The Appearance of the Body: On Body Awareness and Combat Sports

Author(s): Alexandru Dincovici / Language(s): English Issue: 12/2012

If the absence and disappearance of the body have enjoyed considerable attention in the social sciences, the same cannot be said about its appearance, other than during dysfunctional states such as pain and illness. The present article draws from a large array of phenomenological studies and presents a situation in which the body comes to the fore in one’s consciousness during the learning of combat sports, a seemingly destructive practice. The argument that I will develop, starting from extensive ethnographic research in two distinctive combat sports, is that every type of bodily practice develops a specific type of reflective body awareness that has a significant impact upon both the way we feel our bodies and the way we feel the world. In other words, what we do with and to our bodies shapes the way we see and experience the world.

Kinästhetisches Bewusstsein und sinnliche Reflexion im Tanz

Author(s): Mónica E. Alarcón Dávila / Language(s): German Issue: 12/2012

Is the relationship of self-moving (kinaesthesis) to itself a direct prereflective self-awareness, or is it mediated through an Other? Th is article attempts to address this question, taking the phenomenon of dance as a point of departure, since in dance, movement steps out of its everyday background function to become the principal theme. Rudolf zur Lippe extracts from a dance step of the dances of the Quattrocento, the posa, a concept of sensual reflection. Rather than a conceptual reflection, the posa can be understood as an awareness of one’s own movement. In this article, in a dialogue between critical philosophy, dance science, and phenomenology, terms of a possible sensual reflection in dance will be discussed.

Phenomenology without “the body”?

Author(s): Chris Nagel / Language(s): English Issue: 12/2012

French phenomenology focused on “the body” to avoid the supposed transcendental idealism of Husserl’s phenomenology, and to provide an “existential” or “empirical” account of the origin of meaning, as Ricoeur put it. In practice, however, this has implicitly presupposed a Cartesian problematic of the relation between body and mind or “subject.” This is the source of the ultimate frustration of this effort, as well as the persistence of a “mystery” of meaning (to cite Merleau-Ponty and Henry). Th is essay offers an alternative, considering the embodiment of any meaningful experience, suggesting finally that embodiment must be accounted for in terms of subjection.

Corps animal et corps humain: l’« effacement » de la propriété. À la naissance de l’institution chez Merleau-Ponty

Author(s): Anne Gléonec / Language(s): French Issue: 12/2012

The purpose of this article is to show that in Merleau-Ponty’s lesser known works, one can find a path leading toward a phenomenology of the body that would not risk the “ambiguity of the flesh,” as The Visible and the Invisible is often charged with, but instead would sustain the ontology of nature that one finds in the “Working Notes” added to Merleau-Ponty’s last writings. Analyzing first his concept of nature, as it was developed in his courses at the Collège de France, the proposed aim of this text is to question anthropological difference by focusing on Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of the contemporary sciences, whereby the Ineinander between the physical, living, and human orders is re-founded by a new, negative concept of nature. By deconstructing classical ontology and its understanding of space, time, and objectivity, and by returning to the domain of perception, this new concept offers a novel way to reveal the advent of life in nature, its institution, and the emergence of a new corporeity in life itself. The model of Merleau-Ponty’s essential concept of institution becomes birth, and therefore the human body will no longer be interpreted as “one’s own body,” but rather will be understood, in a radically a-subjective way, as from, and based on, the participation of our perception with animality. Thereby, the concept of “ownness” becomes secondary; however, the notion of institution, established against the lexicon of consciousness and subjectivity, opens another sense of anthropological difference, one that is based only on the experiences of corporeity.

The Environed Body: The Lived Situation of Perceptual and Instinctual Embodiment

Author(s): Adam Konopka / Language(s): English Issue: 12/2012

This article is an attempt to retrieve phenomenological resources for the purposes of identifying and clarifying the lived situation of embodiment in an environing world (Umwelt). Drawn primarily from Husserlian resources, it identifies several essential perceptual features of the operative intentionality of environed embodiment. Through an engagement with Husserl’s analyses of instinctual experience, I identify an essential feature of environed embodiment: the principle of association governing the nexus among objects in an environing world that are animated toward an instrumental resolution of an embodied tension, a resolution that promotes the maximization of embodied equilibrium that is instrumental for self-preservation and well-being.

Die Phänomenologie als radikaler Empirismus

Author(s): Vittorio De Palma / Language(s): German Issue: 12/2012

This paper tries to show that Husserl’s phenomenology can be considered as a form of radical empiricism in the sense of James, since it holds—like traditional empiricism—that sensuous experience is the foundation and the source of justification of knowledge, but—in contrast with traditional empiricism—it holds that there are relations, which are given in the sensuous experience just as well contents. Reality is sensuous and the structure of reality is equally sensuous. By an analysis of the concepts of the sensuous relation, of the material a priori, and of association, it is showed that Husserl—in contrast with transcendentalism— confers a normative role to the peculiarity of sensuous contents, which determines their objective connections and also the structure of the world before the intellectual activities of the subject. At the same time, it is pointed out that Husserl has never entirely gotten over the Cartesian psychologism of Brentano and of traditional empiricism, that leads him to consider only the immanent as properly present. Finally, the paper discusses Husserl’s concept of the life-world, which originates from Avenarius’ idea of the natural concept of the world, and his position regarding the relation between experience and science.

Corporéité et existence: Patočka, Merleau-Ponty, Maine de Biran

Author(s): Emre Şan / Language(s): French Issue: 12/2012

We propose here to analyze Patočka’s dialogue with Merleau-Ponty and Maine de Biran with regard to the reciprocal implication of the body and existence. Patočka’s gesture seeks to discover the condition of existence and its effectiveness, named by the concept of flesh for Merleau-Ponty. What is the meaning of existence as constitutive flesh? Th e analysis will consist of three parts. The first part of the article presents the meaning of embodiment characterized by Merleau-Ponty in the analysis of the experience of the body as a sexed being. In the second part, we will analyze the corporeal movement that shows existence in its specificity. In the third and final part, we will analyze the original relationship of subjectivity to corporeal movement through Patočka’s reading of Maine de Biran.

Logika pravne nauke Gustava Radbrucha

Author(s): Ivo M. Tomić / Language(s): Bosnian Issue: 1/2009

Philosophical and legal, as well as legal and logic study entitled “Gustav Radbruch’s Logic of Legal Science” presents, analyses and critically comments Radbruch’s understanding of the world and the phenomenon of law. The study begins by Radbruch’s understanding of the law as reality which aims towards justice and, on that primary level, it tries to solve the antinomies of justice as the idea of law and legal safety and purpose. The author then explains the difference between the sciences dealing with law and pure dogmatic, systematic and legal science. The logic of pure dogmatic legal science is analyzed in three basic aspects – interpretation, construction and systematization. On those basis the difference between the two basic notions is explained (after construction) – the notion of legally relevant and true legal terms. After these postulates are presented, the study focuses on Radbruch’s understanding of the legal science as a cultural science connected with values and based on understanding and individualization. The final section of the study shows ethical reflections of Radbruch’s understanding of law as an overlap of reality and values which leads to reconciliation and morality.

Inter/kulturalna filozofija, filozofija Karla Jaspersa

Author(s): Abdulah Šarčević / Language(s): Bosnian Issue: 1/2009

How is one to find one’s way from “the end of European philosophy to the global philosophy to come?” Long ago, Jaspers perceived the possibility of a post-European philosophy of the future in the shape of a global or intercultural philosophy. For us today, this possibility is inconceivable, opening up for all cultures, in a kind of dramaturgy of the mind, a shared life in a common domain of thought. Karl Theodor Jaspers is one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century. He was a psychiatrist, philosopher and political thinker, a critic of the totalitarian system, of the perversion of history and ideology, of Nazism and communism. His philosophy, like that of Karl Popper, is of the greatest interest in the 21st century in the critique of nihilistic and irrationalist aspirations,and of the fetishization of science and technology. Central to this is the idea of forms of life in which the truth of the idea of freedom and responsibility, of tolerance and pluralism, of the ability to live wisely, manifests itself. It is sufficient to say that with wisdom we avoid both the totalizing figure of thought and action and the wastelands of relativism, indifferent to questions of morality. Jaspers’ liberal, Enlightenment mode of thought, his concept of philosophical belief, of code-script and transcendence, his reflections on the future of humankind in an age of science and technology, the idea of the world and uniformity of thought, shed light on the most important issues of our time. His thinking is characterized by the preservation of freedom and the intellect, of truth in time that is not detached from the human being; it is “navigations in truth,” the decision that freedom is to be created and preserved, which for Jaspers is “the unconditionality of existential decision.”We are exiled as humans if we fail to make sense existentially of these issues now, in post-European, global philosophy. We want relaxed observation and argument, beyond the death-throes of civilization – not only European – and of the drama of the march from modernity to our own times. Committed thinkers are not prophesying a clash of civilizations, cultures and religions; in these times of watershed, we are not proposing the theory of decline assisted, directly and indirectly, by electronic imperialism and media empires. This writer is speaking “in the name of the moment he is interpreting,” which is by no means a phantasmagorical idea or seductive mirage. Since 1954, Karl Theodor Jaspers has not been, for this author, the destructive intoxicant in the “monism of the bourgeois mind” of which the concomitant, in an age of the theatricalization of freedom and truth, are “infantile urges.”

Zadovoljstvo i um

Author(s): Željko Škuljević / Language(s): Bosnian Issue: 1/2009

Kritika moderne kao kritika životnog stila

Author(s): Spahija Kozlić / Language(s): Bosnian Issue: 1/2009

If we were to look for the main thread of Georg Simmel’s philosophy, in which his ideas make the loudest echo, it would, without a doubt be the notion of culture and phenomena standing in relation of subject-object or soul-spirit. Simmel is categorical in stating that the spirit is another human instance, but of the kind that produces its own creations which keep existing in peculiar autonomy, independent of the maker.

U potrazi za korijenima modernosti

Author(s): Lino Veljak / Language(s): Serbian Issue: 406-411/2007

Review of the book "Dekartova metafizika tela / Decartes' Metaphysics of the Body" by Jasna Šakota-Mimica.

Jaký konec dějin?

Author(s): Karlfriedrich Herb / Language(s): Czech Issue: 129/2007

Die politische Meinung, březen 2007, číslo 448, s.44-53

COMMUNITY AND HUMAN WELL-BEING IN AN AFRICAN CULTURE

Author(s): Christopher Agulanna / Language(s): English Issue: 3/2010

An interest in community has remained the concern of philosophers and other thinkers from the period of known history. All through the history of thought, there have been those who have tried to denigrate community and who have seen it as something that could be jettisoned or discarded by humans. Among Africans, however, it is generally held that it is in the community of other human beings that the life of the individual can have meaning or significance. This paper pursues this line of thought and examines how the Igbo people of Nigeria, Africa, conceive of the relationship between the individual and the community. The conclusion the paper reaches is that both as individuals and as groups, people need the protective cover that community life offers if their lives are to have any meaning or significance. Community, the paper adds, is the only essential means by which humans can achieve their social goals and aspirations.

Wolność w sztuce

Author(s): Henryk Kiereś / Language(s): Polish Issue: 9/1997

Życie dla Boga fundamentem wolności

Author(s): Piotr Moskal / Language(s): Polish Issue: 9/1997

Przemówienie Dziekana Wydziału Filozofii KUL z okazji 50-lecie pracy naukowo-dydaktycznej Ojca Profesora Mieczysława Alberta Krąpca

Author(s): Zofia J. Zdybicka / Language(s): Polish Issue: 9/1997

O kulturę prawdy

Author(s): Mieczysław Albert Krąpiec / Language(s): Polish Issue: 9/1997

Mądrość i nauka a wolność człowieka

Author(s): Piotr Jaroszyński / Language(s): Polish Issue: 9/1997

Problem osoby jako szczyt filozofii pierwszej

Author(s): Marie-Dominique Philippe / Language(s): Polish Issue: 9/1997