The Concept Of Passivity In Husserl S Phenomenology

Building upon Husserl’s challenge to oppositions such as those between form and content and between constituting and constituted, The Concept of Passivity in Husserl’s Phenomenology construes activity and passivity not as reciprocally exclusive terms but as mutually dependent moments of acts of consciousness. The book outlines the contribution of passivity to the constitution of phenomena as diverse as temporal syntheses, perceptual associations, memory fulfillment and cross-cultural communication. The detailed study of the phenomena of affection, forgetting, habitus and translation sets out a distinction between three meanings of passivity: receptivity, sedimentation or inactuality and alienation. Husserl’s texts are interpreted as defending the idea that cultural crises are not brought to a close by replacing passivity with activity but by having more of both.

Coming from what is arguably the most productive period of Husserl's life, this volume offers the reader a first translation into English of Husserl's renowned lectures on `passive synthesis', given between 1920 and 1926. These lectures are the first extensive application of Husserl's newly developed genetic phenomenology to perceptual experience and to the way in which it is connected to judgments and cognition. They include an historical reflection on the crisis of contemporary thought and human spirit, provide an archaeology of experience by questioning back into sedimented layers of meaning, and sketch the genealogy of judgment in `active synthesis'. Drawing upon everyday events and personal experiences, the Analyses are marked by a patient attention to the subtle emergence of sense in our lives. By advancing a phenomenology of association that treats such phenomena as bodily kinaesthesis, temporal genesis, habit, affection, attention, motivation, and the unconscious, Husserl explores the cognitive dimensions of the body in its affectively significant surroundings. An elaboration of these diverse modes of evidence and their modalizations (transcendental aesthetic), allows Husserl to trace the origin of truth up to judicative achievements (transcendental logic). Joined by several of Husserl's essays on static and genetic method, the Analyses afford a richness of description unequalled by the majority of Husserl's works available to English readers. Students of phenomenology and of Husserl's thought will find this an indispensable work.

Deleuze's readings of Hume, Spinoza, Bergson and Nietzsche respond to philosophical critiques of classical and modern empiricism. However, Deleuze's arguments against those critiques - by Kant, Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger - consolidate the philosophy of immanence that can be called 'transcendental empiricism'. Marc Rolli offers us a detailed examination of Gilles Deleuze's philosophy of transcendental empiricism. He demonstrates that Deleuze takes up and radicalises the empiricist school of thought developing a systematic alternative to the mainstreams of modern continental philosophy.

Bringing together established researchers and emerging scholars alike to discuss new readings of Husserl and to reignite the much needed discussion of what phenomenology actually is and can possibly be about, this volume sets out to critically re-evaluate (and challenge) the predominant interpretations of Husserl’s philosophy, and to adapt phenomenology to the specific philosophical challenges and context of the 21st century. “What is phenomenology?”, Maurice Merleau-Ponty asks at the beginning of his Phenomenology of Perception – and he continues: “It may seem strange that this question still has to be asked half a century after the first works of Husserl. It is, however, far from being resolved.” Even today, more than half a century after Merleau-Ponty’s magnum opus, the answer is in many ways still up for grasp. While it may seem obvious that the main subject of phenomenological inquiry is, in fact, the subject, it is anything but self evident what this precisely implies: Considering the immense variety of different themes and methodological self-revisions found in Husserl’s philosophy – from its Brentanian beginnings to its transcendental re-interpretation and, last but not least, to its ‘crypto-deconstruction’ in the revisions of his early manuscripts and in his later work –, one cannot but acknowledge the fact that ‘the’ subject of phenomenology marks an irreducible plurality of possible subjects. Paying tribute to this irreducible plurality the volume sets out to develop interpretative takes on the phenomenological tradition which transcend both its naive celebration and its brute rejection, to re-articulate the positions of other philosophers within the framework of Husserl’s thought, and to engage in an investigative dialogue between traditionally opposed camps within phenomenology and beyond.

Phenomenology is the philosophy of our times. Through the entire twentieth century this philosophy unfolded and flourished, following stepwise the intrinsic logic and dynamism of its original project as proposed by its founder Edmund Husserl. Now its seminal ideas have been handed over to a new era. The worldwide contributors to this volume make it manifest that phenomenological inspiration knows no cultural barriers. It penetrates and invigorates not only philosophical disciplines but also most of the sectors of knowledge, transforming our way of seeing the world, our actions toward others, and our lives. Phenomenology's universal spread has, however, oftentimes diluted its original sense, even beyond recognition, and led to a weakening of its dynamics. There is at present an urgent need to retrieve the original understanding of phenomenology, to awaken its dormant forces and redirect them. This is the aim of the present book: resourcement and reinvigoration. It is meant to be not only a reference work but also a guide for research and study. To restore the authentic vision of phenomenology, we propose returning to its foundational source in Husserl's project of a `universal science', unpacking all its creative capacities. In the three parts of this work there are traced the stages of this philosophy's progressive uncovering of the grounding levels of reality: ideal structures, constitutive consciousness, the intersubjective lifeworld, and beyond. The key concepts and phases of Husserl's thought are here exfoliated. Then the thought of the movement's classical figures and of representative thinkers in succeeding generations is elucidated. Phenomenology's geographic spread is reviewed. We then proceed to the culminating work of this philosophy, to the phenomenological life engagements so vigorously advocated by Husserl, to the life-significant issues phenomenology addresses and to how it has enriched the human sciences. Lastly the phenomenological project's new horizons on the plane of life are limned, horizons with so powerful a draw that they may be said not to beckon but to summon. Here is the movement's vanguard. This collection has 71 entries. Each entry is followed by a relevant bibliography. There is a helpful Glossary of Terms and an Index of Names.

Institution and Passivity is based on course notes for classes taught at the Bibliothèque Nationale de Paris. Philosophically, this collection connects the issue of passive constitution of meaning with the dimension of history, furthering discussions and completing arguments started in The Visible and the Invisible and Signs (both published by Northwestern). Leonard Lawlor and Heath Massey’s translation makes available to an English-speaking readership a critical transitional text in the history of phenomenology.

The study of sport is often thought of simply in terms of the sport sciences. This book explains how a phenomenological approach is capable of revealing the nature and meanings of sport in ways that are beyond the reach of the sciences and how the very concepts required by sport science stand in need of philosophical explanation. The book has a 'didactic' intention, seeking to present and discuss ideas and tools developed in the phenomenological tradition in order to illuminate issues in sport, in such a way as to be understandable for those without any previous knowledge or background. There are clear and straightforward accounts of the ideas of central thinkers, such as Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Patočka, and applications of central ideas to the analysis of particular issues, such as the nature of risk sports, the feint in football, the problem of the instant replay, the role of the sport psychologist, the idea of 'bodily perception', and the concept of 'transhumanism' in relation to performance enhancement. This book was originally published as a special issue of Sport, Ethics and Philosophy.