The World of the Dying:’ John Mcgahern’s Memoir and the Thingness in Anticipatory Grief

My essay will aim to prove that John McGahern’s Memoir foregrounds the material dimension of anticipatory grief and its aftermath as a space in which different affective responses to the “Thing” can be explored. Firstly, I look at how the text edits together memories of anticipatory grief in order to dramatize the “apparatus of thinking” (Steven Connor) as an affective spatiality (Marta Figlerowicz) in relation to an irrupting thingness within the object world. Secondly, I look at how McGahern and his father are “timed by things” (Timothy Morton) in their effort to remember or objectify affect, and how mourning itself becomes a matter of accepting nonhuman temporality. As such, this textual engagement with memories and inscriptions enacts a writerly form of anticipatory-vicarious grief, a “moral emotion” arising from the “anticipated harm” (Somogy Varga and Shaun Gallagher) that the subject feels will affect those close to her after her death.

Action and Interaction, Shaun Gallagher

En su libro introductorio a la feno- menología, en las primeras páginas, el filósofo estadounidense y profesor de la Universidad de Memphis, Shaun Gallagher, manifiesta una idea bas- tante llamativa en referencia a su interpretación de dicho método. Señala que el punto de partida del análisis fenomenológico se ubica en la concien- cia de que “nosotros, en tanto agentes que deben actuar y seres pensantes que intentan capturar lo que hacen, siempre nos encontramos ya situados en el mundo”.

MEJÍA FERNÁNDEZ, RICARDO. "El giro fenomenológico en las neurociencias cognitivas: de Francisco Valera a Shaun Gallagher". Barcelona: Ateneu Universitari Sant Pacià / Universitat Ramon Llull, 2019, 513 páginas

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Sartre and Merleau-Ponty’s Theories of Perception as Cognition in the Context of Phenomenological Thought in Cognitive Sciences

Husserl’s phenomenology was particularly influential for a number of French philosophers and their theories. Two of the most prominent French thinkers, Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, turned to the instruments offered by phenomenology in their attempts to understand the notions of the body, consciousness, imagination, human being, world and many others. Both philosophers also provided their definitions of perception, but they understood this notion in very different ways. The paper describes selected aspects of Husserl’s phenomenology that were adopted by Sartre and Merleau-Ponty and depicts the presumptions of their respective theories of perception, as well as the differences between them. The main thesis presented here is that theories as different as those proposed by Sartre and Merleau-Ponty may, and indeed do, lead to the same conclusion, i.e. that perception represents a different form of cognition. Despite the differences between these theories, they can both be placed in the contemporary context of phenomenological research carried out by cognitive philosophers Dan Zahavi and Shaun Gallagher, as well as by the proponent of the enactive theory of perception, Alva Noë.

Esquemas sensoriomotores y cognición off-line

En este texto se presenta una propuesta sobre cómo comprender la cognición off-line o no situada a partir de la noción de esquema corporal. Se expone qué es un esquema corporal y cómo, a partir de Jean Piaget, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Shaun Gallagher e Immanuel Kant, se puede ofrecer una noción de esquema corporal o esquema sensoriomotriz desde la cual marcar una ruta de investigación que permita responder a una crítica al enfoque enactivo de la mente, a saber, si este enfoque sostiene que la cognición es situada, ¿cómo puede el enactivismo dar cuenta de los casos de la cognición que no es situada?

Modes of participation

This paper focuses on the notion of ‘participation’ as it has been used in the social sciences throughout the 20th century. It proposes that there are two main traditions of use – an ‘individual’ one, and a ‘dividual’ one – and it argues in favour of the latter. It does this by examining how Simmel and Goffman, on the one hand, and Lévy-Bruhl and Durkheim, on the other, defined participation. Developed by Lucien Lévy-Bruhl in the first part of the last century, ‘participation’ in the dividual sense is today being given new life by sociocultural anthropologists such as Marshall Sahlins and phenomenologically inclined cognitive scientists such as Shaun Gallagher. The paper addresses the roots of the concept in Scholastic theology and proposes to show how central it can come to be to a sociocultural anthropology that is willing to take on frontally the challenges presently being posed by embodied cognition.