In her book, Illness, Havi Carel writes of her own experience, “I quickly learned that when doctors ask ‘How are you?’ they mean ‘How is your body?’” (Illness 48). While this mismatch between the use of ‘you’ here might be excused by most as a mundane confusion of language, this dual role of the self, as both bodily and social, revealed through the doctor/patient relationship, speaks to the heart of a long-lasting intellectual debate within ‘disability studies theory’ regarding how we conceptualise what it means to be disabled. In this paper, I critically evaluate this relationship and look to what the emerging field of ‘disability phenomenology’ can contribute here. In particular, I develop an argument for the reinterpretation and use of Jean-Paul Sartre’s chapter on ‘The Body’ in Being and Nothingness for the field of disability studies. Arguing against Sarah Richmond’s criticisms of his view in her article, “Sartre and the Doctors,” I propose that Sartre provides a foundation for an effective philosophy of disability, explaining the dual role of the body for the disabled subject while being sensitive to their individual conception of selfhood.
Since the 1980s, and especially into the 1990s, the phrase “always already” came to be used well beyond its specialised context in Continental Philosophy, becoming ubiquitous in a range of academic disciplines within the general orbit of poststructuralism, and loosely in connection with the legacy of Heidegger’s Being and Time. In this paper, I want to do three things: (i) trace the conceptual background of the “always already” (immer schon) formulation in Kantian and post-Kantian thought, especially via the phenomenology of Hegel through to Husserl and Heidegger, as well as touching on the phrase’s implicit theological overtones; (ii) consider the terms ‘always’ and ‘already’ very literally as they are used in ordinary language in English in order to then think more about what it means for them to be put together (and how this in turn helps us consider the phrase’s distinct usage in the Phenomenological tradition); and (iii) to argue for the implications of thinking about the ‘always already’ formulation in such a way for engaging both with Indigenous conceptions of temporality and place, and with thephenomenology of Deep Time.
In this paper we propose a critical reading of Robert Brandom’s reading, in A Spirit of Trust, of the final eleven paragraphs of the Spirit chapter of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, especially the crucial paragraph 665 – the discussion of the Kammerdiener, or “moral valet”. We argue that Brandom significantly understates the role that desire plays in Hegel’s account of the institution of normativity. This interpretive disagreement has implications for Brandom’s broader philosophical project, including his critical treatment of the “genealogical” tradition, and his rejection of the “instrumental pragmatist” strand in classical U.S. pragmatism. On our preferred interpretation of the moral valet passage, Hegel’s project in the Phenomenology is closer to both of these post-Hegelian traditions than Brandom’s rational reconstruction acknowledges.
