Michael R. Kelly

Providing theoretical and applied analyses of Michel Henry's practical philosophy in light of his guiding idea of Life, this is the first sustained exploration of Henry's practical thought in anglophone literature, reaffirming his centrality to contemporary continental thought. This book ranges from the tension between his methodological insistence on life as non-intentional and worldly activities to Henry's engagement with the practical philosophy of intellectuals such as Marx, Freud, and Kandisky to topics of application such as labor, abstract art, education, political liberalism, and spiritual life. An international team of leading Henry scholars examine a vital dimension of Henry's thinking that has remained under-explored for too long.

This book provides a phenomenological analysis of envy. The author's account takes a descriptive look at the whole experience of envy as it pertains to the envier's sense of self and the envied. Philosophical work on envy has predominately focused on how the envier perceives, thinks about, or schemes against the person envied. This book proposes a phenomenological analysis of envy that articulates its essentially comparative character according to which we can further incorporate the role of the envier. This approach offers a novel contribution in three ways. First, it develops a notion of two predominant ways in which envy expresses itself: one that is bad for the envied and the other that is bad for the envier. Second, it renews the traditional defense of the view that envy is bad or vicious. Third, it provides original phenomenological descriptions of differences between envy and covetousness, indignation, emulation, ressentiment, and jealousy. By drawing on literary sources and social scientific literature, the author provides concrete examples of the lived experience of an envier. A Phenomenological Analysis of Envy will appeal to researchers and advanced students working in ethics, moral psychology, phenomenology, and philosophy of emotion.

People often talk that time changes everything. But what is perhaps more interesting is how cultural conceptions of time, which both construct and are constructed by social custom, are changing. In this era of globalization, with the phenomenal growth and power of the Internet, it appears that time itself is changing very rapidly. And this change has profound implications for the developing identities of local cultures. We would like to be able to show in this paper that time is also a victim of globalization and technological drive.

Any convincing theory of self-awareness must do the following: (a) avoid what Henry terms “ontological monism” (OM), the belief that there is only one kind of awareness, namely, object-awareness; for as long as we stick to OM, we remain wedded to the reflection theory of self-awareness and its well-known difficulties (the infinite regress being the worst). And, (b) account for the concrete personal facts about self-awareness: familiarity, unity, identity, etc. First, I go through the tradition, starting with Descartes, of accounts of self-awareness which fail to satisfy constraint (a). Second, I discuss the standard solution to the problem of self-awareness found in Sartre’s pre-reflective self. I argue that Sartre’s pre-reflective self contains a residue of the bias of “ontological monism,” therefore satisfying neither (a) nor (b). Third, I suggest an alternative in Kant’s transcendental subject, which possesses self-awareness independently of a cognitive attitude in the traditional sense of object-intentionality, and thereby intimates the beginnings of a phenomenology of the invisible.

Ricoeur’s text divides into three parts corresponding to its title: the phenomenology of memory; the epistemology of history; and the hermeneutics of the human historical condition, its “emblem of vulnerability” being “forgetting”. That the words “memory” and “history” appear in the title proves unsurprising. But what of the title’s final word, “forgetting”? The putative “duty of memory” to “not forget” relegates forgetting to a via negativa, the “reverse side of memory”. Ricoeur, however, raises the prospect of a “right of forgetting”, “a positive meaning” for forgetting that entails the “spirit of forgiveness” and “reconciliation”. By reconsidering forgetting, Ricoeur moves toward the praxis of forgiveness beyond epistemological reflections—including the phenomenology of memory and totalizing, Hegelian philosophies of history —and utilitarian ethico-politics, and redresses lacunae in Time and Narrative and Oneself as Another.

Cet essai met en cause la comparaison historique courante qui relie le traitement husserlien de la conscience du temps à la tradition philosophique occidentale par le biais du livre IX des Confessions d’Augustin. Je soutiens notamment que cette comparaison n’est valable qu’à l’égard des leçons sur le temps de 1905 (qui expliquent l’appréhension du temps par le recours à l’étirement de la conscience opéré par la mémoire) et non pour la théorie husserlienne ultérieure, que l’on peut dater autour de 1908 (qui critique ouvertement les premières leçons à cause la position défectueuse et contre-intuitive qu’y était défendue selon laquelle la mémoire étend la perception). Après avoir pointé les défauts de la théorie du temps partagée par Augustin et par le Husserl de 1905, j’approfondis la distinction, élaborée plus tard par Husserl à partir de 1911, entre mémoire et rétention, et j’examine l’hypothèse selon laquelle la théorie aristotélicienne du temps telle qu’elle est présentée dans le IVème livre de la Physique pourrait représenter une meilleur terme de comparaison historique pour la théorie husserlienne de la maturité, notamment dans la mesure où elle s’appuie sur l’idée que c’est « l’esprit qui dit les “maintenant” comme deux ».

Bergson scholars such as Leonard Lawlor, Alexander Lefebvre, Philip Soulez, and Frederic Worms have recently argued that Bergson “places the phenomenon of war at the center of his analysis” in Two Sources of Morality and Religion. We want to contribute to this line of interpretation. We claim that Bergson’s account of the causes of, and solution to, the problem of war can be effectively understood in light of a central tenet of classical political philosophy, namely, the City of God, both the concept and Augustine’s great text, de Civitate dei contra paganos. We highlight the shared view of the root of war in Augustine and Bergson, namely the lust for domination, libido dominandi. Our contribution provides a useful heuristic for understanding Bergson’s account of war, not a claim of Augustine’s influence on Bergson.

Grief research in philosophy agrees that one who grieves grieves over the irreversible loss of someone whom the griever loved deeply, and that someone thus factored centrally into the griever’s sense of purpose and meaning in the world. The analytic literature in general tends to focus its treatments on the paradigm case of grief as the death of a loved one. I want to restrict my account to the paradigm case because the paradigm case most persuades the mind that grief is a past-directed emotion. The phenomenological move I propose will enable us to (1) respect the paradigm case of grief and a broader but still legitimate set of grief-generating states of affairs, (2) liberate grief from the view that grief is past directed or about the past, and thus (3) account for grief in a way that separates it from its closest emotion-neighbor, sorrow, without having to rely on the affective quality of those two emotions.If the passing of the beloved causes the grief but is not what the grief is about, then we can get at the nature of grief by saying its temporal orientation is in the past (the event of the passing), but its temporal meaning is the present and future—the new significance of a world with the pervasive absence that is the world without the beloved. The no-longer of grief is a no-longer oriented by a past (that which is no longer) that is referred a present and future (that which is a no-longer understood as not now as it once was). Looking at the griever’s relation to time can tell us much about the pain and the object of grief, then. As the griever puts the past before himself with a certainty about this world “henceforth,” a look at the griever’s lived sense of the fi nality of the irreversibly lost (1) liberates grief from the tendency in the literature to be reduced to a past-directed emotion, (2) accounts for grief ’s intensity, its affective force or poignancy, and thus (3) enables us to separate grief from sorrow according to its intentionalobject in light of the temporal meaning of these emotions.

Often neglected as an influence on phenomenology, Bergson's thought has resurfaced and brought challenges to phenomenology. In a series of original essays and translations, leading scholars of contemporary continental philosophy seek to redress this oversight and inaugurate a long over due dialogue and yet pertinent to the future of continental philosophy. This thematically focused collection reintroduces Bergson to the dominant discourse in continental philosophy (phenomenology), reevaluates phenomenologists' readings of Bergson (e.g., Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, and Henry), and examines Bergsonian challenges to phenomenological methods and issues. What emerges is not only a revitalized Bergson read on his own terms, but also a view of the vibrance of Bergson's thought and its central contributions to perennial issues in phenomenology and contemporary continental philosophy: including dualism, intentionality, subjectivity and selfhood, science, time, ethics, freedom, life and affectivity. -- Product Description.

This dissertation examines the problem of self-awareness with respect to the phenomenological tradition. The problem of self-awareness concerns whether or not the self, the condition of the possibility for experience, can itself be experienced. Unlike Kant, phenomenology must answer this question in the affirmative, but it cannot hold that the self knows itself via an intentional act in the way that it knows other objects in the world. A solution to the problem requires the articulation of an alternative account of awareness that makes possible a description of the self's self-apprehension independently---but not to the exclusion---of intentionality. Any solution to the problem of self-awareness, then, requires: a broadening of the scope of awareness to include epistemic and non-epistemic modes of manifestation beyond the critique of ontological monism, i.e., the disposition in western philosophy that holds there is only one form of awareness, namely object-awareness; an account of the passive, non-epistemic modes of self-givenness found in subjectivity's temporal and bodily modes of givenness; an account of the relation between self- and hetero-affection that marks an immanence, or self-awareness in transcendence; an illustration of that the closing chapter provides by examining subjectivity's moods and emotions as experiences of the world where the self's temporal flow and bodily experience transcends without losing self-awareness or reducing to object-awareness. The author appeals to the work of Descartes, Kant, Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and Michel Henry, as well as that of the contemporary phenomenologist, Dan Zahavi, in order to address and support the above criteria