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…
Tag: Phenomenology
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
An Ethics of Love – Epigraph
This is why through the face
filters the obscure light
coming from beyond the face,
from what is not yet,
from a future never future enough,
more remote than the possible.
An Ethics of Love – Part 1.1
Levinas writes about the encounter of the Other as a ‘perturbation’ or ‘interruption’ of our everyday human experience. The Other is not only the shelter, or the incarnated form, of the Infinite. It is, for Levinas, what complexifies our spontaneous understanding of time itself. Time is what gets interrupted by the Other…
An Ethics of Love – Part 1.2
French language contains one interesting expression, which we could borrow to further discuss the encounter of the loved Other in and after Levinas: the point de fuite. Levinas does not make a use of this expression. The point de fuite is principally a technical term, belonging to the field of photography and visual art…