Decisions and Transformations: The Phenomenology of Embodiment

by James Richard Mensch, James Richard Mensch (Editor)

Overview

To say that we are embodied subjects is to affirm that we are both extended and conscious: both a part of the material world and a place where that world comes to presence. The ambiguity inherent in our being both can be put in terms of a double “being in.” Thus, while it is true that the world is in consciousness taken as a place of appearing, it is equally true that, taken as embodied, consciousness is in the world.  How can our selfhood support both descriptions? Starting with Husserl’s late manuscripts on birth and death, James Mensch traces out the effects of this paradox on phenomenology. What does it mean to consider the self as determined by its embodiment? How does this affect our social and political relations, including those marked by violence? How does our embodiment affect our sense of transcendence, including that of the divine? In the course of these inquiries, such questions are shown to transform the very sense of phenomenology.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783838274355
Publisher:	ibidem
Publication date:	10/20/2020
Series:	Body and Consciousness , #1
Sold by:	Libreka GmbH
Format:	eBook
Pages:	280
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

James Mensch is a full Professor of Philosophy at Charles University in Prague.  He is also a member of the Central European Institute of Philosophy. His main areas of research are phenomenology and its contemporary social and political applications.  He is the author of numerous articles and thirteen books, the most recent being Selfhood and Appearing, The Intertwining (Brill, 2018), and Patočka’s Asubjective Phenomenology: Toward a New Concept of Human Rights (Königshausen & Neumann, 2016).

Table of Contents

Introduction 11

Part I Embodiment and the Transformation of Husserlian Phenomenology

Chapter I Birth, Death, and Sleep: Limit Problems and the Paradox of Phenomenology 23

Chapter II The Numerical and the Unique Singularity of the Ego in the C Manuscripts 35

Chapter III The Spatiality of Subjectivity 49

Chapter IV Life and the Reduction to the Lifeworld 63

Chapter V Life and Horizon 81

Chapter VI Rethinking Subjectivity as an Environmental Concept 91

Part II Embodiment and the Singularity of Selfhood

Chapter VII Self-Identity from the Perspective of the Body 105

Chapter VIII Temporality and Embodied Self-Presence 115

Chapter IX Social Change and Embodiment 129

Part III Trust and Mistrust

Chapter X Belief and Trust, an Analysis of Husserl's Epoché 141

Chapter XI Trust and Violence 149

Chapter XII Violence and the Return of the Religious 163

Part IV Sacrifice and the Presence of the Divine

Chapter XIII Suffering and Theodicy 179

Chapter XIV Embodiment and the Experience of the Divine 191

Chapter XV Flesh and Forgiveness 201

Afterword 211

Bibliography 219

Indexes 273