Phenomenology and dialogue: A methodological consideration

Dialogue between religions, if it is to advance beyond polite posturing and into the arena whereby mutual mis‐perceptions are corrected and old dogmas transcended, requires a particular framework for discourse, a language that belongs to neither religion in isolation but to both in the context of the dialogical encounter. With the specifics of Christian‐Muslim dialogue in mind this paper asks the question: What methodological tools are required such that dialogical engagement may take place at the conceptual and ideological level? We argue that the theological dimension of dialogue requires the particular tools of the phenomenologist of religion; indeed that the path to a dialogue that seeks to address the deep and thorny issues requires, in fact, the complementary methodologies of the theological and phenomenological approaches. To this end, the matter of defining the term ‘religion’ is addressed, various approaches to the study of religion are noted, and the phenomenological method outlined and discussed.     

A Phenomenology of Depth

In this paper, I re-vision the depth metaphor in a more contemporary epistemological frame. Rather than using depth as a “vertical” metaphor referring to the hidden, remote, or regressed, I use depth as a “horizonal” metaphor referring to the dimensionality of experience, to the ways in which all experience is structured in a figure–ground relationship. A foreground is always contextualized in relation to its background, and the series of relationships of form to field, self to world, subject to other constitute the ways in which meaning is formed, unformed, and transformed in a movement that characterizes how experience becomes what it is. The analyst’s role in deepening involves attending to the immediacy of the immersive perceptive moment, where embodied feeling-states might emerge from an unspecified ground, where the gap between what forms and its context becomes the crucible for new meaning. This entails receptivity to absence as much as presence, to the ways in which formation is always a play between what becomes and what it is not yet there.     

Intentionality: A Fundamental Idea of Husserl's Phenomenology

Simone de Beauvoir has written of the sense of excitement that marked Jean-Paul Sartre's first encounter with the thought of Husserl and Heidegger. Perhaps no work of Sartre's communicates this excitement, and the reason for it, quite so transparently as his brief 1939 essay on Husserl's notion of intentionality. Husserl here appears as a revolutionary, almost as a saviour, who has provided the necessary key for putting philosophy back in touch with the ordinary experience which both French realism and French idealism had vainly sought to characterize. Realism and idealism alike had been guilty in effect of a reduplication of things in consciousness, dependence on an often unexpressed correspondence theory which made mental surrogates for the real the only reality available to man. But if the present essay testifies to Sartre's attempt to return French thought to immediate contact with things, it enters into a fascinating dialectical tension with another of Sartre's chief motives—to purify immediate experience of its deceptions through a highly reflective, analytic mediation. The essay first appeared in Nouvelle Revue Francaise, LII, January 1939. (Tr.)     

Depression: A historical overview

The American Journal of Psychoanalysis -     

Feminism and Phenomenology: A Reply to Silvia Stoller

Responding to Silvia Stoller's comments on “Domination and Dialogue in Merleau‐Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception” ( Sullivan 1997 ), I argue that while phenomenology has much to offer feminism, feminists should be wary of Merleau‐Ponty's notion of projective intentionality because of the ethical solipsism that it tends to involve. I also take the opportunity to clarify the concept of hypothetical construction introduced in the earlier paper, in particular the transformative relationship that it has to pre‐reflective experience.     

Jung's Erotic Phenomenology: I. A New Translation

In the introduction to The Psychology of the Transference (1946), Carl Jung sketched out a theory of “erotic phenomenology” which condenses his teaching about sexuality and romantic love into a very concise summary. But the meaning of this passage is obscured in the English translation given in the Collected Works of C. G. Jung. I propose here a new translation which makes Jung’s meaning clearer, along with a commentary which explains it in the context of Freudian drive theory and German 19^th century philosophy. Invoking the concepts of instinct, mind, and Eros (both the passion and the divine figure), Jung’s theory says that male sexual desire can be cultivated or repressed in four distinct ways, each associated with a female symbolic figure or anima image: Eve, Helen, Mary and Sophia.     

Being at Home: A Feminist Phenomenology of Disorientation in Illness

This article explores the relation among illness, home, and belonging. Through a feminist phenomenological framework, I describe the disorientations of being diagnosed with borderline personality disorder (BPD) and living with mental illness. This research anticipates the consequences of illness and serious (bodily) disorientations for a conception of belonging as seamless body–world compatibility. Instead, this article examines how the (in)stability of bodily dwellings in experiences of disorientation can suggest ways of being in the world that are more attentive to interdependency, unpredictability, and change in human experience. I argue that these types of dwellings function as a more capacious and apposite metaphor to account for variations in belonging. This discussion outlines the ethical importance of building worlds that make room for different ways of being at home in and through our interactions with others. Although my discussion does not supply norms for ethical action, I contend that a feminist phenomenology of illness generates saliences and illuminates sensibilities that can transform our ways of being with others.     

Anonymity and Diversity: A Phenomenology of Self-Formation in Urban Culture

Topoi - In this paper, I show how phenomenological analysis of unreflective dimensions of our experience has implications for our participation in an increasingly urban and multicultural world. I...     

Phenomenology in Japan

Continental Philosophy Review -