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.
Empathy was introduced to philosophy as a solution to the problem of other minds skepticism, the doubt whether other minds exist at all, which arises from the Cartesian dualist picture of the mind as metaphysically hidden (Lipps 1907). Already in Lipps’s work, and from then on into contemporary philosophical discussion, empathy in its various forms is commonly seen as our way to know what specific minds believe and feel and desire in specific scenarios. In this paper, I focus on affective empathy, usually seen as the success of a simulation effort, where one tries to adopt the perspective of another and imagine oneself in the other’s situation (e.g. Coplan 2011). I shall argue that this attempt is resting on a misguided notion of similarity between two people, and that the epistemic stance simulation involves is objectifying and obliterating of the other’s individuality. Relying on the work of the psychoanalyst Neville Symington (2018), I propose a new associative-imaginative account of affective empathy, which involves the surrender of the epistemic position and a genuine moment of a communion in feeling.
I take it that in watching a film one is imaginatively presented with an as-if reality. In this talk I’d like to explore the idea that the mode of viewing a film is closely analogous to the imaginative mode of viewing a dream. I shall take up and extend Suzanne Langer’s suggestion in “A Note on the Film” that film is presented to the viewer in “the dream mode” by reflecting on the relation between dream and imagination as theorized by Bernard Williams (“Imagination and the Self”). I end with some tentative thoughts about why this connection between film and dream is important.
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.
