The Iranian Yearbook of Phenomenology
Volume:2 Issue: 2, Winter 2024

In this paper I present some elements of Marc Richir's political phenomenology. Drawing from the Husserlian distinction between Leib and Körper, as well as from the ontology of the flesh sketched in the last works of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Richir proposed a novel reading of the relation between phenomenology, the social and the political. His project is built upon the distinction between incarnation and incorporation, two forms of embodiment that, while corresponding to the two ways of experiencing One's own body noted by Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, concern not only the embodied subject but also the individuation of the social body. This approach can be read as a radically embodied inquiry into the social and the political that constitutes a phenomenological critique of identitarian essentialism and disembodied universalism. In the first section of the article I explain the role played by intersubjectivity, asubjectivity and embodiment in Richir's understanding of the process of phenomenalization. The second section is dedicated to his elaborations on the joint sensemaking of the ipse and the community, articulated around the distinction between incarnation and incorporation. In the final section I outline a possible application of the concepts developed by Richir to the contemporary debate around identity-based politics.

The aim of this work is to demonstrate that Alfred Schütz's contribution to the social sciences is understandable only within the framework of his troubled relationship with Husserl's phenomenology. We will see how Schütz tries to take charge, to face and resolve a good part of the critical issues present in Husserl's work and, above all, to make a turning point in the field of investigation of phenomenology which will prove decisive for the human sciences as it will focus his attention on the question of intersubjectivity, considered no longer as a problem concerning only the phenomenological sphere but as a fundamental category of human existence. Therefore, we will try to show how Schütz's path assumes a considerable critical value as it contributes to raise the expectations of sociology and to strengthen the confidence of this discipline which tends to go beyond the narrow boundaries outlined by Husserl and to go in a direction diametrically opposite to "The Crisis of European sciences" outlined by the father of phenomenology, since Schütz provides stable and adequate bases for the social sciences that allow to analyze the fundamental structures that support the social world, and, in this way, at the same time, he manages to safeguard the basic nucleus of the phenomenological discipline, since, stripped of metaphysical lure and devoid of verbal and oracular enchantments, it is traced back to the Husserlian idea of rigorous science. From this point of view, Schütz's merit lies primarily in having made a critical revision of phenomenology, in having initiated a broad debate on the role of the social sciences, and in having provided the first ideas for the foundation of a phenomenologically oriented sociology.

In his book It’s Not about the Gift: From Givenness to Loving, Steinbock advances a new phenomenological analysis of the gift. In this analysis, the gift is not about what is being given, but about the event of a loving relation between two subjects. In this interpersonal relation the gift emerges as each beloved withdraws themselves in order to reveal the other as they are by being loved in humility. In this paper, I undertake to express two main challenges for Steinbock’s account of the gift. The first concerns Steinbock’s attempt to disengage the phenomenon of surprise from the possibility of the gift. The second involves his neglecting the body. This neglect raises serious questions on the kind of love during which the gift is supposed to emerge. In the epilogue, instead of a conclusion, I offer some thoughts on the gift that have not been given much attention in the philosophical discussion of the gift.

This article is structured in two parts. In the first part there is a focus on Deleuze’s philosophy and in particular the question of desert(ed) islands. Running throughout this section is a consistent concern with empathy and sociality, with the changing structure of alterity in the identified movement from neurosis, psychosis to perversion. In this section I make the argument that several forms of contemporary philosophy are carrying out acts of philosophical autism with regards to species extinction and the question of the absence of the other. I try to counter this trend in the second part of the paper where there is a concern with thinking the structure “Us-without-world,” which is my original contribution. In the time of the coronavirus pandemic, in the time of our forced solitude, in the time of our intoxication with technology, there is a real problem of the life-world, of thinking we-experience in common life, in this new hermetic reality. This is encapsulated in the thought-experiment of the structure “Us-without-world”.

Our research pays attention to the problem of the coverage of the realm of semiotic beings. This problem is raised by the meeting between the contemporary account of the human animal as a semiotic animal and the possible advent of a technological singularity, meaning a living technological being aware of semiosis. Apart from highlighting the prospective emergence of a complex phenomenon leading to evolutionary pressures on humans, we also pointed to a positive direction towards the development of a cooperative relationship between the latter and a sustainable form of technological life: the furtherance of semiotics. To this end, we started by providing a few historical and philosophical references to help us better understand the problem at stake. Next, we described the way in which beings gain semiotic access to reality, the distinction between the realm of semiotic beings and of machines, and the infinite character of the study of semiotics. Finally, we concluded that the realm of semiotic beings is still, despite technological advances, exclusively human.

While Hegel would agree with existentialist philosophers that anxiety testifies to an existential condition, applying to any human being as such, he believes that the experience of anxiety is shaped by social and cultural institutions and changes over history. The paper offers a reconstruction of Hegel’s account of the social conditions of anxiety. While my focus is the modern period, I use Hegel’s comments on death in previous epochs—and especially in ancient Greece—to bring out the peculiarity of modernity. In the first half of the paper, I discuss the nature and conditions of anxiety. In the second half, I trace Hegel’s critique of a common way to avoid—of flee from—anxiety in modernity, which results in social isolation, boredom, and emptiness. As long as the modern individual is only an economic actor in civil society, she is prone to anxiety. To confront her finitude, Hegel argues, she must endorse her political affiliation, namely, be an active and sacrificing citizen of the state.

Human being is ontologically a relational being living with others in organized communities and institutions. By focusing on the intersubjective and collective levels of human experience, this essay considers the possibility of a critical dialogue between Paul Ricœur’s and Alfred Schütz’s phenomenological works in the direction of a renewed socio-phenomenological approach to social reality. Through reference to Ricœur’s interpretation of the most important of Husserl’s writing presented in his 1967 collection of essays entitled Husserl: An Analysis of His Phenomenology and Schütz’s masterpiece The Phenomenology of the Social World, this article will show a remarkable continuity and a coherent complementarity between these two authors. I begin with a broad framing of Husserl’s second epoché or reduction to the sphere of ownness as performed within the egological sphere, and then turn to Ricœur’s and Schütz’s critiques of the Husserlian conception of intersubjectivity. These reflections will lead us to discuss the inconsistency of Husserl’s idea of the intersubjective acceptance of the common objective nature and his formulation of the higher-order case of communal constitution.

This paper analyses social cognition by considering the analytic philosophy of mind, neurophenomenology and social neuroscience. Many social neuroscientists rely unconsciously on different philosophical answers to the question "how do we understand each other?". Consequently, we will compare the principal philosophical and experimental approaches to social cognition that have been proposed so far and join them in an integrationist account by taking into consideration the direct embeddedness of social interactors. First, the "theory theory" (T.T.) affirms that mindreading consists in inferring the other's mental state by observing his behaviour from a third-person perspective. A neural network called the "mentalizing system" (M.E.N.S.) underlies mindreading activities.Second, the Simulation Theory (S.T.) assumes that social cognition involves simulating the mental states of the other. The neural substrate for the simulatory activities is the "mirror neurons system" (i.e., M.N.S.). Both TT and S.T. are fastened to the "observer paradigm" since the experimental set-ups involve detecting the brain's activity of a participant observing or simulating someone else's movement, and intersubjective dynamics are not at play. Finally, the 2nd person approach invites to consider the other as the one who is directly intervening on our perception and is responsible for the meaning we assign to his mental states (cf. Schillbach et al., 2013). Consequently, Schilbach et al. (2013) have established an experimental setting that is "minimalist and naturalistic" because it focuses on basic kinds of embedded interactions such as mutual gaze. This paper argues that the philosophical theories underlying those approaches do not conflict with each other, but they highlight different moments of social interaction in real life. Indeed, their neural substrates partially overlap. Hence, we want to establish in which order these three moments of social interaction occur. We hold that a realistic phenomenology must consider second-person interactions as the beginning of a realistic phenomenology.

The Heideggerian theme of authenticity (Eigentlichkeit) proves crucial to the task of fundamental ontology that Heidegger pursues in Being and Time. Unfortunately, clear and textually based commentary on this notion of authenticity has been sparse. Many prominent readings of authenticity fail to stay true to its purpose in Being and Time, opting instead to render a stronger existentialist reading than is warranted. While such readings of authenticity are truly fascinating as independent conceptions worthy of philosophical attention, they cannot be properly ascribed to Heidegger or the project of Being and Time. The present essay serves as an attempt to correct this course in the scholarship, offering a textually supported account of authenticity that recognizes its role as that which makes manifest the transparency that everyday Dasein lacks—a transparency that can do away with self-concealments and assist Heidegger in his pursuit of an answer to the question of Being qua Being.

My aim in this paper is to show how Josiah Royce’s philosophy contains many themes that will be at the core of Husserl’s philosophical investigations. This paper is divided in two sections. The first one outlines the start point of these two philosophers, contextualizing their background and showing how they share a common put the experience at the center of their thought. For this reason, I want to analyze how they treat the concept of attention in relation to that of intentionality to argue that their philosophies are strictly anchored to the givenness of the experience. In the second one I deal with the rising of the precategorial dimension (prior to any objectivation), as a possibility of experience itself, making a parallel between the Husserlian concept of Lebenswelt and that Roycean of World of Appreciation. Through this distinction they both criticize the scientific, naturalistic and objectivistic Weltanschaung, showing how its method is founded in an intuitive and non-thematic relation with the world experience that comes ontologically before the scientific description.

I will look at Immigration from persepective of phenomenology and its somewhat foucauldian understanding of governmentality in third way marxism that integrates phenomenology. The term economism has been kept as a primary reason to close the state borders from immigration. There are different ideas of which sector of being clearly defined kind of legitimizes the sovereign. My hypotheses is that in the economic times of third way economic policies just behind us economic is the most clearly defined category to legitimize sovereign and its borders in many senses. Economism as reason to keep borders closed is paradoxical since economic activity most clearly penetrates the borders. Poststructuralist analysis of flows like in Gilles Deleuze or of hospitality in political sense and context in Jacques Derrida are important. Phenomenology helps to understand governmentality as I will argue/show. It can also help to see keeping people out of sovereign - like the state as question of governmentality. The question becomes technical question of governmentality. the point and argument is to sketch out the technical governmentality concerning the immigration question mostly after all phenomenologically.

Neuroscience and its attendant subdisciplines, including, so it supposes, philosophy, hold that there is nothing more to self and society than what is in the brain. Yet two centuries have not resolved the philosophical objections to such claims, much less resolved the binding problem that would link mind and brain, or arrive at a general, materialist explanation of consciousness. Just as ideological and economic blinders beset this discipline, so they limit philosophy to account for the nature of this ‘thinking organ’ – what that means and if it can even exist. Taking the work of Hegel, Heidegger, Deleuze, neuroscientific results, I consider the phenomenology of the organ. I argue that an understanding of this object requires distinguishing concepts such as function and activity, capacity and regulation, surface and recognition. Results show that the ability to arrive at a thinking organ as organ is uncertain but worth the pursuit for the services done to science and ethics.