Vocational life : personal, communal and temporal structures

AbstractThis paper offers a new philosophical account of vocations as deeply personal but at the same time also communal and generational forms of multimodal intending. It provides a reconstruction and a systematic development of Edmund Husserl’s scattered discussions on vocations. On these grounds, the paper argues that vocational life is a general human possibility and not determined by any set of material values, religious, epistemic or moral. Rather, vocations are distinguished from other complexes of intentional acts and attitudes by certain structural features of their core valuations and volitions.

Embodiment and Feminist Philosophy

Ihmistieteellinen kriisi-diagnoosi

Strange vegetation: Emotional undercurrents of Tove Jansson’s Moominvalley in November

This article investigates the emotional undercurrents of Tove Jansson’s Moominvalley in November. I argue that one of the main characters of Jansson’s book is the autumn forest that surrounds the abandoned Moomin house. The decomposing forest is not just an emblem of the inner lives of the guests that gather in the house but is an active character itself: an ambiguous life form that creeps in the house and must be expelled from its living core. I further demonstrate that the emotion of disgust has a crucial role in Jansson’s narrative, and that an adequate analysis of the intentional content of disgust allows us to see what is at issue in the relations between the characters. In my reading,…

Sukupuolten eriarvoinen kohtelu maamme viisaustieteissä

Normality

The chapter explicates the central resources that classical Husserlian phenomenology and its contemporary elaborations offer for the study of psychic disorders. We shall first discuss the phenomenological principles that enable analysis of the conditions and limits of experiencing and sense-constitution. We shall then clarify the concepts that phenomenologists have developed for the discussion of the normality and abnormality of experiencing—optimality and concordance—while also paying heed to the types of phenomena that classical and contemporary phenomenologists have tackled while developing their methods. In this vein, we will emphasize methodological factors that separate phenomenologic…

Descartes’ Notion of the Mind–Body Union and its Phenomenological Expositions

The chapter clarifies the connections between Descartes’ discussion of the mind–body union and classical phenomenology of embodiment, as developed by Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. It argues that the perplexing twofoldness of Descartes’ account of the mind–body union—interactionistic on the one hand, and holistic on the other—can be explicated and made coherent by phenomenological analyses of the two different attitudes that we can take toward human beings: the naturalistic and the personalistic. In the naturalistic attitude, the human being is understood as a two-layered psycho-physical complex, in which mental states and faculties are founded on the material basis of the body. In the personal…

Love and Admiration (Wonder) : Fundaments of the self-other relations

Values of love: two forms of infinity characteristic of human persons

AbstractIn his late reflections on values and forms of life from the 1920s and 1930s, Husserl develops the concept of personal value and argues that these values open two kinds of infinities in our lives. On the one hand personal values disclose infinite emotive depths in human individuals while on the other hand they connect human individuals in continuous and progressive chains of care. In order to get at the core of the concept, I will explicate Husserl’s discussion of personal values of love by distinguishing between five related features. I demonstrate that values of love (1) are rooted in egoic depts and define who we are as persons, (2) differ from objective values in being absolute …

Strange vegetation: Emotional undercurrents of Tove Jansson’s Moominvalley in November

Abstract This article investigates the emotional undercurrents of Tove Jansson’s Moominvalley in November. I argue that one of the main characters of Jansson’s book is the autumn forest that surrounds the abandoned Moomin house. The decomposing forest is not just an emblem of the inner lives of the guests that gather in the house but is an active character itself: an ambiguous life form that creeps in the house and must be expelled from its living core. I further demonstrate that the emotion of disgust has a crucial role in Jansson’s narrative, and that an adequate analysis of the intentional content of disgust allows us to see what is at issue in the relations between the characters. In my…

On the transcendental undercurrents of phenomenology: the case of the living body

AbstractToday the phenomenological concept of the lived body figures centrally in several philosophical and special scientific debates. In these wide and widening fields, the concept is used with multiple different meanings. In order to clarify and delineate the debates, this paper provides an explication of the phenomenological-transcendental methods. It argues that these methods help us remove the most fundamental ambiguities of the concept of embodiment by distinguishing between the main constituents of the lived body and by illuminating their mutual relations.

Simone de Beauvoir on Sexual Difference

In the introduction to The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir clarifies her philosophical approach to embodiment and sexual difference by writing: “However, it is said, in the perspective which I adopt—that of Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty—that if the body is not a thing, it is a situation: it is our grasp upon the world and an outline of our projects.”

Introduction: Phenomenological approaches to Tove Jansson’s fiction

Ambiguity and difference: Two feminist ethics of the present

The chapter studies the ethical dimensions of Beauvoir’s existentialism and Irigaray’s ontology of difference. It argues that Irigaray builds on one central but largely neglected result of Beauvoir’s moral philosophical argumentation: the claim that fundamentally sexual subordination constitutes an ethical problem that cannot be adequately solved merely through social reforms, political interventions, or theoretical reflections. By comparing Beauvoir’s concept of erotic generosity to Irigaray’s discussion of wonder and love, the chapter demonstrates that both philosophers conceive of male privilege as an ethical issue that must be worked out between individual women and men in their concret…

On the Complexity and Wholeness of Human Beings: Husserlian Perspectives

At the beginning of Being and Time, Heidegger rejects Husserl’s classical phenomenology on three grounds: he claims that Husserlian phenomenology is impaired by indeterminate concepts, by naïve personalism, and by obscurities in its account of individuation. The paper studies the validity of this early critique by explicating Husserl’s discourse on human persons as bodily-spiritual beings and by clarifying his account of the principles by which such beings can be individuated. The paper offers three types of considerations. After a summary of Heidegger’s early critique of Husserl, the second section of the paper distinguishes between two dimensions of Husserl’s discourse on human persons. I…

Two Ways of Understanding Persons: A Husserlian Distinction

This paper clarifies the distinction that Edmund Husserl makes between two different ways of understanding other persons, their actions and motivations: the experiential or empirical way, on the one hand, and the genuinely or authentically intuitive way, on the other hand. The paper argues that Husserl’s discussion of self-understanding clarifies his concept of the intuitive understanding of others and allows us to explicate what is involved in it: not just the grasping of the other’s actual motivations of action but also the grasping of her motivational possibilities. The paper ends by discussing the dynamic character of the personal subject.