Year: 2013

December 6, 2013

Phenomenologies of Time – Introduction
Can science study time? Is time an object of scientific inquiry? Can scientific methods and experiments scrutinise time in a way similar to the study of an instance of matter, a movement or an organism? Defining time has been an intellectual mystery in all societies, and one may arguably concede that in the western tradition of scientific thought, the understanding of time has been set more through postulates and metaphysical assumptions than via a procedure of experimental inspection…

December 6, 2013

Phenomenologies of Time – Part 1
“These are extremely important matters, perhaps the most important in the whole of phenomenology.” Thus ended one of the many lectures that Edmund Husserl dedicated to time in the course of his teaching career. Compiled in On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893-1917), these texts reveal the centrality of time, or, in Husserl’s vocabulary, time-consciousness for the larger project of the philosopher…

December 6, 2013

Phenomenologies of Time – Part 2
The tradition of phenomenology, which may even appear in some textbooks as a coherent ‘pheomenological family’ with each member neatly listed after the other, is particularly fascinating for the simultaneous depth of their common agreements, and the wide extent of their differences…

December 6, 2013

Phenomenologies of Time – Part 3
Like a Happy Families card game: as Emmanuel Levinas undertakes his own creative interpretation of phenomenology, he too inherits of a keen attention to the central question of time. A student of both Husserl and Heidegger in Freiburg in the year 1928, his indebtedness to them is sufficiently proved through the numerous translations and commentarial works that he dedicated to them for nearly two decades afterwards…

December 6, 2013

Phenomenologies of Time – Conclusion
This exploration of a few accounts of time in the phenomenological tradition, of these ‘phenomenologies of time’, was set against the backdrop of anterior theories of time. It is generally accepted that these older theories of time, through Newton or Kant, are those that were followed in most of the scientific community…

December 6, 2013

Levinas: For the Feminine Other – Introduction
Emmanuel Levinas is not a philosopher of love. The Lithuanian-born, French Jewish thinker gave birth to a rather substantial œuvre, writing for nearly seventy years on a variety of themes and questions. If love appears in the prose of Levinas, it is not as a topic in itself…

December 6, 2013

Levinas: For the Feminine Other – Part 1
It is undeniable that Levinas tends to submit numbers of formulations, expressions or hypotheses that seem, to say the least, controversial. In Existents and Existence, Levinas states, “the other par excellence is the feminine,” a proposition that would be complemented, one year later in Time and the Other with the view that the pure “essence” of the feminine is otherness or alterity…

December 6, 2013

Levinas: For the Feminine Other – Part 2
The richness of Levinas’s prose allows for numerous possible interpretations. Levinas is an author who is very careful with his words. This is the consideration that has led a number of commentators to try retrieving the sources of Levinas’s more or less controversial statements on the feminine…

December 6, 2013

Levinas: For the Feminine Other – Part 3
The margins regularly produce some of the most pertinent voices. Mitchel Verter is a rather unknown and unrecognized scholar, who dissimulates this qualification of his on the background of his résumé, to highlight his professional activity as restaurant waiter and suicide counsellor. He has nonetheless written a series of fascinating essays on Levinas, Heidegger, Nietzsche and others, all available in his obscure page, hosted on a communitarian website…

December 6, 2013

Levinas: For the Feminine Other – Conclusion
If the aim of a scholarly work of quality is to present a problem in its diverse complexities, and, in some situations, to take a position or defend one of the views, it could appear, here, as judicious to use Verter’s demonstration as the last words of this discussion…