The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy

Volume 17

Timothy Burns, Thomas Szanto, Alessandro Salice, Maxime Doyon, Augustin Dumont, Timothy Burns, Thomas Szanto, Alessandro Salice, Maxime Doyon, Augustin Augustin Dumont

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429590313
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Volume XVII

Part 1: Phenomenology, Idealism, and Intersubjectivity: A Festschrift in Celebration of Dermot Moran's Sixty-Fifth Birthday

Part 2: The Imagination: Kant's Phenomenological Legacy

Aim and Scope:

The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy provides an annual international forum for phenomenological research in the spirit of Husserl's groundbreaking work and the extension of this work by such figures as Scheler, Heidegger, Sartre, Levinas, Merleau-Ponty and Gadamer.

Contributors: Andreea Smaranda Aldea, Lilian Alweiss, Timothy Burns, Steven Crowell, Maxime Doyon, Augustin Dumont, Richard Kearney, Mette Lebech, Samantha Matherne, Timothy Mooney, Thomas Nenon, Matthew Ratcliffe, Alessandro Salice, Daniele De Santis, Andrea Staiti, Anthony J. Steinbock, Michela Summa, Thomas Szanto, Emiliano Trizio, and Nicolas de Warren.

Submissions: Manuscripts, prepared for blind review, should be submitted to the Editors ([email protected] and [email protected]) electronically via e-mail attachments.

Part I

Phenomenology, idealism, and intersubjectivity

A Festschrift in celebration of Dermot Moran’s sixty-fifth birthday

1 Editors’ introduction

Timothy Burns, Thomas Szanto, and Alessandro Salice

There’s an adage usually reserved for hosts of late night talk shows. It has even become the title of David Letterman’s most recent Netflix program, My Next Guest Needs No Introduction. Chances are, if you’re reading this journal, Dermot Moran needs no introduction. Nevertheless, and because this is a Festschrift after all, an introduction and some recognition of his many accomplishments are in order.

Dermot Moran was born in Stillorgan, County Dublin, Ireland in 1953. (We’re afraid that if someone publishes a Festschrift in celebration of your sixty-fifth birthday, there’s no keeping your age out of the matter.) He was educated at Oatlands College where he studied applied mathematics, physics, and chemistry in preparation for university. He was awarded the Higgins Gold Medal for Chemistry in 1968 and the Institute of Chemists of Ireland Gold Medal for Chemistry in 1970. He enrolled at University College Dublin (UCD) on an Entrance Scholarship to study languages and literature, and in 1973 he graduated with a Double First Class Honours Degree in English and Philosophy. Upon graduating from UCD he entered Yale University as the recipient of the Wilmarth Lewis Scholarship for graduate study. He accumulated a mere three degrees from Yale, graduating with an MA (1974), MPhil (1976), and PhD (1986) in philosophy.

Moran returned to Ireland to teach philosophy. He held positions at Queen’s University Belfast and St. Patrick’s College Maynooth before he was appointed to the Chair of Philosophy (Metaphysics and Logic) at his alma mater in 1989. Presently, he is the inaugural holder of the Joseph Chair in Catholic Philosophy at Boston College, where he is also the Chairperson of the Department of Philosophy. He has held more visiting and distinguished professorships than it would be polite to name because we would inevitably leave one off the list.

Moran is no slouch when it comes to service to the profession either. He is the founding editor of International Journal of Philosophical Studies, published by Routledge and still managed out of the philosophy department at UCD. He has been a member of the Governing Authority of University College Dublin since 2009. He served as Chairperson of the Programme Committee, Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie (FISP), from 2009 to 2013, and was elected President of the Executive Committee of the same in 2013. In 2018 he will preside over the XXIV World Congress of Philosophy in Beijing. He has, over the years, been on the steering committee or boards of dozens of philosophical societies from the Mind Association to the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy. From 1982 to 2018 he convened eighteen major conferences worldwide. In 2012, in honor of his scholarship and outstanding academic career, the Royal Irish Academy (RIA), of which he has been a member since 2003, granted him the highest honor it can bestow, the Gold Medal. He was the first philosopher to be granted this distinguished award, which “aim[s] to identify and recognise inspirational figures – the stars of the knowledge economy – to celebrate the achievements of higher education in Ireland and to inspire future generations.”¹

There are more awards and distinctions that we could list, and there are numbers we could point out that might make a sane person’s head swim. He has been awarded more than fifteen major grants and fellowships for his research, which are cumulatively valued at over 1,000,000 euros. He has been the supervisor, member of dissertation committee, or external examiner for approximately fifty doctoral dissertations, including one member of this guest editorial team. He has mentored thirteen postdoctoral fellows, including the other two members of this guest editorial team. And in 2003 The Encyclopedia of Ireland included an entry on Dermot Moran.

Moran’s Yale dissertation was entitled Nature and Mind in the Philosophy of John Scottus Eriugena: A Study in Medieval Idealism. It is also in this regard that Moran’s career and record of scholarship stand out from the crowd. He is one of a few philosophers working today to have developed not just competencies but true specializations in at least two distinct eras in the history of philosophy and on both sides of the analytic–continental divide. He can count among his areas of expertise the philosophy of mind, phenomenology, existentialism, and medieval philosophy – especially the Christian Neoplatonism of Eriugena, Eckhart, and Cusanus. Thus, in choosing the theme for this Festschrift, we had our work cut out for us. We settled on three motifs that have permeated Dermot’s work from its inception and continue to motivate it today: phenomenology, idealism, and intersubjectivity. Accordingly, the contributors of this volume – all of whom have crossed academic paths with Moran at various stages of their careers and have intensively collaborated with him on multiple occasions, engage with one or more of these core motifs, while some explicitly reflect on Moran’s take on them in his publications. In their methodological and thematic orientation, they aptly reflect, we believe, both the breadth and depth of Moran’s philosophical outlook.

Andrea Staiti’s (University of Parma) contribution to this volume engages with Moran’s 2014 article, “Defending the Transcendental Attitude: Husserl’s Concept of the Person and the Challenges of Naturalism.” In so doing, Staiti seeks to clarify in what sense Husserl’s account of action is correctly described as anti-naturalistic. His article presents and assesses Husserl’s account of action as found in the forthcoming and much anticipated Husserliana publication of Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins. He argues that Husserl’s description of action charts a course between an anti-naturalistic construal of action as non-reducible to natural causality, and a broadly naturalistic refusal to assign to actions a non-natural cause. After presenting what he describes as the “anatomy of action” for Husserl, Staiti offers a description of the subtle interplay of passivity and activity for the constitution of deliberate, goal-oriented actions. In closing, he argues that contemporary debates over free will can learn an important lesson from a Husserlian account of action. Husserl redirects our attention from the question of the position of actions within nature to the question of the position of actions within consciousness. Hence, as Staiti puts it, “The pressing philosophical issue is … no longer the ontological status of actions in a uniformly deterministic nature, but rather the ontological status of the body as the locus of freedom within the nexus of nature.”

Mette Lebech’s (National University of Ireland, Maynooth) contribution to the present Festschrift draws from another Festschrift published some eighty-nine years previously, the 1929 edition of Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung (notably the historical forerunner of the present journal), which was issued in celebration of Husserl’s seventieth birthday (albeit belatedly because of difficulty in procuring funding). Lebech’s article works at the intersection of our themes of phenomenology and intersubjectivity in her analyses of Edith Stein’s understanding of essence and eidos and offers an eidetic analysis of the intersubjective occurrence of dialogue.

Steven Crowell’s (Rice University) article, “Twenty-First-Century Phenomenology? Pursuing Philosophy with and after Husserl,” is another of our contributions that directly engages Moran’s work. Crowell turns to Moran’s Introduction to Phenomenology, which paints the philosophical movement as inextricably tied to the twentieth century and as both a brilliant breakthrough and as a fractured movement with an uncertain future. Crowell attempts to “extricate” phenomenology from the twentieth century in order to see what a twenty-first-century phenomenology might look like. He suggests the return of transcendental phenomenology, and in so doing he rejects the “story” of twentieth-century phenomenology that Moran’s Introduction offers, especially its reading of Heidegger’s rejection of Husserl’s transcendental idealism. Crowell offers, alternatively, a transcendental reading of Heidegger’s analytic of Dasein that he argues can resolve a paradox that arises at the very heart of Husserlian phenomenology. Ultimately, Crowell suggests that twenty-first-century phenomenology ought to return to transcendental phenomenology and embrace as our own the “ultimate philosophical self-responsibility” that phenomenology proffers when it is understood as seeking the clarification of meaning, carried out on the basis of evidence that each of us can produce for him or herself.

In his contribution, Tim Mooney (University College Dublin) considers Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception and habitual movement in relation to Hubert Dreyfus’s account of skilled coping. At issue is the question of whether reflection and conceptual contents completely drop out of the picture when one is fully engaged in episodes of skilled coping. According to Mooney, Merleau-Ponty affirms that everyday reflection, with its objectifications and analyses and syntheses, is integral to a developed perceptual life. Acquired skills help open up the space for the reflective activities in which we take a distance, as subjects, from the things in our environment taken as standing against us. Together with language, our habitualized bodies allow for the explicit recognition of objects and the thematic investigation of their properties; the cognitive stage of awareness is both the outcome and the ultimate destination of an integrated process of human perceptual development. Merleau-Ponty’s critique of objective thought nonetheless ensues in a dissociation of reflection from the skillfully acting body. Having characterized all reflections on the body as variants of objective thought which involve a departure from the world of practical engagements, he passes over the contribution some of them make to coping in the flow. Merleau-Ponty’s position thus appears closer to Dreyfus’s account than other commentators are ready to admit. This problem is surmountable though, since elsewhere he points toward a more balanced view of engaged perception that could accommodate what Mooney describes as “little reflections” – small episodes of reflective thought that arise in response to situations of resistance which do not threaten to send skillful acting completely off the rails.

In “Grief and Phantom Limbs: A Phenomenological Comparison,” Matthew Ratcliffe (University of Vienna) makes the case that grieving over the loss of a loved one and the experience of losing a limb of one’s own body are structurally similar in a number of important ways. Another person, he argues, can come to shape how we experience and engage with our surroundings in a way that resembles the contribution of our own bodily capacities and dispositions. Ratcliffe maintains that the boundary between the experience-shaping contribution of bodily capacities and the contribution made by potential, anticipated, and actual relations with another person is blurred. In other words, the boundaries between bodily and interpersonal experience are indistinct. Though there are important physiological, neurobiological, and indeed phenomenological differences between the two experiences, they are importantly similar. When I lose a loved one, something that was previously integral to my ability to experience and engage with the world, to perceive things in structured ways that reflect a coherent system of projects, cares, concerns, and abilities, is now absent. Comparisons between bereavement and losing part of one’s body are not mere analogies that convey the closeness of a relationship. The two phenomena are structurally isomorphic in a number of important respects. These serve to illustrate how the habitually taken for granted world is shaped by one’s bodily capacities, one’s projects, and one’s relations with other people in a unified way.

Lilian Alweiss (Trinity College Dublin), like Mooney and Ratcliffe, discusses the phenomenology of embodiment in her article, “Back to Space.” The targets of her argument, however, are interpreters of Husserl’s account of embodiment – in particular Edward Casey – that read it in such a way as to reduce our understanding of space to place. While the tradition of modern philosophy and science holds that place merely “takes up space,” insofar as any representation of spatial relations or positions can only be determined within one absolute and infinite space, the claim now is that phenomenology reveals th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Part I Phenomenology, idealism, and intersubjectivity: a Festschrift in celebration of Dermot Moran’s sixty-fifth birthday
• Part II The imagination: Kant’s phenomenological legacy
• Part III Varia
• Index