Sūkṣma and the Clear and Distinct Light: The Path to Epistemic Enhancement in Yogic and Cartesian Meditation

2017 ◽  
Vol 67 (3) ◽  
pp. 667-692
Author(s):  
Gary Jaeger
Keyword(s):  
1985 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 177-191
Author(s):  
Lorraine Viscardi-Murray

AbstractThis paper explores Husserl's phenomenological description of the constitution of the alter ego within the sphere of transcendental subjectivity. It is important at the start to point out that the Other plays a crucial role in securing the intersubjective nature of the experienced world. Although Husserl goes on in the "Fifth Cartesian Meditation" to consider the constitution of an objective world common to all subjects and the establishment of a community of monads, my primary focus in this paper will be the examination of the initial steps whereby the sense, "other ego," is constituted by the transcendental ego. My main task, then, will be to examine the reduction to the sphere of ownness, the appresentative transfer of sense from ego to alter ego, and the criterion of harmonious behavior. My primary criticisms will center around certain difficulties inherent in the attempt to uncover a primordial sphere of ownness and problems that arise from a shift in concern from the life-world (everyday) attitude to the attitude following the performance of the epoché. Part I of the paper will consist of a general discussion of Husserl's phenomenological project, Part II will be a detailed study of the alter ego, and Part III a general statement of problems and objections.


Ethics ◽  
1947 ◽  
Vol 58 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Herbert Spiegelberg
Keyword(s):  

Phainomenon ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-52
Author(s):  
Roberto J. Walton

Abstract This article is an attempt to clarify the role of pregivenness by drawing on the accounts afforded by Eugen Fink both in the Sixth Cartesian Meditation and in the complementary writings to this study. Pregivenness is first situated, along with givenness and non-givenness, within the framework of the system of transcendental phenomenology. As a second step, an examination is undertaken of the dimensions of pregivenness in the natural attitude. Next, nonpregivenness in the transcendental sphere is examined with a focus upon the way in which indeterminateness does not undermine the possibility of a transcendental foreknowledge in the natural attitude, and on the other hand implies the productive character of phenomenological knowledge. After showing how, with the reduction, the pregivennes of the world turns into the pregivenness of world-constitution, the paper addresses the problems raised by the nonpregivenness both of the depth-levels and the reach of transcendental life. By unfolding these lines of inquiry, transcendental phenomenology surmounts the provisional analysis of constitution at the surface level as well as the limitation of transcendental life to the egological sphere. Finally, it is contended that Fink’s account of pregivenness overstates apperceptive or secondary pregivenenness because is does not deal with the pregivenness that precedes acts and is the condition of possibility for primary passivity. Reasons for the omission of impressional or primary pregivenness are suggested.


2018 ◽  
pp. 8
Author(s):  
Sverre Raffnsøe ◽  
Morten Thaning ◽  
Marius Gudmand-Høyer

This essay argues that what makes Michel Foucault’s oeuvre not only stand apart but also cohere is an assiduous philosophical practice taking the form of an ongoing yet concrete self-modification in the medium of thought. Part I gives an account of three essential aspects of Foucault’s conception of philosophical activity. Beginning with his famous characterization of philosophy in terms of ascēsis, it moves on to articulate his characterization of philosophical practice as a distinct form of meditation, differing from both Cartesian meditation and Hegelian meditation, as it aims to stand vigil for the day to come and operates as a preface to transgression. Part II begins the articulation of crucial traits left implicit in this understanding of philosophy by turning to Foucault’s in-depth investigation of philosophy in Antiquity during his lectures at the Collège de France in the 1980s. First, it develops how philosophy here begins to constitute and distinguish itself by establishing itself as an activity that has a privileged relationship to truth and truth-telling as an unremitting, existentially determining challenge for the philosopher. Further, it instantiates how Platonism elaborates the need for a sustained ‘auto-ascetic’ ethical non-compliant differentiation as the condition of possibility for accessing and stating truth, and then describes how the assertion of an ethical differentiation and attitude in Cynicism takes the form of an insistent combat for another world in this world. Finally, it underlines how the ethical-practical philosophical work upon oneself in Antiquity is developed in an ongoing critical and political exchange with others. Part III indicates how ethical differentiation according to Foucault remains an essential precondition for the practice of philosophy and is further developed in the modern age. This is particularly perspicuous in Kant’s determination of the Enlightenment, in the attitude of modernity exemplified by Baudelaire, and in the history of revolt since the beginning of early Modernity. On this background, Part IV develops how philosophy as an ongoing meditative practice of self-modification leads to an affirmative critique, confirming the virtuality of this world in order to investigate the potentiality in the examined. In this manner, the essay presents Foucault’s philosophical practice as well as an outline of the history of ideas of a seemingly alternate, yet still agenda-setting conception of philosophical practice today.


2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 46-54
Author(s):  
Marc De Leeuw

The aim of this article is to examine how Ricœur’s critique of Husserl’s and Levinas’s notions of intersubjectivity informs his own alternative conceptualization of the intra- and interpersonal as a complex intertwining of moral selfhood and a just community. My first assumption is that law, as a prescriptive intervention in the social structure of our communal life, presupposes a phenomenology of our “being with others”. My second assumption is that Ricœur’s entire philosophical anthropology, and specifically his ideas on ethics, legality and justice, can be read as a prolonged response to Husserl’s solipsistic deadlock in the famous Fifth Cartesian Meditation. Taken together these two assumptions connect Ricœur’s early analysis of phenomenology with his complex reconceptualization of moral selfhood in Oneself as Another, culminating in the ethical maxim of “a good life with and for others in just institutions.”


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