3/2016
HUMAN NATURE BEYOND NATURALISM. PHENOMENOLOGICAL, ANTHROPOLOGICAL AND PSYCHOANALYTICAL PERSPECTIVES
EDITORIAL
This Dialogue and Universalism issue includes two thematic selections. The first one entitled Human Nature beyond Naturalism. Phenomenological, Anthropological and Psychoanalytical Perspectives is a collection of papers founded on the idea of non-reducibility of human being to natural phenomena. The authors investigate human being from three antinaturalistic standpoints, significant in contemporary philosophy. The standpoints grounding their con-siderations are weak antinaturalisms since they regard human being an ontically complex entity—with natural as well as supernatural (in a modern, not religious sense of the term) aspects. This type of antinaturalism prevails in those contem-porary philosophical conceptions of man which oppose naturalistic apprehen-sions currently much more widespread. The presuppositions of the selection of the papers and its contents are presented in detail in the Introduction authored by its editors, Jagna Brudzińska and Stanisław Czerniak.
The second collection of papers in this Dialogue and Universalism issue entitiled In Memoriam Marek Siemek is a continuation and at the same time a complement of the previous one (2/2016) which has been devoted entirely to an outstanding Polish philosopher Marek Siemek. The previous Dialogue and Universalism issue has been thematically concentrated on forgotten as well as over-estimated problems in social philosophy whereas this issue includes the papers thematically diversified but joined together by the common feature: they are intellectual gifts of their authors to Marek Siemek’s memory in the fifth anniversary of his death, an amazing evidence that non omnis moriar. We would like to express our gratitude to all the contributors of this collection. First and foremost, the editorial board of Dialogue and Universalism warmly thanks Professor Wolfram Hogrebe—a great authority for Marek Siemek and a person of exceptional importance in his life.
Małgorzata Czarnocka
Dialogue and Universalism Editor-in-Chief
INTRODUCTION
HUMAN NATURE BEYOND NATURALISM.
PHENOMENOLOGICAL, ANTHROPOLOGICAL AND PSYCHOANALYTICAL PERSPECTIVES
Studies of the human being and the structure of human experience are nowa-days carried out mainly in the naturalistic paradigm. This concerns the empirical sciences as well as the cognitively oriented philosophy supported by the positiv-istic and linguistic pragmatic epistemologies. The human subject is treated here essentially as a particular natural fact, while nature itself is understood as a complexity of cause-determined phenomena which can be observed from out-side. Thereby, neurosciences play a leading role, significantly affecting the perception of ourselves and of the world around us. In their view, subjectivity is reduced to the ways of functioning of the brain. This is understood as a causally determined system directed to information processing. Despite such a determin-istic thesis, naturalism also assumes that the brain should be able to interact. Furthermore, it is considered able to generate random processes. These interrup-tions of the natural causal chain are labelled as autopoesis and are considered as an evolutionary factor.
Thus, our shared world appears as a construct of the neuronal structure mi-raculously converting the matter into spirit. Modern medicine, contemporary neurological brain research as well as other neurosciences strive to identify the biological, chemical or physical conditions of the human organism and its cere-bral activities as that which determines our experience, either in the practical or theoretical, aesthetical or axiological realm.
The present collection of essays consciously distances itself from these trends, maintaining that research conducted in the reductive-naturalistic ap-proach does not give the answer to the question about the meaning and sense of human activity as actions of personal subjects in the lifeworld. What is more, the authors emphasize that this kind of research neglects the immanent teleolo-gy of human subjects as persons motivated in their actions, therefore persons who are free and able to make free decisions. All the here presented articles refer, explicitly or implicitly, to the phenomenological tradition and emphasise the significance of the lifeworld as the intuitive fundament of every cognition. They seek to formulate a positive alternative to the interpretation of human na-ture comprehending it on the one hand as a bodily specified structure of experience, on the other hand as an intentional and therefore sense-performing devel-opmental structure.
In this context it is mainly the classical (even if currently somewhat margin-alized) phenomenology of Edmund Husserl that shows its up-to-date face. After all, it is he who, in the footsteps of Wilhelm Dilthey, argued in the first half of the twentieth century that the naturalistic position was nothing else than a logi-cal consequence of a particular idealizing cognitive attitude formed in the mod-ern era and grounded in the development and expansion of the natural sciences. According to Husserl, this attitude is burdened with fateful assumptions regard-ing the concepts of nature and the laws governing it, first of all the assumption of the universal law of causality. However, human consciousness, even if we recognize its bodily determination, cannot be explained by reference to the facts of physical nature and the laws governing them.
Husserl shows that the universal law of causality is no less but also no more than an effective hypothesis about the subjects of physics. By no means it is adequate for interpreting human nature, either in its individual and bodily di-mension, or in its social dimension. Husserl requires us to critically reflect on the assumptions which impose experience. His own reflection results among others in descriptions of alternative attitudes, especially of the so-called per-sonalistic attitude, which reveals experience to us before it becomes naturalisti-cally deformed. Within the personalistic attitude experience is not burdened with these assumptions. If we observe it exactly, if we let it speak, it turns out that even the oppositions of body and spirit, of interior and exterior, lose their legitimacy. Within the personalistic attitude experience is experience in the lifeworld, in our shared world, which is defined by affective and volitional ref-erence, by intersubjective and evaluative relations, in a world which is guided by understandable motivation, and not by blind but necessary causality. The body—the Trojan horse of naturalism—represents here not just a fact of nature, not only animated matter as an object in time and space defined by a succession of physiological processes. In the personalistic attitude corporeality signifies a dynamic sphere of subjectivity as the sphere which defines our here and now. However, at the same time it generates the original sense of experience. These issues are mentioned and further developed by the post-Husserlian phenome-nology in existential as well as in ethical or aesthetical reflection and by philo-sophical anthropology. In this way phenomenology reveals its closeness to psychology and, last but not least, to psychoanalytical thought.
The authors of the presented collection deal with these threads and motives, both in terms of systematic as well as historical research. The cycle starts with systematic analyses of selected issues concerning human nature—like freedom, drives and memory, conflict or bodily perception—which cannot be adequately grasped from the naturalistic point of view. Consequently, discussed are some historical positions in philosophical anthropology (Max Scheler, Johann Gottfried Herder, Arnold Gehlen, Gernot Böhme) as well as in aesthetics (Vasily Sesemann). These are considered bearers of a still unexhausted antinaturalistic potential with regard to the interpretation of human nature and its achievements.
Dieter Lohmar deals with the topic of human freedom. The author discusses the different meanings of our daily claim that we are free in our actions and decisions on the grounds of phenomenology. He rejects deterministic theories in the naturalistic approach using Husserl’s argument that the subsumption of human decisions under the causal paradigm is simply an unjustified extension of methodical idealization in the framework of naturalization. Then, he argues for Husserl’s understanding that humans are generally subjects under manifold effective influences but they are nevertheless free. In the end some aspects of our freedom are delineated. Mariannina Failla dedicates her contribution to the phenomenological conception of bodily perception (leibliche Wahrnehmung) as a possible therapeutic model for treating melancholic depression. Starting with a few key concepts of Freudian psychoanalysis (instinct (Trieb), memory, perception, narcissism and melancholia), she develops a comparison of the Freudian theory of melancholia and the studies of phenomenological psychopathology (Otto Binswanger). The article finally focuses on the question of the extent to which the structure of perception and its constitutive openness towards the future represent a theoretical model for therapeutic practices designed to treat melancholic depression. Jagna Brudzińska goes further on the path of connecting phenomenological research with the psychoanalytical approach, focusing on the issue of conflict as the crucial dimension of human nature and its developing dynamics. On this basis, it becomes clear that human nature cannot be explained through a strict causal schema. She stresses that conflict is not a mere additional and accidental characteristic of experience that can be somehow eliminated. Conflict rather affects the fundamental structure of personal experience and should be therefore understood as a constitutive moment of human nature. Thereby, her radical claim is that both self-experience and the development of community can only be understood in the light of motivational conflicts.
The following cluster of essays examines some particular philosophical–anthropological positions which from our point of view still deserve deeper consideration. Stanisław Czerniak discusses Böhme’s approach, pointing out that Böhme’s philosophical anthropology emphasises the differences between the “historical models of man” and its author can be considered a follower of descriptive historicism, although his doctrinal ties to critical theory also make him open to normative positions. Böhme seeks the normative standards for his social critique in his axiological “sovereign man” project. Czerniak investigates this two types of philosophical narrative and concludes that there are categorial and argumentative inconsistencies at their meeting-point which could have prompted Böhme to partial withdrawal from the sovereign man idea in favour of another “reference to history,” though no longer in the descriptive but in the “relief” (Entlastung) mode. Here the German philosopher takes the same path as thinkers like Jürgen Habermas, who referred to the “relief” category in their critical polemic with supporters of eugenic genetic engineering. Rafał Michalski analyses Gehlen’s anthropological approach, which he confronts with Herder’s. His essay is an attempt to present Gehlen’s concept of language in the context of his self-expounded “elementary anthropology.” Emphasis is put on the role of language in the formation of motoric and sensory imagination, the crystallization of human drives and, finally, the development of cognitive competencies. Michalski shows that Gehlen refers in his project directly to the thoughts of Herder. The related anthropological position of Helmuth Plessner is displayed by Alice Pugliese. She discusses criticism against naturalism based on the irreducibility of first-person-perspective facts. This critique considers naturalism as insufficient, since it proposes the view of reality as a centreless dimension. Against this view, she refers to Plessner’s notions of positionality and aspectivity as characteristics of all natural forms of life, thus suggesting the possibility of a more encompassing critique to naturalism on the basis of the philosophical-anthropological research. From a psychological standpoint, Flávio Vieira Curvello explores Franz Brentano’s approach in the lectures Descriptive Psychology and how it leads to a new way of introducing and reframing his fundamental psychological theses. Even though many problems of the Descriptive Psychology, as well as their solutions, are already to be found in the Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, the argumentative turn is clear. And it contributes to set the purely descriptive overtones of the latter aside and emphasizes the relevance of the development of descriptive psychology as an ontology of the soul. Finally, Saulius Geniusas takes into consideration the rather forgotten approach to aesthetics of the Lithuanian Vasily Sesemann, and shows its great potential for the modern debate, also by confronting it with the renowned position of Merleau-Ponty. He thus offers an account of the overall structures of perceptual acts and contends that the distinctive nature of aesthetic perception lies in the unique disposition of the aesthetic attitude.
The last three essays shed light on the problem of the body as a crucial issue in the debate on naturalism and antinaturalism. With reference to the phenomenological understanding of the living body, Andrzej Gniazdowski analyses the antinaturalistic theory of race developed by Ludwig Ferdinand Clauss. The critical conclusion of the article is that in spite of the claim to work out a clear, rigorous and “presuppositionless” theory of race, Ludwig Ferdinand Clauss’ race psychology remains a form of racism that contradicts the solidarity of mankind and the principles of tolerance. From the transcendental phenomenological point of view, also Mansooreh Khalilizand underscores the question of the body and contrasts the naturalistic meaning of instincts with the transcendental phenomenological one. In her analysis she strives to explicate Husserl’s specific description of instinctive processes and the experienced teleology of instincts and to reconstruct the body- and nature-relatedness within the instinctual structures. Finally, Karel Novotný addresses the question of the subjective and embodied character of appearance, and shows that it can play its central role for human experience only by means of its connection with subjectivity of the body. Through its corporeality, experience is given immediately; it is self-given in a non-intentional way, in the immediate auto-affection of experience.
This compilation certainly does not exhaust the question of human nature. We only hope to formulate some arguments for an adequate and differentiate understanding of the human and its experience as well as to contribute to further discussion.
Jagna Brudzińska, Stanisław Czerniak
ABSTRACTS
Jagna Brudzińska
HUMAN NATURE IN CONFLICT. REFLECTIONS FROM A PHENOMENOLOGICAL AND PSYCHOANALYTICAL PERSPECTIVES
This article tends to connect phenomenological research with the psychoanalytical approach by focusing on the issue of conflict as the crucial dimension of human nature and its dynamics. On this basis, it becomes clear that human nature cannot be explained through a strict causal schema; rather, it can be grasped by exploring the dynamic motivational structures of experience which are expressed in the ambivalent tensions and striving tendencies of persons as subjects of the lifeworld. I stress that conflict is not a mere additional and accidental characteristic of experience that can somehow be eliminated, but it rather affects the fundamental structure of personal experience and should therefore be understood as a constitutive moment of human nature. Thereby, my claim is that both self-experience and the development of community can only be understood in the light of motivational conflicts.
Keywords: ambivalence, conflict, individuation, lifeworld, motivation, polarity, phenomenology, psychoanalysis.
Affiliation: Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, ul. Nowy Świat 72, 00-330 Warsaw, Poland and Research Fellow at the Husserl-Archive of the University of Cologne.
E-mail: jagna.brudzinska@uni-koeln.de
Stanisław Czerniak
BETWEEN HISTORICISM AND ESSENTIALISM. THE CRITICAL AMBITIONS OF GERNOT BÖHME’S PHILOSOPHICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
Gernot Böhme’s philosophical anthropology combines a historistic-descriptive and a normative approach (“historical models of man,” the axiological “sovereign man” project).The author describes both types of philosophical narrative in detail, together with the categorial and argumentative inconsistencies which appear on their crossing point. His thesis is that the German philosopher attempts to neutralize these aporias by reference to the category of “relief” (Entlastung) and an argumentative strategy close to the position of thinkers like Jürgen Habermas, who made use of the “relief” category in his critical bioethical analyses.
Keywords: philosophical anthropology, historicism, essentialism, human nature, historical models of man, sovereign man, relief, body, consciousness, identity.
Affiliation: Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, ul. Nowy Świat 72, 00–330 Warszawa, Poland.
E-mail: stanislaw.l.czerniak@wp.pl
Mariannina Failla
DISTURBANCES OF TEMPORALITY AND THE POTENTIALITIES OF PHENOMENOLOGICAL PERCEPTION
The paper presents the phenomenological conception of bodily perception (leibliche Wahrnehmung) as a possible therapeutic model for treating melancholic depression. At the beginning, it discusses some key concepts of Freud’s psychoanalysis: instinct (Trieb), memory, perception, narcissism and melancholia. Next, the Freudian theory of melancholia is compared with studies of phenomenological psychopathology (Binswanger). It is investigated how melancholia is based on the division of temporal relations. Finally, the main problem of the paper is investigated: can the structure of perception and its constitutive openness toward the future represent a theoretical model for therapeutic practices designed to treat melancholic depression?
Keywords: instinct (Freud), impulse (Husserl), perception, narcissism, mourning, melancholia, association, time.
Affiliation: Università degli Studi Roma 3, Via Ostiense, 234-236 – 00146 Roma, Italy.
E-mail: mariannina.failla@uniroma3.it
Saulius Geniusas
VASILY SESEMANN’S PHENOMENOLOGICAL AESTHETICS
The paper offers a systematic account of Vasily Sesemann’s aesthetics. First, I argue that, due to the primacy this aesthetics grants to intuition, intentionality and the objectivity of aesthetic values, its underlying principles are decidedly phenomenological. Secondly, I offer an account of the general structures of perceptual acts and I contend that the distinctive nature of aesthetic perception lies in the unique disposition of the aesthetic attitude. Thirdly, I maintain that there are three fundamentally different ways in which one can speak of aesthetic truth: in terms of formal requirements, subjective material requirements, and objective material requirements. Fourthly, I open a short dialogue between Sesemann and Maurice Merleau-Ponty and argue that an artwork ful-fills the objective requirements of material truth when it succeeds in disclosing those levels of experience, on which the theoretical and practical attitudes rest and from which they take their departure.
Keywords: phenomenology, aesthetics, aesthetic attitude, aesthetic perception, aesthetic truth.
Affiliation: Chinese University of Hong Kong, Fung King Hey Bld, Department of Philosophy, CUHK, Shatin, New Territories, Hong Kong.
E-mail: geniusas@cuhk.edu.hk
Andrzej Gniazdowski
SCHELER AND CLAUSS ON THE POSSIBILITY OF A PHENOMENOLOGICAL THEORY OF RACE
This paper attempts to answer questions about, first, the historical motives which brought the “race” issue into the focus of phenomenological reflection, and, secondly, the theoretical grounding for calling such reflection “phenomenological.” The basis for this reconstruction will be the psychological race theory developed in the 1920s and 30s by Ludwig Ferdinand Clauss, a somewhat forgotten student of Edmund Husserl, and its rooting in the history of the phenomenological movement. Discussed will be both, the theory’s historical background—which, in keeping with the paper’s main thesis, is best-expressed by Max Scheler’s reflections on “European patriotism”—and its relation to Husserl’s concept of phenomenology as a “strictly scientific philosophy.”
Keywords: phenomenology, political theory, European patriotism, race psychology, national socialism.
Affiliation: Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Scienc-es, Nowy Świat 72, 00–330 Warsaw, Poland.
E-mail: agniazdo@ifispan.waw.pl
Wolfram Hogrebe
INDISTINCTNESS AND DISUNION
In the paper the concept of indistinctness is examined. In the author’s view, indistinctness is present in all the aspects of the world. The problem of indistinctness is apprehended in four steps, namely, by 1. claiming and proving that the world of indistinctness and vagueness enhances our creative intelligence; 2. examining who and when discovered the advantages of indistinctness; 3. maintaining that precision is usually of advantage, but not always; 4. proving the misery of reductionistic programmes.
Keywords: indistinctness, disunion, space of meaning, space of being, Turing machine, Galileo Galilei, Leibniz, Willard Van Orman Quine, Wilhelm Dilthey.
Affiliation: University of Bonn, Regina-Pacis-Weg 3, 53113 Bonn, Germany.
E-mail: wolfram@hogrebe.info
Mansooreh Khalilizand
THE STRUCTURE OF THE BODY DYNAMICS: TELEOLOGY OF THE INSTINCTS AND THE INTENTIONALITY OF THE BODILY MOTIONS
One of the constitutional moments of the structure of kinesthesia—that is the motions of the body—is the practical orientedness of motions towards something. In this article I will deal with this structural moment in the practical life of the subject. I will first differentiate between teleology in the instinctive movements of the body and the intentionality in the practical activities of the subject. Whereas the former refers to the primary and instinctive orientedness of the bodily motions toward something generally determined fulfilling the instinctive needs of the body, the latter is to be understood as the prereflexive orientedness of the bodily motions toward a goal in the practical sphere of subject-life. At the end I will examine Husserl’s idea of the universal teleological structure of reason, which has its roots in the primary instinctive life of the subject.
Keywords: instinct, teleology, intentionality, primordial body, kinesthesia, practical synthesis.
Affiliation: University of Cologne, Husserl-Archive, Albertus-Magnus-Platz, 50923 Köln, Germany.
E-mail: faribakhalilizand@gmail.com
Jerzy Kochan
FREEDOM AND INTERPELLATION OR ABOUT FREEDOM ACCORDING TO LOUIS ALTHUSSER
The paper presents a new understanding of freedom. It refers to the concept of ideology and the interpellation of Louis Althusser. In this new perspective freedom is a phenomenon from the sphere of social communication, and, more broadly, a process of socialization, in which plays the role of a subtle medium of interiorization of ideological philosophical universalisms. This specific role of freedom and especially its prevalence in the contemporary world has its fundamental anchored in the common within the framework of capitalism society private ownership of the workforce.
Keywords: Freedom, interpellation, ideology, universalisms, socialisation, Karl Marx, Louis Althusser.
Affiliation: Instytute of Philosophy, Szczeciński University, Krakowska 71–79, 71–004 Szczecin, Poland.
E-mail: jerzy_kochan@poczta.onet.pl
Józef L. Krakowiak
NIETZSCHEAN TRAGIC OUTLOOK AS A CRITIQUE OF METAPHYSICS
In my taxonomy, the tragic outlook is one of four types of outlooks, beside organological, mechanistic and personalistic. Its essence is the idea of non-integrity of being, non-integrity of man, and a dissonance between the quality-ridded scene of the becoming being and the creative actor. The tragic knowledge is a vital component part of the tragic outlook; it is inherent in Carl Jaspers and Christianity’s beliefs but as something transcended in the concept of salvation from the tragic. The Nietzschean challenge could be this “Be an affirming, creative way of life” upon seeing which the becoming “will not vomit.”
Keywords: tragic knowledge vs tragic outlook, critique of substantialism; will to power as description and relation rather than substance; Heraclitean metaphors versus the Stoic heaven without guilt, self as a system of social drives, philosophical fear of the tragic.
Affiliation: The Higher School of Health Education and Social Science, Kamińskiego 29, 90-229 Łódź, Poland.
E-mail: j.k.l@wp.pl
Dieter Lohmar
HUMAN FREEDOM—A HUSSERLIAN PERSPECTIVE
I would like to discuss—on the basis of a phenomenological argumentation—the different meanings of our everyday claim that we are free in our actions and decisions. First, I reject deterministic theories in the naturalistic approach by using Husserl’s argument that the subsumtion of human decisions under the causal paradigm is simply an unjustified extension of a methodical idealization in the framework of naturalization. Then I argue for Husserl’s understanding that humans are generally subjects under a manifold of effective influences but they are nevertheless free. In the end some aspects of our freedom are delineated.
Keywords: Freedom, determinism, everyday causality, naturalistic and personalistic attitude.
Affiliation: University of Cologne, Husserl-Archive, Albertus-Magnus-Platz, D-50923 Cologne, Germany.
E-mail: dieter.lohmar@uni-koeln.de
Rafał Michalski
THE ORIGINS OF LINGUISTIC ANTHROPOLOGY —THE POSITIONS OF JOHANN GOTTFRIED HERDER AND ARNOLD GEHLEN
This article attempts to present Gehlen’s concept of language in the context of his project of philosophical anthropology. The emphasis will be put on showing the role of language in: 1) the formation of motor and sensory imagination, 2) the crystallization of human drives and, finally, 3) the development of cognitive competences. Gehlen refers in his project directly to the thoughts of Herder, and therefore—according to the chronological order—a reconstruction of the origins of “the linguistic anthropology” will start from outlining the main objectives of Herder’s philosophy of language (the first chapter), and then will consider Gehlen’s considerations devoted to the genesis of language competence and to the impact of speech for the constitution of human self-knowledge (second chapter).
Keywords: anthropology, language, deficient being, relief, ontogenesis, sensorimotor process, functional cycle, excess of drives, flood of stimulation.
Affiliation: Institute of Philosophy, Nicolaus Copernicus University, Toruń, Poland.
E-mail: metasis@umk.pl
Karel Novotný
SUBJECTIVITY AND EMBODIMENT OF THE EVENT OF APPEARING
The question of the subjective and embodied character of appearing that was an important issue particularly in post-Husserlian phenomenology is posed in different ways and contexts by Edmund Husserl. One can see how—even according to the Ideas Per-taining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. The second book. Phenomenological Investigations of Constitution subjectivity was not grounded in the acts of the I that it lent the body its subjective character—thanks to the originally egoic character of its own experiences my body also can be my own. In the paper this position is confronted with a deeper foundation of subjectivity than the I of acts. Husserl also sees in deeper levels of lived experience an immediate, non-intentional self-immersion in one’s own experiences. The question that we would like to outline here is: in what sense this self-experience is necessarily bodily, what is the mutual relationship between subjectivity and bodiliness in the later Husserl’s works in respect to his conception of phenomenality.
Keywords: Body, lived body, lived experience, kinesthesis, ego, subjectivity.
Affiliation: Institute of Philosophy of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic in Prague, Department of Contemporary Continental Philosophy, Jilská 1, 11000 Praha 1.
E-mail: novotnykcz@yahoo.de
Alice Pugliese
THE CENTERED REALITY. HELMUTH PLESSNER’S ANTI-NATURALISTIC ACCOUNT
This paper discusses the criticism of naturalism based on the irreducibility of first-person-perspective facts. This critique considers naturalism insufficient since it proposes the view of reality as a centerless dimension. However, simply reintegrating subjective facts into a naturalistic view of reality we eventually produce a split situation in which conscious and self-conscious forms of life require a special consideration, thus appearing as separated from the whole of reality. In order to overcome what turns out to be a dualistic interpretation of reality, this paper considers Helmuth Plessner’s non-naturalistic approach. It elaborates the notion of positionality and aspectivity as characteristics of all natural forms of life, thus leading to the consideration of reality an essentially centered dimension and of humans as part of nature.
Keywords: naturalism, philosophical anthropology, Helmuth Plessner, positionality.
Affiliation: University of Palermo, Department of Humanities, Viale delle Scienze – Edificio 12, 90128 Palermo, Italy.
E-mail: alice.pugliese@unipa.it
Michał Rożynek
GENEALOGY AS A METHOD AND A PROGRAMME
Genealogy is a well-known philosophical method, often used by a disciplines of Friedrich Nietzsche and Michel Foucault. It is seen as part of a broader programme—one that offers critical tools for examining the modes of production of the modern political subject. The aim of this article is to show the usefulness of the genealogical method as a mode of critique separate from the philosophical programme it often belongs to. In order to do this, the paper examines the transformations of genealogy from Nietzsche to Foucault as well as the common lines of critique.
Keywords: Michel Foucault; genealogy; Friedrich Nietzsche.
Affiliation: University of Edinburgh; School of Social and Political Science, Crystal Macmillan Building, 15a George Square, Edinburgh, United Kingdom.
E-mail: mrozynek@gmail.com
Flávio Vieira Curvello
FRANZ BRENTANO’S MEREOLOGY AND THE PRINCIPLES OF DESCRIPTIVE PSYCHOLOGY
I analyse Brentano’s argumentative strategy from his lectures in the Deskriptive Psychologie and how he introduces and reframes his fundamental psychological theses. His approach provides us with the reasons why psychology can be distinguished into different domains of investigation and how the tasks of one of these domains—the descriptive-psychological one—imply a specific understanding about the structure of consciousness. Thereby a mereology of consciousness is developed, which offers the theoretical background to the aforementioned reframing of the Brentanian theses.
Keywords: mereology, unity of consciousness, inner perception, descriptive psychology, genetic psychology, epistemology of psychology.
Affiliation: Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Sociais. Largo São Francisco de Paula, n. 1, sala 310. Centro, 20051070 – Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brasil.
E-mail: fv.curvello@hotmail.com