Gustav Shpet and Phenomenology in an Orthodox Key

Gustav Gustavovich Shpet (1879--1937) is undoubtedly best known for introducing Husserlian phenomenology to Russia. He applied to aesthetics and the philosophy of language the principles he had discovered in Husserl's Logical Investigations and Ideas I. But, perhaps without knowing it, he modified the phenomenology he had found in Husserl. His modifications show a thinker who is thoroughly grounded in Russian religious thought of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The result is a philosophy that combines Husserl's analysis of the structure of consciousness with the fundamental Platonism of Orthodoxy, the doctrine of incarnation, and the related notion that matter is to be venerated.     

Minding the Gap: Detachment and Understanding in Aleksej Losev's Dialektika mifa

Aleksej Losev's definition of myth centres onthe concept of detachment. In modern timesdetachment has most often figured in thecontext of philosophical aesthetics, where itis a cognitive category akin to Kant's``disinterestedness'' or the Russian formalists'``estrangement.'' However Losev's usage alsomakes reference to the ontological sense ofdetachment as contemplativeascent (cf. Meister Eckhardt'sAbgeschiedenheit). Thus, Losev's concept ofmyth combines both senses of detachment,binding perceptual attitude and being togetherin a double movement of resignation from theworld and union with meaning; this movementliterally makes sense out of reality. Ittherefore bears comparison to the treatment ofdistanciation in contemporary hermeneutics,where detachment is a key condition ofunderstanding. By investigating Losev'sconnections to other Russian thinkers, theauthor makes a case for a distinct Russiantradition of hermeneutic philosophy (V. Ivanov,G. Shpet, A. Bakshy, A. Losev).     

Logic as a Universal Medium or Logic as a Calculus? Husserl and the Presuppositions of “the Ultimate Presupposition of Twentieth Century Philosophy”

This paper discusses Jean van Heijenoort's (1967) and Jaakko and Merrill B. Hintikka's (1986, 1997) distinction between logic as a universal language and logic as a calculus, and its applicability to Edmund Husserl's phenomenology. Although it is argued that Husserl's phenomenology shares characteristics with both sides, his view of logic is closer to the model‐theoretical, logic‐as‐calculus view. However, Husserl's philosophy as transcendental philosophy is closer to the universalist view. This paper suggests that Husserl's position shows that holding a model‐theoretical view of logic does not necessarily imply a calculus view about the relations between language and the world. The situation calls for reflection about the distinction: It will be suggested that the applicability of the van Heijenoort and the Hintikkas distinction either has to be restricted to a particular philosopher's views about logic, in which case no implications about his or her more general philosophical views should be inferred from it; or the distinction turns into a question of whether our human predicament is inescapable or whether it is possible, presumably by means of model theory, to obtain neutral answers to philosophical questions. Thus the distinction ultimately turns into a question about the correct method for doing philosophy.     

Confusion of Horizons: Gadamer and the Christian logos

This paper argues for Gadamer's indebtedness to logs Christology. Gadamer's language philosophy and hermeneutic experience both depend on theological insights gleaned mainly from St. Augustine and German Pietism. In Truth and Method , Gadamer uses Augustine's rewriting of Platonism to establish his language philosophy and employs the Pietist formula of application to describe the hermeneutical experience as word event. Gadamer's silence about these influences in his later works leave his interpreters and critics (such as Jürgen Habermas) puzzled about his seeming naïve trust in philosophical hermeneutics as a means to improve human interaction. This article tries to contribute to an understanding of Gadamer's hermeneutics by arguing that Gadamer's optimism in language and reason make sense when seen in the theological context from which crucial elements of his philosophy are derived.     

Gustav Shpet’s Implicit Phenomenological Idealism

The issue of whether the phenomenology presented in Ideen I was a metaphysical realism or an idealism came to the fore almost immediately upon its publication. The present essay is an examination of the relation of Gustav Shpet, one of Husserl’s students from the Göttingen years, to this issue via his understanding of phenomenology and, particularly, of the phenomenological reduction, as shown principally in his early published writings. For Shpet, phenomenology employs essential intuition without regard to experiential intuition. If we look on transcendental idealism as the label for this methodology, which disregards but does not deny either the empirical or its correlative species of intuition, then Shpet was such an idealist, all the while adhering to a metaphysical realism. In this way, Shpet could proclaim phenomenology to be the fundamental philosophical discipline without precluding the possibility of other philosophical disciplines insofar as they were conducted in relation to consciousness taken not as the “possession” of a human individual, but eidetically and thus not a “possession.”     

Conceptually Downstream: Revisiting Old Tributaries of Thought for “New” Constructivist Ideas and Practices

Contemporary constructivism occurs at the confluence of three tributaries of thought and practice: hermeneutics, phenomenology, and linguistic philosophy. Selectively tracing the contributions of each tributary, or tradition of thought, a case is made for integrating cultural meanings and customs, lived experience, and people's uses of language in a generative and socially grounded approach to constructivism.     

Reading the Lives of Others: Biography as Political Thought in Hannah Arendt and Simone de Beauvoir

In this essay, I focus on two biographical works by Hannah Arendt and Simone de Beauvoir that I read as political texts: Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess (Arendt 1957 ) and “Must We Burn Sade?” (Beauvoir 2012 ). Reading Arendt's Varnhagen and Beauvoir's “Sade” side by side illuminates their shared preoccupation with lived experience and their common political premises: the antagonism between freedom and sovereignty, and the centrality of action and constructive relations with others. My argument is that these texts constitute an original style of political thinking, which I call politico‐biographical hermeneutics, or reading the life of others as exercises in political theory. Politico‐biographical hermeneutics, as I take it, is not a systematic methodology, but an approach to interpreting sociopolitical forces as they come to bear and are embodied and inscribed in the lived experiences, struggles, and works of representative or exemplary individuals. This approach identifies the political lessons of lived experience and supports one of the central claims of feminist philosophy, namely, that the personal and the political are not antithetical, but relational.     

A POSITIVE PHENOMENOLOGY: THE STRUCTURE OF MAURICE BLONDEL'S EARLY PHILOSOPHY

Given recent developments in Franco‐German phenomenology with its so‐called ‘theological turn’, there has been a concomitant renewal of interest in Maurice Blondel's thought. In this paper I consider the phenomenological structure of Blondel's early philosophy. Blondel defended and published his controversial thesis in 1893 and with this work presented a highly original phenomenology that was deeply indebted to the positive tradition and yet went beyond this same tradition to include even religious practice as part of its inquiry. Keen to engage the rationalist philosophers of the French academy, Blondel proposed a phenomenological project that was geared to engage the critical spirit of an age that was already deemed to be post‐metaphysical. It is in clarifying the manner in which Blondel conceives such a positive phenomenology that I indicate how his thought may contribute to contemporary debates in the phenomenology of religion.     

Transcendental Phenomenology and the Way to Happiness: Husserl’s Reply to Csikszentmihalyi

It is an unprecedented task to interpret Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology as a fundamental philosophy of happiness. Although happiness has been discussed in many psychologies, Csikszentmihalyi’s positive psychology defines happiness as “flow”, a psychic state of ongoing immersion guided by intrinsic motivations and rewards. In this paper, I interpret our transcendental consciousness as a radical “flow” maker and claim that in our transcendental life, happiness is what we ourselves are. Then, I propose this not only as an appeal to a change of attitude (i.e. reduction) for happiness, but also as a deep hermeneutics of the mental skills and activity designs suggested by positive psychology. In this way, worldly happiness dictums can be profoundly re-examined. Understood as such, Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology leaves us the task of how to make a concrete form of qualitative or hermeneutical research on happiness out of it.     

Phenomenology of language beyond the deconstructive philosophy of language

In Speech and Phenomena and other works, Derrida criticizes Husserl’s phenomenology and attempts to pave the way to his deconstructive philosophy. The starting point of his criticism of Husserl’s phenomenology is his assessment of the latter’s phenomenology of language developed in the Logical Investigations. Derrida claims that Husserl’s phenomenology of language in the Logical Investigations and the subsequent works is guided by the premise of the metaphysics of presence. The aim of this paper is twofold: on the one hand, it aims to show that Derrida’s criticism of Husserl’s phenomenology of language is off the mark and, on the other hand, it aims to reveal that the phenomenology of language goes far beyond the scope of the Derridian deconstructive philosophy of language.     

Differing ways, <Emphasis Type="Italic">Dao</Emphasis> and <Emphasis Type="Italic">Weg</Emphasis>: Comparative,metaphysical, and methodological considerations in Heidegger’s “Aus einem Gespräch von der Sprache”

This paper critically examines Heidegger’s 1959 dialogue, A Conversation from [von] Language – Between a Japanese and an Inquirer, across three distinct levels: as (1) a cross-cultural comparative exchange, (2) a meta-philosophical/ontological analysis of the fundamental relation between language and thought, and (3) a methodological inquiry into the phenomenology and hermeneutics of conversation. Despite the problematic nature of Heidegger’s explicit comparative engagement, I contend that his questioning of the possibility of “a conversation from house to house” provides a substantial clarification of the meta-philosophical difficulties inherent in comparative and cross-cultural philosophy. At the same time, his thinking with respect to hermeneutics provides a methodological clue to the possibility of and the normative conditions for understanding across such cultural differences.     

How to Husserl a Quine — And a Heidegger,too

Is consciousness or the subject part of the natural world or the human world? Can we write intentionality, so central in Husserl's philosophy, into Quine's system of ontological naturalism and naturalized epistemology — or into Heidegger's account of human being and existential phenomenology? The present task is to show how to do so. Anomalous monism provides a key.     

Visualizing thought at work. Review of Alyssa DeBlasio: The Filmmaker's philosopher - Merab Mamardashvili and Russian cinema

Alyssa DeBlasio’s book The Filmmaker's philosopher - Merab Mamardashvili and Russian cinema presents Merab Mamardashvili’s philosophy seen through the eyes of film directors who were directly or indirectly influenced by his lectures. With a detailed analysis of eight films, the book brings together a generation of filmmakers who translated Mamardashvili’s message into cinematic language, performing an experiment through which we might see an alternative mode of thought at work. By showing how Mamardashvili’s considerations of metaphysical, epistemological and moral nature shine through in the films described, DeBlasio touches upon one of the pillars of Mamardashvili’s thought: art is, together with philosophy, a privileged language for recording each own’s experience of the field of consciousness.

     

The Moment of a Star: The Ethics of Narration

The main theme of the following presentation of Ric?ur's philosophical preoccupations with religion is the interrelationship between reflection and revelation. In a first section, Ric?ur's philosophical profile is outlined in order to indicate the tone between sadness and joy, negativity and affirmation, in which religion has its existential and philosophical ambience. The following part discusses the pertinence of Ric?ur's position in light of contemporary debates about divine otherness and kenosis. Finally, a third section examines the antagonism between philosophy of reflection and biblical revelation, which marks the range and limits of Ric?ur's hermeneutic philosophy. The kind of dependency or heteronomy implied in religion, especially in the biblical idea of the absolute as an external truth-event, presents a genuine challenge to both phenomenology and hermeneutics. This problem is addressed in Ric?ur's theories of revelation and testimony.     

THE SUPERNATURAL AS LANGUAGE GAME

Abstract. For many in the Anglo‐American tradition of language analysis, Ludwig Wittgenstein, the great progenitor of twentieth‐century philosophy of language, showed conclusively that theological terms lack any referent in reality and therefore represent a discourse that can do no more than manifest the existential attitudes that speakers take toward reality as a whole. To think that such terms represent more is to be bewitched by the use of language. Is it possible, however, that theological language references a fundamental human drive? In this article I reexamine the dyad of nature and supernature from the perspective of Wittgenstein's philosophy. Perhaps surprisingly, Wittgenstein's thought on the subject offers much more than his famous, terse aphorism at the conclusion of his first masterwork, the Tractatus Logico‐Philosophicus ([1921] 1961, 74, §7): “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.” Furthermore, the basic Tractarian drive to determine the relationship between language and reality, which is redirected but not extinguished in Wittgenstein's second, divergent, opus, the Philosophical Investigations ([1953] 1967), may be the place for a renewed examination of what the supernatural means in human discourse. Does talk of God give expression to the fundamental transcendence of human knowledge? Is it a language game we can eschew?     

JESUS' LANGUAGE‐GAMES: THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE NOTION OF LANGUAGE‐GAME FOR A REFORMULATION OF ‘NEW TESTAMENT BIBLICAL THEOLOGY’1

Despite the exciting consequences of the later Wittgenstein's notion of language‐game for theology in general, one discipline centered on language – exegesis and biblical theology – has remained largely unaffected by this advance. I here show that describing biblical language as a language‐game not only enhances our understanding of biblical texts; it also explodes a long‐term impasse separating the interpretation from the ‘actualization’ of sacred texts. Insights taken from the notion of a language‐game may, as with form of life and grammar, emerge as central building blocks for reformulating the postulates of biblical theology. 1     

From Buddha's speech to Buddha's essence: philosophical discussions of Buddha‐vacana in India and China1

This is a comparative study of the discourses on the nature of sacred language found in Indian Abhidharma texts and those written by 7th century Chinese Buddhist scholars who, unlike the Indian Buddhists, questioned ‘the essence of the Buddha’s teaching'. This issue labeled fo‐chiao t'i lun, the theory of ‘the essence of the Buddha’s teaching', was one of the topics on which Chinese Yogācāra scholars have shown a keen interest and served as the inspiration for extensive intellectual dialogues in their texts. It is in Hsüan‐tsang's massive and organized translation works, begun in 648, that various previous translations of the term buddhavacana from Indian Abhidharma texts were given the unified translation of fo‐chiao. (Fo‐chiao literally means “the Buddha's teachings,” and is the term used in the modern period for “Buddhism.”) By combining fo‐chiao with the term t'i, meaning ‘essence’ or ‘substance’ throughout his translations, Hsüan‐tsang attempted to define ‘the essence of the Buddha’s teaching'. In Indian Abhidharma texts, the nature of the Buddha's word was either ‘sound’ (?abdha), the oral component of speech, or ‘name’ (nāma), the component of language that conveys meaning, or some combination of the two. From the time of Hsüan‐tsang's translation, however, discourse on the nature of sacred language was no longer relegated to the category of language or of epistemological investigation, but became grounded in the Chinese discussion investigating the ‘essence’ or ‘substance’ of the Buddha's teaching, and even of ‘Buddhism’ itself. As such, it sought to transcend the distinction between language and meaning. This gradual but explicit process of inquiry into the nature of ‘the Buddha’s word' was a necessary antecedent to the transition to a ‘Chinese’ Buddhism.     

Inspiration in the Act of Reading: A Discussion of Ulrich H. J. Körtner's Hermeneutics

In German‐language theology, Professor Ulrich H. J. Körtner's theory of inspiration, as it relates to the Bible reader's perspective, is well known. His attempt to gain fruitful insights from contemporary literary hermeneutics while linking them to theological concerns makes his approach a valued yet not uncontroversial example of a reception‐aesthetics twist on the Lutheran sola Scriptura. This article presents Körtner's hermeneutical considerations with special regard to inspiration related to the Bible reader's perspective and shows how this approach may be related to some aspects of the crisis that the Lutheran churches and theology suffer today.