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94Ways of knowing the self and the otherIn Shaun Gallagher & Stephen Watson (eds.), Ipseity and Alterity: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Intersubjectivity, Publications De L'université De Rouen.. pp. 1-25. 2004.Introduction to S. Gallagher and S. Watson. (2004). _Ipseity and Alterity: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Intersubjectivity_ . Rouen: Presses Universitaires. Originally published in 2000 as a special issue of the online journal _Arobase: Journal des lettres et sciences humaines,_ 4 (1-2).
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98Ipseity and Alterity: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Intersubjectivity (edited book)Publications de l'Université de Rouen.. 2004.Introduction In Autrement qu'etre on au-delh de I'essence, Levinas claims that ipseity depends upon alterity. One of the reasons given is that I, according to Levinas, become a subject exactly by being addressed and accused by the Other .
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82Gadamer, aesthetic modernism, and the rehabilitation of allegory: The relevance of Paul KleeResearch in Phenomenology 34 (1): 45-72. 2004.Paul Klee's art found broad impact upon philosophers of varying commitments, including Hans-Georg Gadamer. Moreover, Klee himself was not only one of the most important artists of aesthetic modernism but one of its leading theoreticians, and much in his work, as in Gadamer's, originated in post-Kantian literary theory's explications of symbol and allegory. Indeed at one point in Truth and Method, Gadamer associates his project for a general "theory of hermeneutic experience" not only with Goethe…Read more
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38“Philosophy is also an Architecture of Signs”: On Merleau-Ponty and CavaillèsResearch in Phenomenology 46 (1): 35-53. 2016._ Source: _Volume 46, Issue 1, pp 35 - 53 In a letter written at the end of July 1930, Jean Cavaillès singled out two of his successful students at the _Ecole Normale_, Merleau-Ponty and Lautman, “full of interest in the philosophy of mathematics”. While both would play an important role in French philosophy in the coming decades, one almost never thinks of their names together. Indeed, only rarely do we think of Merleau-Ponty and Cavaillès together. This paper will argue against this rarity. Ca…Read more
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13On the Metamorphoses of Transcendental Reduction: Merleau-Ponty and “the Adventures of Constitutive Analysis.”In Véronique M. Fóti & Pavlos Kontos (eds.), Phenomenology and the Primacy of the Political: Essays in Honor of Jacques Taminiaux, Springer. 2017.Invocations of Merleau-Ponty’s claim concerning the incompleteness that accompanies the phenomenological reduction have had a long and somewhat contentious history. In this paper I will further explore the implications of Merleau-Ponty’s claim and the itinerary from which it emerges. From the Structure of Behaviour onward, he argued that consciousness is not a transcendental presupposition but an achievement that emerges from and transforms the labor of our rational practices. Phenomenological t…Read more
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11Hermeneutics and the Retrieval of the Sacred: Hegel's GiottoReview of Metaphysics 72 (4): 741-765. 2019.
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Prepare for Saints: Gertrude Stein, Virgil Thomson, and the Mainstreaming of American ModernismRandom House (NY). 1998.Watson chronicles the making of the opera "Four Saints in Three Acts" in a fully illustrated, dazzling narrative of high culture, high gossip, and high bohemia during the late 1920s and early 1930s in America.
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13On the Mutations of the Concept: Phenomenology, Conceptual Change, and the Persistence of Hegel in Merleau-Ponty’s ThoughtIn Cynthia D. Coe (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism and Phenomenology, Palgrave-macmillan. pp. 481-507. 2021.This chapter will be devoted to the itinerary of classical German thought, and especially Hegel, in Merleau-Ponty’s thought. I begin by examining Merleau-Ponty’s initial use of Hegel’s systematic and metaphysicalmetaphysics ideas in phenomenological analyses of behavior and perception. Next, I examine Merleau-Ponty’s role in controversies regarding the existentialists’ interpretation and objections to Hegel’s system. I trace his attempts to surmount antinomiesantinomy between subjectivitysubject…Read more
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54Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenological Itinerary From Body Schema to Situated KnowledgeJanus Head 9 (2): 525-550. 2007.This paper addresses a number of issues concerning both the status of phenomenology in the work of one of its classical expositors, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and the general relation between theoretical models and evidence in phenomenological accounts. In so doing, I will attempt to explain Merleau-Ponty's departure from classical transcendental accounts in Husserl's thought and why Merleau-Ponty increasingly elaborated on them through aesthetic rationality. The result is a phenomenology that no lo…Read more
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14Proust’s Disenchantments, the “Repoetization” of Experience, and the Lineaments of the VisibleChiasmi International 21 117-134. 2019.This paper investigates the role of literature and, in particular, Proust in Merleau-Ponty’s late works’ rehabilitation of the ontology of the sensible. First, I trace Proust’s role in Phenomenology of Percpetion, contrasting it with the somewhat more paradigmatic status as a model it plays in the late works. Second, I compare this with the role of the novel as partial myth in Schelling, who also played an essential role in Merleau-Ponty’s refiguration of the sensible. I briefly trace his examin…Read more
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Tradition(s): Refiguring Community and Virtue in Classical German ThoughtRevue Philosophique de la France Et de l'Etranger 188 (3): 415-416. 1997.
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The Sublime Continuum Klee's Cosmic SimultaneitiesIn Paul Klee (ed.), Paul Klee: Philosophical Vision, From Nature to Art, Mcmullen Museum of Art, Boston College. 2012.
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26Tradition(S): Refiguring Community and Virtue in Classical German ThoughtIndiana University Press. 1997.Tradition(s) accomplishes this through a series of original readings of Kant and post-Kantian German philosophy, in which topics such as Kant on friendship, nature in post-Kantian thought, HeideggerÕs relationship to Hobbes, and HegelÕs ...
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11Tradition(s) Ii: Hermeneutics, Ethics, and the Dispensation of the GoodIndiana University Press. 2001.Tradition II Hermeneutics, Ethics, and the Dispensation of the Good Stephen H. Watson Examines concepts of tradition in 20th-century Continental philosophy. In Tradition II, Stephen H. Watson engages post-Kantian Continental philosophy in his continuing investigation into the concept of tradition which he began in his work, Tradition. According to Watson, the problem of tradition became explicit in 20th-century philosophy, and is especially apparent in the work of Heidegger, Gadamer, Husserl, Be…Read more
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12Reinterpreting the Political: Continental Philosophy and Political Theory (edited book)State University of New York Press. 1998.Rereads classical figures in continental thought, takes up current topics in the legacy of political theory, and analyzes and evaluates Foucault's work as a prime manifestation of the complicated modern interface between truth and power, institution and liberation
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49To Sketch an Essence: Schematic Thoughts on Paul Klee and the Image of the DaemonicResearch in Phenomenology 41 (2): 253-275. 2011.This paper examines the ambiguity that attends Paul Klee's characterization of the daemonic element in his work. It does so by analyzing the history of this concept in classical German thought from Wincklemann to Goethe. I note transformations of the concept in writings contemporaneous to Klee in literary theory and theology. These include Lukács, for whom the modern novel articulates the daemonic as an ironic world devoid of transcendental immanence, homeland, or essence; and Otto, for whom the…Read more
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52‘Post-Structuralism’ and the Dispensation of the GoodThe Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy 8 195-210. 2000.The extent to which discourses surrounding the Good, the sacred, and (more problematically) the beautiful have preoccupied thinkers in continental philosophy and in poststructuralism is striking. What is equally striking, however, is the decisively ‘non-theological’ theoretical cast of this account of the Good. Attempts to “disengage” the account of trancendence at stake remain complicated. What is in question is an understanding that is profoundly ethical—and, I want to argue, against the fabri…Read more
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64Heidegger, Paul Klee, and the Origin of the Work of ArtReview of Metaphysics 60 (2): 327-357. 2006.
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18Montaigne’s of Cruelty and the Emergence of Hermeneutic and Intercultural Modernity: Three Rival ReadingsJournal of Chinese Philosophy 42 (1-2): 62-85. 2015.While classical interpretations of hermeneutics have often identified themselves with Montaigne, others have contested not only whether Montaigne is committed to an account of a hermeneutic self, but whether a hermeneutics of traditional or self-identity is either possible or desirable. This article will investigate the continuing viability of hermeneutics through contested interpretations of Montaigne undertaken from the varying standpoints of phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and critical theory.…Read more
Areas of Interest
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Philosophy of Language |
Philosophy of Mind |
Meta-Ethics |
Normative Ethics |
Logic and Philosophy of Logic |
Asian Philosophy |