A Multidisciplinary Bibliography of Phenomenology

in 21^st Century North America

2001

Michael, Barber - Philosophy - barbermd@slu.edu

• “Sartre, phenomenology and the subjective approach to race and ethnicity in Black Orpheus.” Philosophy and Social Criticism, Vol. 27 (2001): 91-103. While Appiah and Soyinka criticize racial essentializing in Sartre and the Negritude poets, Sartre in Black Orpheus interprets the Negritudinists as employing a phenomenological, anamnestic retrieval of subjective experience. This retrieval uncovers two ethical attitudes: a less exploitative approach to nature and a conversion of slavery’s suffering into a stimulus for universal liberation. These attitudes spring from peasant cultural traditions and ethical responses to others’ race-based cruelty, rather than emanating from mystified “blackness.” Alfred Schutz’s because-motive analysis, a process of narrative self-constitution, renders plausible these linkages Negritudinists draw between themselves and peasant or slave ancestors. Such narratives, customarily constructed in common sense by European- and African-Americans, regularly involve mythic elements, serve laudable ethical purposes, and require continual theoretical critique by anthropology, genetics, and ethics. Theory, though, plays only a critical, corrective role for subjective anamnestic recoveries of racial and ethnic identity, and it can never replace them.

• “Phenomenology and the Ethical Bases of Pluralism: Arendt and Beauvoir on Race in the United States." In The Existential Phenomenology of Simone de Beauvoir, 149-174. Edited by Wendy O’Brien and Lester Embree. Dordrecht, Boston, and London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001. Though differing in their approach to race in the United States, Hannah Arendt and Simone de Beauvoir work on two different levels of a philosophical-ethical spectrum, paralleling Husserl’s distinction between the transcendental and pre-theoretical, life-world levels. Each level needs the other in order to realize an authentic socio-political pluralism.

• “Ethnicity and Phenomenology: The Primordial vs. Social Constructivist Approaches,” in The Reach of Reflection: Issues for Phenomenology’s Second  Century, Vol. 1(2001):142-163. Edited by Stephen Crowell, Lester Embree, and Samuel J. Julian. Electronically published by Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology and Electron Press. This paper examines the sociological debate about where whether ethnic identity is a primordial given of social existence or a social construction. It argues that both social formations beyond kinship, of which ethnicity is one, and kinship itself make possible a social world whose typification and relevance structures, eidetically considered, are in a sense primordial for establishing personal identity. This minimalist account of ethnicity makes possible a playing field on which various in-groups socially construct their identity in the light of ever revisable relevance and depending on ever changeable circumstances.

Richard L. Langan - rlanigan@mac.com -Communnicology -  http://myprofile.cos.com/rlanigan

• “Paradigm Shifts: Recalling the Early ICA and the Later PHILCOM”, The Communication Review, 8, no. 4 (2005), pp. 377-382. A conceptual and organizational history of Division 9: Philosophy of Communication in the International Communication Association at the First World Congress on Communication Science in 1976 at Berlin, Germany. I was the founding chair and served four terms.

Jacqueline Martinez – jmartinez@asu.ed - communicology

• “Weight Room Semiotics: Female Bodies Enacting Masculine Codes,” The American Journal of Semiotics. Vol. 17, No. 4, 147-171. Featuring the semiotic and phenomenological work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Charles Sanders Peirce, this article analyzes the codification of body movement and spatial configurations in weight rooms. Its purpose is to articulate the specific codes through which perceptions of masculinity and femininity are both replicated and altered. The application of Peirce’s phenomenological categories of Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness reveals the conditions in which expressions of human freedom emerge via a common recognition of exertions of brute physical force in ways that usurp the typical perception of masculine and feminine body capacities. Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of freedom as an expression of “I can” in contexts where the object of the “I can” must overcome obstacles so as to create a field in which “special possibilities” may in fact emerge.

Frederick J. Wertz - wertz@fordham.edu - psychology - www.fordham.edu/psychology/wertz/

• "Humanistic Psychology and the Qualitative Research Tradition." In K.J. Schneider, J.F.T. Bugental & J.F. Pierson (Eds.) The Handbook of Humanistic Psychology: Leading Edges in Theory, Research and Practice.  Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, pp. 231-246. One of the most exciting and promising developments in psychology during the latter part of the twentieth century is the proliferation of diverse research methods and the articulation of their scientific and philosophical soundness within a sophisticated methodology that can be called humanistic.  Phenomenological philosophy of science is used to bring to light the natural science context in which psychology has developed its disciplinary identity and then used to consider the criteria by which a research method or methodology may be considered humanistic.  Samples from the rich tradition of humanistic research in the history of psychology are explored.  Phenomenological foundations of human science are used to appreciate the value of contemporary blossoming of humanistic research methods.  The challenges and contemporary possibilities of employing phenomenologically based humanistic research methods are articulated.

• "An Introduction to Phenomenological research in Psychology: Historical, Conceptual, and Methodological Foundations." With S. Churchill. In K.J. Schneider, J.F.T. Bugental & J.F. Pierson (Eds.) The Handbook of Humanistic Psychology: Leading Edges in Theory, Research and Practice.  Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, (first author S. Churchill)., 2001, pp. 247-262. This chapter begins with the historical and conceptual background of phenomenological psychology.  Some of the major methodological principles that guide phenomenological research in psychology are reviewed and highlighted.  After a discussion of procedures that are typically involved in empirical research, the orientation and procedures are illustrated by describing a particular application of these methods to the study of being criminally victimized.  The chapter concludes with a discussion of reliability and validity of phenomenological psychological research.

2002

Michael, Barber - Philosophy - barbermd@slu.edu

• “Alfred Schutz,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy" (Summer 2001 edition, published in 2002) Edward N. Zalta (ed.), http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2001/entries/sample. This essay presents a summary of Schutz’s thought.

• “Modern and Postmodern Aspects of Scheler’s Later Personalism,” In Max Scheler’s Acting Persons: New Perspectives, 19-36. Edited by Stephen Schneck. Amsterdam, New York: Editions Rodopi, 2002. In his later personalism, Scheler blends a confidence in rationality with diffidence about it and a commitment to personalism with a recognition of how socio-cultural real factors, including drives, defer its realization. The modern/postmodern debate thus provides a lens through which to view the diverse aspects of Scheler’s later personalism.

• “Alfred Schutz: Reciprocity, Alterity, and Participative Citizenry,” in Phenomenological Approaches to Moral Philosophy: A Handbook, 415-435. Edited by John Drummond and Lester Embree. Dordrecht, Boston, and London: Kluwer Academic Press, 2002. Schutz’s phenomenology, taken ethically, moves in two directions, toward an intersubjectively shared, modernist ethics of discourse and toward a post-modern sounding ethics of alterity and meaning-dissonance, flowing from his notions of the reciprocity of perspectives and the otherness of the other person as these are found in his account of the life-world. It is to Schutz’s credit that his thought is comprehensive enough to embrace tensions that have polarized recent philosophical discussion.

George Psathas - geops1@bu.edu - sociology

• "A conversation analysis of practices and competencies in telefundraising" (with L.L. Simmel, W.S. Siegal and P.D. Berger) The CASE International Journal of Educational Advancement, 2002, vol. 25, no. 4, pp. 22-39. Data from calls to alumni seeking contributions are analyzed using a conversation analysis perspective to show how they are organized and what the significance of particular openings may be in the achievement of the aims of the caller.

• "The Path to Human Studies," Human Studies, 25, 2002, pp. 417-424. The way in which Human Studies was founded as reflecting the times during which it came into being and the aims of the various organizers and early contributors.

   

David Seamon – triad@ksu.edu - Geography, Environment-Behavior Research

• “Physical Comminglings: Body, Habit, and Space Transformed into Place,” in Occupational Therapy Journal of Research, 22 (winter): 42S-51S. This article considers the ways in which the habitual, bodily dimension of human experience works as one kind of tacit connection between self and world—between people’s need to act and move, and the physical spaces and places in which those actions and movements take place. On the one hand, I argue that the body is an active intentionality in relation to the physical and spatial environment. On the other hand, I argue that the physical and spatial environment—in being made one way rather than another, particularly in terms of pathway layout—plays a potential role in where people go and how many and what kind of physical interactions they have with other people in their immediate place. In short, there is a mutual support at the level of body and world that, in terms of habit, allows the physical environment to be both a taken-for-granted support and a source of interpersonal stimulation and exchange.

Robert D. Stolorow - robertdstolorow@gmail.com - philosophy/psychoanalysis - robertdstolorow.googlepages.com

• Worlds of Experience: Interweaving Philosophical and Clinical Dimensions in Psychoanalysis, coauthored with George Atwood and Donna Orange, New York: Basic Books, 2002. A rethinking of psychoanalysis as a form of phenomenological inquiry.
   

Frederick J. Wertz - wertz@fordham.edu - psychology - www.fordham.edu/psychology/wertz/

• "Empirical phenomenological analyses of being criminally victimized."  Republished in M. Huberman & M.B. Miles (Eds.), The qualitative researcher’s companion (pp. 275-304).  Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.A phenomenological psychological analysis of  the experience of being criminally victimized based on an NIH funded research project in which 100 crime victims in the Greater Pittsburgh area were interviewed.  A general narrative of the experience with illustrative quotations from crime victims highlights the taken for granted horizons of trust, reciprocity, and agency that characterize social existence prior to victimization.  The emergence of the experience of victimization, including the detrimentality of the predator, the loss of agency, and the indifference of surrounding community are described.  The continuation of this new experiential structure in the “reliving of victimization” after the actual crime victimization ends is elaborated.  Finally the process of “recovery” in which a person reactivates effective agency, receives help and protection from others, and receives the gift of community solidarity are described.

   

2003

Jacqueline Martinez – jmartinez@asu.ed - communicology

• “On the Possibility of the Latino Postcolonial Intellectual.” Nepantla: Views from South, Vol. 4.2: 345-348. This article responds to Eduarto Mendieta’s article arguing for the particular contributions of Latino postcolonial intellectual in contemporary public discourse. In agreement with Mendieta, the response aims to extend Mendieta’s argument by focusing on how the particular life histories of Latinos is essential in shaping the emergence of the Latino postcolonial intellectual. The self-reflective stance of the Latino postcolonial intellectual constitutes an essential counterbalance to the presumption of uniform political perspective pervasive in contemporary US American public discourse. The Latino postcolonial intellectual is uniquely positioned to generate efforts where the totality of our life histories can be placed in the context of many people’s life histories, and the differences and fears that labels sometimes generate could be turned into a recognition of struggle and hope.

• “Racisms, Heterosexisms, Identities: A SemioticPhenomenology of Self Understanding.” Journal of Homosexuality, vol. 45, no. 2/3:109-127. This article examines the contributions of lesbians of color in the developmental relationship between queer theory and qualitative research methodology. Its thesis is that the contributions of lesbians of color in this context have been overlooked despite being featured. This oversight is explained through an examination of theoretical perspectives that dominate our current understanding of the relationship between queer theory and qualitative research. Postmodernism is revealed as susceptible to liberal bias and racist exclusions common in U.S. American culture. Semiotic phenomenology is offered as a non-essentialist approach to queer theory and qualitative research that reduces the liberal bias and racist exclusions often perpetuated in postmodern theorizing that has led to the exclusion of contributions of lesbians of color in queer theory.

   

George Psathas - geops1@bu.edu - sociology

• "Kurt Wolff: A brief biography," Human Studies, 2003, vol. 26, no. 3, pp. 285-291. An examination of the life of Kurt Wolff and his major contributions to American sociology, particularly the sociology of knowledge.

• "Types, typifications and membership categorization devices: Alfred Schutz and Harvey Sacks on the notion of types," Focus Pragensis III, Prague: Center for Phenomenological Research, 2003, 28-51. Beginnng with Harvey Sacks’s work, the contrast between membership categorization and types and typifications is analyzed to show their similarities and differences.

2004

Michael, Barber - Philosophy - barbermd@slu.edu

• “Occupational science and phenomenology: Human activity, narrative and ethical  responsibility,” Journal of Occupational Science (Australia), 11(2004): 105-114. This essay briefly describes phenomenology and its method and pinpoints the unique contribution that phenomenology, in contrast and in relation to the natural and social sciences, can make to a discussion of occupation. It further illustrates phenomenology’s usefulness in this regard by discussing contributions that renowned phenomenologists have already made to three areas of crucial importance to the understanding of occupation: human activity, narrative, and ethical intersubjectivity.

• “A Moment of Unconditional Validity?: Schutz and the Habermas/Rorty Debate,” The Alfred Schutz Memorial Lecture, Human Studies 27 (2004): 51-67. This paper makes use of Alfred Schutz’s phenomenological accounts of motivation, the reciprocity of perspectives, and the theoretical province of meaning to mediate the debate between Rorty and Habermas by articulating Habermas’s intuitions in a manner that attempts to meet several of Rorty’s objections.

George Psathas - geops1@bu.edu - sociology

• "Alfred Schutz’s influence on American sociologists and sociology," Human Studies, vol. 27, no. 1, 2004, pp. 1-35. Traces the ways in which Alfred Schutz influenced a number of American sociologists particularly Peter Berger, Helmut Wagner and Harold Garfinkel.

David Seamon – triad@ksu.edu - Geography, Environment-Behavior Research

• “Grasping the Dynamism of Urban Place: Contributions from the Work of Christopher Alexander, Bill Hillier, and Daniel Kemmis,” in Tom Mels (ed.), Reanimating Places (pp. 123-45).  Burlington, Vt: Ashgate. In this chapter, I examine how the ideas of three current researchers—architect Christopher Alexander, architectural theorist Bill Hillier, and political philosopher Daniel Kemmis—provide important new insights for understanding the urban lifeworld and for making more vibrant places. I argue that these thinkers’ conceptions of place, though considerably different in some ways, can be drawn together to offer a powerful understanding of how physical-spatial and human worlds might mutually sustain each other by bringing human beings together informally and thereby generating a sense of togetherness, particularly in cities. In turn, this possibility of spontaneous geographical gathering can support a liveliness of place and one kind of implicit environmental belonging.

• “Revealing Environmental and Place Wholes: Lessons from Christopher Alexander’s Theory of Wholeness and Bill Hillier’s Space Syntax,” Environmental Philosophy, 1 (1): 13-33. This article examines the conception of the everyday city as presented in the work of architect Christopher Alexander and architectural theorist Bill Hillier. Both thinkers suggest that, in the past, lively urban places arose unself-consciously through the routine daily behaviors of many individual users coming together in supportive space and place. In different ways, both thinkers ask whether, today, a similar sort of vital urban district can be made to happen self-consciously through explicit understanding transformed into design and policy principles. The aim for both Alexander and Hillier is place-based urban communities marked by lively streets, serendipitous public encounters, and informal sociability. The article begins by examining commonalities and differences in Alexander and Hillier’s conception of environmental wholeness and urban place. Next, the article considers implications for urban design and, finally, indicates the considerable value that the two thinkers’ ideas offer environmental philosophy, particularly for understanding environmental wholes.

2005

Michael, Barber - Philosophy - barbermd@slu.edu

• “If Only to Be Heard: Value-Freedom and Ethics in Alfred Schutz’s Economic and Political Writings,” in Explorations of the Life-World: Continuing Dialogues with Alfred Schutz, 173-202. Ed. Martin Endress, George Psathas, and Hisashi Nasu. (Dordrecht: Springer, 2005). Alfred Schutz’s critique of Ludwig von Mises, while not sacrificing value-freedom within economic science, opened up possibilities for a politico-ethical critique of the economic sphere. Schutz’s account of rationality, however, lacked resources for developing the theoretical bases of this critique. Although his political writings proceeded formally and descriptively, observing the constraints of value-freedom, there are potentialities in some published and unpublished works for developing an ethical theory, albeit a rather formal one. This paper articulates the lineaments of that theory, based on a concept of “participative agency” that emerges from the ethical commitments underpinning the Austrian economic tradition.

• Explorations of the Life-World: Continuing Dialogues with Alfred Schutz, Co-edited with Martin Endress and Hisashi Nasu, Dordrecht: Springer, 2005.

• "Alfred Schutz’s influence on American sociologists and sociology," Human Studies, vol. 27, no. 1, 2004, pp. 1-35. Traces the ways in which Alfred Schutz influenced a number of American sociologists particularly Peter Berger, Helmut Wagner and Harold Garfinkel.

• "The Ideal type in Weber and Schutz," in M. Endress, G. Psathas, and H. Nasu (eds.), Explorations of the Life-World: Continuing Dialogues with Alfred Schutz, Dordrecht: Springer, 2005, pp. 143-169. A comparison of the use of the ideal type and an attempt to show how Weber’s usage differed from that of Schutz. A final listing of the varieties of ideal type analysis is included.

2006

Michael, Barber - Philosophy - barbermd@slu.edu

• “Philosophy and Reflection: A Critique of Frank Welz’s Sociological, Processual Criticism of Husserl and Schutz,” Human Studies 29 (2006): 141-157. Frank Welz’s Kritik der Lebenswelt undertakes a sociology of knowledge criticism of the work of Edmund Husserl and Alfred Schutz that construes them as developing absolutist, egological systems opposed to the “processual” worldview prominent since the modern rise of natural sciences. Welz, though, misunderstands the work of Schutz and Husserl and neglects how their focus on consciousness and eidetic features pertains to the kind of reflection that one must undertake if one would avoid succumbing to absolutism, that uncovers the presuppositions of the processual worldview itself, and that secures a domain distinctive of philosophy over against sociology.  Finally, Welz’s charge that Schutz favors a Neo-Kantian social scientific methodology contradictory to his phenomenology neglects the levels of Schutz’s discourse and ignores how the Weberian ideal-typical approach can be subsumed within phenomenology.

• “Rationality in Enrique Dussel’s Thought: Liberation Reasons for Avoiding the Naturalistic Fallacy,” Concordia (Aachen) 50 (2006): 39-51. Dussel’s consignment of the worry about committing the naturalistic fallacy, that is, conflating the “is” with the “ought,” to a mere preoccupation of the formal-logical domain, neglects the critical-utopian elements in Kantian thought that are quite consistent with the Levinasian questioning of every of extant totality that Dussel embraced long ago.

• “Rigid Dualisms? Joachim Renn's Critique of Alfred Schutz,” Human Studies, 29 (2006): 21-32. This paper argues that Professor Renn misconstrues Schutz's views, overlooks their complexity, and criticizes him for not delivering what he never promised. It concurs, though, with Renn's comments in the final sections of his paper in which he suggests that other philosophical methodologies are necessary for a comprehensive understanding of the social world and that Schutz's work could play a complementary role in relation to these other methodologies.

• “Occupational Science and the First-Person Perspective,” Journal of Occupational  Science 13 (2006): 94-96. An approach to occupational science based on the model of an “organism-in-relationship-to-its-environment” may help elucidate the holistic, environmentally interconnected dimensions of occupation.  But such a theoretical perspective risks overlooking the first-person perspective of actors that mere organisms lack, that an adequate occupational science must consider, and that debates about the methods appropriate to occupational science themselves presuppose.

• “Rorty’s Ethical De-Divinization of the Moralist Self,” Philosophy and Social Criticism  32 (2006): 135-147. In spite of their differing philosophical bases, Richard Rorty and Emmanuel Levinas converge methodologically in their treatments of the self by avoiding paradigmatic notions of human nature and a philosophical project of justification. Although Rorty refuses to prioritize a moralist account of the self over its romanticist rivals, his presentation relies on the reader’s response to the ethical appeal of the other as depicted by Levinas: Rorty ultimately de-divinizes the moralist self on an ethical basis. Finally, a Levinasian approach would supplement Rorty’s view of the self by manifesting: concern for victims of de-moralization, greater appreciation for philosophical rationality and justification, and acceptance of self-critically executed paternalistic interventions.

Daniel Marcelle - marcelle@fau.edu - philosophy

• “The Ontological Priority of Spirit over Nature: Husserl's Refutation of Psychophysical Parallelism in Ideas II,” Philosophy Today. SPEP Supplement (2006), 75–82. Husserl's Ideas II develops in the order beginning with nature, moving to psychology, and finishing with what he calls spirit with an argument against psychophysical parallelism.

Jacqueline Martinez – jmartinez@asu.ed - communicology

• Semiotic Phenomenology and Intercultural Communication Scholarship: Meeting the Challenge of Racial, Ethnic, and Cultural Difference. Western Journal of Communication, 70(4), 292-310. The present work considers how semiotic phenomenology can meet challenges presented in the effort to study the complexities of racial, ethnic and crosscultural difference, and what is required for the potential of semiotic phenomenology to be adequately realized as a research methodology that can fully engage questions of historical context and the trajectories of power that are inherent in efforts to build cross-cultural knowledge. A focus on Martin and Nakayama’s (1999) dialectical perspective provides the major context for this discussion. A focus on C.S. Peirce’s categories of Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness allows for the specification of the theoretical and practical terms in which the dialectical perspective can be successfully implemented and thus realized in the actual conduct of our scholarly research efforts.

   

David Seamon – triad@ksu.edu - Geography, Environment-Behavior Research

• “Interconnections, Relationships, and Environmental Wholes: A Phenomenological Ecology of Natural and Built Worlds,” in Melissa Geib (ed.), Phenomenology and Ecology (pp. 53-86). Pittsburgh: Simon Silverman Phenomenology Center. Ecology, both as a science and as a world view, emphasizes the study of relationships, interconnections, and environmental wholes that are different from the sum of their environmental parts. “Special qualities emerge out of interactions and collectivities,” writes intellectual historian Donald Worster (1994, p. 22), in his Nature’s Economy, a history of ecological ideas. The central question I ask here is this: What do the relationships, interconnections, and environmental wholes of ecology become in a phenomenological perspective? To examine this question, I consider one phenomenon from the natural world—color—and one phenomenon from the human-made world—lively urban places. I think it important to offer an example from both natural and built worlds because a “phenomenological ecology,” as it might be called, must be responsive to all lived relationships and interconnections, examining and describing the ways that things, living forms, people, events, situations and worlds come together to make environmental and human wholes (Riegner 1993, p. 211-12; Seamon 1993, p. 16). To discuss a phenomenology of lively urban places, I turn to my own work on the bodily dimensions of environmental experience and action and also emphasize, after architectural theorist Bill Hillier (1989, 1996; Hillier and Hanson 1984), that the physical structure of place, particularly the spatial configuration of pathways, plays a major role in establishing whether streets are well used and animated or empty and lifeless. To discuss a phenomenology of color, I turn to the remarkable proto-phenomenology of German dramatist and poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), who—more than a hundred years before Husserl formally laid out the phenomenological enterprise—devised a qualitative way of seeing and understanding that can rightly be called a phenomenology of the natural world.

• “A Geography of Lifeworld in Retrospect: A Response to Shaun Moores,” Particip@tions, 3, 2 (November) [Particip@tions is an on-line peer-reviewed professional journal of media and communication studies; available at: www.participations.org/]. This essay is a response to communication researcher Shaun Moores’ commentary on the author’s A Geography of the Lifeworld, an examination of the significance of the everyday spaces, places, and environment in peoples’ daily lives (Seamon 1979). The author discusses a number of Moores’ concerns, including the role of media in supporting or undermining physical places; the value of phenomenological method for media and communication studies; and the charge that phenomenology is hindered by an essentialist approach that presupposes the presence and significance of invariant existential structures.

Susan Speraw - ssperaw@utk.edu - nursing

• "Spiritual Experience of Parents and Caregiveers who have Children with Disabilities or Special Needs." Despite the fact that faith has been described as a universal concern, and despite the realization that the presence of social supports is an essential element in successful coping, there has been no systematic examination of the quality of spiritual networks important to families impacted by childhood disability. There is also little understanding of how spirituality in children influences the lived experience of faith in the adults who care for them. Findings reported here come out of a larger existential phenomenology study that examined the lived experience of parents or caregivers who sought to obtain formal religious education for their children with special needs. Participants included 26 parents/caregivers representing 44 children with special needs and 15 different faith traditions. Narratives indicated that many clergy and members of faith communities either devalue or fail to recognize the spiritual lives of disabled children. This lack of recognition was associated with participant disillusionment or crises of faith and a sense of alienation from potential sources of emotional support. In contrast, those participants whose children were welcomed reported feeling sustaining support and strengthened faith. No parent or caregiver perceived nurses as having an awareness of or interest in spirituality within families of children who have special needs.

Frederick J. Wertz - wertz@fordham.edu - psychology - www.fordham.edu/psychology/wertz/

• "Phenomenological currents in 20^th century psychology."  In H. Dreyfus & M.A. Wrathall (Eds.), Companion to Existential-Phenomenological philosophy, pp. 392-408.  Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing Inc., 2006. The historical development of phenomenological and existential approaches in psychology, with a focus on the contributions of seminal philosophers to psychology and the early European schools of psychology that were conversant with the movement.  The impact of phenomenological thought in clinical psychology and the growing breadth of phenomenological work across diverse subject matter in psychology are discussed.  Particular emphasis is placed on development of qualitative research methods for psychology by phenomenologically oriented psychologists.  The chapter concludes with some reflections on the role of existential-phenomenological approaches in the future of psychology.

• "The introduction of a qualitative perspective in advanced psychological research training: Narrative of a mixed methods doctoral dissertation."  With K. Bogard. Humanistic Psychologist, 34(4), 369-398, 2006. A mixed methods dissertation, using phenomenological analysis to supplement quantitative analyses is described.  In research on pre-kindergarten through 3rd-grade school programs, the interplay of quantitative hypothesis testing and phenomenological discovery oriented research was used to gain knowledge of how different educational outcomes are achieved. A narrative addresses such contemporary disciplinary issues as the growing interest in qualitative research methods; the effort to employ holistic, contextually sensitive investigations of complex social problems; and the need in graduate training to facilitate the learning of and an identity formation that includes multiple methods. This study highlights the value of dissertation research for learning phenomenological methods and melding multiple methods into a unified research identity and stresses graduate students’ need for coursework on qualitative research methodology and philosophy of science.

2007

Michael, Barber - Philosophy - barbermd@slu.edu

• “Introduction” to Interpersonal Perspective and Knowledge, a special edition of   The Modern Schoolman, containing the papers and commentaries of the Seventh Henle Conference in the History of Philosophy, Vol. 84 (2007): 99-107. This paper summarizes the papers in the conference and situates them with reference to broader discussions in philosophy.

• “Radical Reflection: Brandom and McDowell on Perception,” Interpersonal Perspective and Knowledge, a special edition of The Modern Schoolman, containing the papers and commentaries of the Seventh Henle Conference in the History of  Philosophy, Vol. 84 (2007): 245-265.   Robert Brandom’s Making It Explicit  exemplifies a complex, self-reflective methodology that explains discursive practice and characterizes in particular its intersubjective relationships in terms of deontic scorekeeping, but John McDowell has challenged what he takes to be the position’s externalism regarding perception. This paper siutates McDowell’s criticism on a pre-discursive plane that Husserlian phenomenology has developed and then seeks to reconcile Brandom’s viewpoint with McDowell’s by situating them within the kind of philosophical architectonic suggested by Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of “radical reflection.”

• “Endorsement and Eidos: Phenomenology and the Schutz/Voegelin Correspondence,” Phenomenology 2005, Volume 5, Selected Essays from North America, edited by Tom Nenon and Lester Embree (Bucharest: Zetabooks, 2007), 37-66. Like Alfred Schutz, Eric Voegelin opposed positivistic approaches to the social sciences through the method of locating the object of social science in life-world relationships. However, Voegelin’s metaphysical critique of modern political theory led him to emphasize sub-rational, metaphysical factors and to suspect epistemological/ methodological approaches, like phenomenology, that proceed independently of them. However, due to this strategy, Voegelin appears less self-reflective about the methodology underpinning his claims, in contrast to Schutz, who relied more heavily on phenomenological methods. Nevertheless, Voegelin discovers the attitude of committed participation exceeding the stance of phenomenology that must, however, be used to describe it.

• “Ethical Experience and the Motives for Practical Rationality: A Kantian/Levinasian Criticism of McDowell’s Ethics,” International Philosophical Quarterly 47 (2007): 425-441. In his ethics, John McDowell extends the first-person, intentional approach of Mind and World to ethics understood as pre-theoretical virtuous responsiveness to situational features, and, as a consequence, he articulates a modest account of practical rationality.  McDowell recovers pre-theoretical dimensions of ethics that rationalistic versions of practical rationality, such as Kant’s, neglected, that recent Kant scholarship has rehabilitated, and that Emmanuel Levinas has developed. Despite the fact that the virtues for Aristotle and McDowell are other-regarding or belong to a system of other-regarding virtues, the Kantian interpreters and Levinas place greater emphasis on the impressive force of the appearance of rational agents whose exigency for respect is not just one exigency among others, but rather raises deliberative questions about the limits of satisfying other exigencies. McDowell’s limited notion of practical rationality depends on a third-person reading of the conflicts between those from different communities who from a first-person perspective undertake to justify their beliefs. Furthermore, McDowell’s interpretation of such undertakings as motivated by desires to coerce others under a veneer of rationality or by an unnecessary modern anxiety about protecting community beliefs, overlooks how such justifications can rather be a matter of giving an account of one’s beliefs out of responsibility to others different from oneself—a responsibility pre-theoretically elicited by those others.

• “The First-Person: Participation in Argument and the Intentional Relationship,” Commentary on Charles Siewert’s “Who’s Afraid of Phenomenological Disputes?” The Twenty-Fifth Spindel Conference, "The First-Person Perspective in Philosophical Inquiry," The Southern Journal of Philosophy, vol. 45 (2007); 22-27. This paper supports Charles Siewert’s criticism of those criticizing first-person approaches because such critics adopt a noncommittal, third-person observer standpoint on the debates themselves before recommending only third-person natural scientific approaches to mind and that they oversimplify when they portray philosophy as contentious and natural science as ruled by consensus. Further, a complete account of first-person intentionality in terms of acts and their correlative objects in their temporal and bodily interrelationships make it possible to defend Siewert’s theses:  that thought is phenomenally conscious, that there is a phenomenal consciousness beyond sensing, that the Protean view that equates change in a shape’s appearance with an apparent change in the shape of what appears is incorrect, and that Hume’s two-dimensional phenomenalism is mistaken.

Richard L. Langan - rlanigan@mac.com -Communnicology -  http://myprofile.cos.com/rlanigan

• “Communicology: The French Tradition in Human Science” in Perspectives on the Philosophy of Communication, ed. Pat Arneson (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2007), pp. 168-184 [ISBN 1557534314]. The article uses the work of Merleau-Ponty and Foucault on discourse to present the non-Aristotelian logic of Postmodern discourse in which Symbology reverses Aristotle’s laws of logic. The postmodern discussion extends the analysis of modernity presented in the (above) article “From Enthymeme to Abduction”.

Olga Louchakova ­ olouchakova@gmail.com - psychology and comparative religions - http://www.itp.edu/academics/faculty/louchakova.php

• "Spiritual Heart and Direct Knowing in the Prayer of the Heart."  Existential Psychoanalysis, Vol.18 (2007), 1, 81-102. Prayer of the Heart is one of the mystical practices  which is utilizing direct intuition as a tool of self-knowledge. Article presents results of the phenomenological analysis of changes emerging during the use of this practice in clinical setting, including intrapsychic ontopoiesis,  and hyletic (corporeal) transformations  associated with the center of awareness known in esotericism as the spiritual heart.

• "Prayer of the Heart, Ego-transcendence and Adult Development." Existential Psychoanalysis, Vol.18 (2007), 2, 261-287. Research (reports of more than 300 practitioners) shows how reduction, central to the practice of the Prayer of the Heart, leads to ego-transcendence and the experience of mystical Union. The ego-transcendence in spiritual experience is contrasted to the other types of ego-transcendence. Phenomenology of Union is described in detail, emphasizing the dis-identification with names and forms, topological shifts of identity, gestalt of individual uniqueness in the absence of separateness, dialectics of the devotional I-Though and oneness, and the changes in the intentional consciousness.

• "Ontopoiesis and spiritual emergence: Bridging Tymieniecka's phenomenology of life and transpersonal psychology."  In A.-T.Tymieniecka (ed.), From the Animal Soul to the Human Mind, Analecta Husserliana, V. 94 (2007), (pp. 43-68). Dordrecht: Kluwer.

Daniel Marcelle - marcelle@fau.edu - philosophy

• “Chronicle of North American Phenomenological Organizations” Phenomenology 2005, Vol. 4, Part II. Zeta Books, 2007. This is a survey and history of North American phenomenological organizations and is the most extensive and in-depth that has ever been done.

George Psathas - geops1@bu.edu - sociology

• The Sociology of Radical Commitment: Kurt H. Wolff's Existential Turn, Co-edited with Gary Backhaus, Lexington Press, 2007.

• Foreword in K. Liberman, Husserl’s Criticism of Reason, Lanham, Boulder, New York: Lexington Books, 2007, ix-xi. A brief commentary on how Liberman’s analysis adds to our understanding of the relation between phenomenology and ethnomethodology.

• "Introduction and overview: Amidst the processual," in (Co-edited with Gary Backhaus) The Sociology of Radical Commitment: Kurt Wolff’s Existential Turn, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007, xvii-xli. An effort to show how Kurt Wolff’s thinking emerged and how an examination of his various writings enables an analysis of his distinctive contributions to sociology, particularly the sociology of knowledge.

David Seamon – triad@ksu.edu - Geography, Environment-Behavior Research

• “Karsten Harries’ Natural Symbols as a Means for Interpreting Architecture: Inside and Outside in Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater and Alvar Aalto’s Villa Mairea,” co-authored with Enku Mulugeta Assefa. In Wolkenkuckucksheim, [on-line architectural journal] vol. 12, no. 1 (August), pp. 1-7; available at: www.tu-cotbus.de/theo/Wolke/eng/Subjects/071/Seamon/seamon_assefa.htm. Philosopher Karsten Harries writes that a key task of architecture is “interpreting the world as a meaningful order in which the individual can find his [or her] place in the midst of nature and in the midst of a community” (Harries 1993, p. 51). Harries argues that, too often, buildings do not respond to the needs of human dwelling because they are made arbitrarily in that they do not arise from the real-world requirements of particular people, places and landscapes. As an expression and interpretation of human life, a non-arbitrary architecture involves design that both listens to and incorporates nature and culture. Harries claims that one need in creating a non-arbitrary architecture is understanding what he calls natural symbols—qualities of experience that mark essential human qualities as they relate to nature and society (Harries 1993, p. 53). In this article, we draw on two seminal 20^th-century houses—Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater and Alvar Aalto’s Villa Mairea—to examine the natural symbol of inside and outside, which for Harries is one important lived dimension of successful architecture and place.

• “A Lived Hermetic of People and Place: Phenomenology and Space Syntax” [keynote address], in A. Sema Kubat et al., eds., Proceedings, 6^th International Space Syntax Symposium, vol. 1, pp. iii-1-16. Istanbul: ITU, Faculty of Architecture; available at: http://www.spacesyntaxistanbul.itu.edu.tr/papers/invitedpapers/david_seamon.pdf. This paper examines ways in which a phenomenological approach might contribute to space syntax research, drawing on three themes that mark the heart of phenomenological investigation: (1) understanding grounded in real-world experience; (2) human immersion in world; and (3) describing the lifeworld—a person or group’s everyday world of taken-for-grantedness of which the person or group is typically unaware. A major phenomenological question is how space syntax concepts, particularly the spatial configuration of the “deformed grid,” point toward a particular kind of place structure in which the spatial-temporal regularity of individual participants potentially coalesces into a larger environmental dynamic—what is termed “place ballet”—that both sustains and is sustained by an attachment to and a sense of place. 

Robert D. Stolorow - robertdstolorow@gmail.com - philosophy/psychoanalysis - robertdstolorow.googlepages.com

• Trauma and Human Existence: Autobiographical, Psychoanalytic, and Philosophical Reflections, New York, Routledge, 2007. An exploration of the phenomenology of emotional trauma from a perspective that combines post-Cartesian psychoanalytic understandings with insights from Heidegger's existential analytic.

2008

Michael, Barber - Philosophy - barbermd@slu.edu

• “Autonomy, Reciprocity, and Responsibility: Darwall and Levinas on the Second  Person,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 16 (2008): 629-644. While not wanting to diminish the significance of Darwall’s contribution in his The Second-Person Standpoint, this paper criticizes from the Levinasian perspective his account of ethics.  It contrasts both thinkers’ philosophical methodologies, discusses Darwall’s overall strategy and the importance of autonomy within it, highlight the difference between Darwall’s stress on autonomy and reciprocity and Levinas’s on responsibility, and develops further the possible implications of giving first place to responsibility over reciprocity.

• “Epistemic and Ethical Intersubjectivity in Brandom and Levinas,” Levinas Studies: An Annual Review, ed. Jeffrey Bloechl (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press) 3 (2008): 35-60. This paper presents Brandom’s epistemology and the importance of the intersubjectivity within it, though Brandom’s approach tends to be theoretical and externalist, he allows a place for the first-person perspective. It then shows how Emmanuel Levinas proposes an alternative view of intersubjectivity, ethical intersubjectivity, which engages us at a bodily level, beneath theorizing, and which involves a fusion of a robust first-person perspective with robust intersubjectivity (the other in the same). In this relationship, the “I” approaches the other in trust, through a non-knowing (but still known) attitude, and experiences a different kind of decentration from that typical of a project aimed at overcoming epistemic inertia. A final section points out how one can find traces of ethical intersubjectivity within Brandom’s epistemic intersubjectivity and how an ethically directed epistemic intersubjectivity can best achieve its epistemic goals.

• “Holism and Horizon: Husserl and McDowell on Non-conceptual Content,” Husserl Studies 24 (2008): 79-97. While endorsing McDowell’s rejection of what he means by non-conceptual content, and appreciating his insight into the experiential synthesis of intuition and conception (in particular, its role in grasping objects), this paper argues that Edmund Husserl presents an even more comprehensive account of perceptual experience that explains how we experience the contribution of receptivity and sensibility and how they cooperate in perceptual discrimination.  Further, it reveals “horizons”—a unique kind of contents, surplus contents (rather than independent non-conceptual content)—beyond the synthesis of intuitive and conceptual contents through which objects are grasped. Such horizons play a constitutive role, making experience with its conceptual dimensions and justificatory potential possible; they in no way function like a bare given that is to fulfill some independent justificatory role. Whereas McDowell focuses on how experience does not take place in isolation from the exercise of conceptual capacities, Husserl complements his view by situating experience in a more encompassing whole and by elucidating the surplus-horizons that exceed the conceptual content of experience; play an inseparable, constitutive role within it; and indicate the limits of conceptual comprehension.

• “Empowering Asymmetry: Levinas’s Providentially Powerful Self” in Despite Oneself: Subjectivity and Its Secret in Kierkegaard and Levinas, eds. Claudia Welz and Karl Verstrynge, 67-80 (London: Turnshare, Ltd., 2008). Common sense refutations of Emmanuel Levinas view the asymmetrical ethical relationship as self-demeaning, but in his writings asymmetry ends up producing a powerful self. However, one does not deliberately aim at this production, but rather one discovers after the fact that it has been realized, almost providentially, “behind one’s back.” As such, this defense of asymmetry begins to resemble theodicy, which on the basis of providential processes working behind the back of the sufferers attempts to justify their suffering, usually because it produces some greater good, and which, as is well-known, Levinas rejected since the “justification of the neighbor’s pain is certainly the source of all immorality.”  This paper demonstrates that the defense of asymmetry reconstructed here does something different from theodicy and escapes the dangers that make Levinas so wary of it.

Greg Bird - gregb@yorku.ca – philosophy

• "Community beyond hypostasis: Nancy responds to Blanchot", Angelaki, 13:1 (2008), pp. 3-26. This article examines the development of Jean-Luc Nancy's theorizing on community in relation to his debate with Maurice Blanchot. I demonstrate how Nancy moves beyond the logic of the hypostasis, which frames the traditional theories of community. For Nancy, hypostasis takes place in three ways: first, it pertains to the problem of signification; second, it points to a substantiation and foundation; third, its archetype is the Christian Third. I  engage with this problem by emphasizing various elements in his theory, such as the "insofar as", the "other"/"Other", the "proper", and the "with".

Jacqueline Martinez – jmartinez@asu.ed - communicology

• “Semiotic phenomenology and the ‘dialectical approach’ to intercultural communication: Paradigm crisis and the actualities of research practice.” Semiotica, 169, 135-153. The present work considers the place of phenomenology within intercltural communication scholarship and argues for semiotic phenomenology as a theory and methodology that can address the current ‘paradigm crisis’ within the field. Current misunderstandings of phenomenology as an ‘interpretive’ research paradigm are challenged. ‘Metatheoretical’ efforts to develop dialectical approaches to the study of communication are critiques for their failure to adequately address the question as to how we know when, in fact, we have truly achieved a shift at the habituated level of human experience where cultural perception is generated. Martin and Nakayama’s (1999) dialectical perspective provides the context through which the discussion proceeds. A focus on Peirce’s categories of firstness, secondness, and thirdness constitute the theoretical point through which the argument proceeds.

George Psathas - geops1@bu.edu - sociology

• "Reflections on the history of ethnomethodology: the Boston and Manchester 'schools,'" The  American Sociologist, 2008, vol. 39: 38-67. An overview of the ways that these particular schools developed and how they contrasted with the ideal typical model, the Chicago School. The kinds of dissertations and career paths of graduates of these programs are added to a discussion of how the ‘program’ or ‘schools’ developed, who the prominent persons at each institution were and how they could maintain and develop ethnomethodological programs in environments which were not accepting of this approach.

   

David Seamon – triad@ksu.edu - Geography, Environment-Behavior Research

• “Place, Placelessness, Insideness, and Outsideness in John Sayles’ Sunshine State.”  In Aether [blind peer-reviewed on-line “Journal of Media Geography”] vol. 3 (June), pp. 1-19; available at: http://geogdata.csun.edu/~aether/pdf/volume_03/seamon.pdf. John Sayles is one of America’s most successful independent filmmakers, whose works include Return of the Secaucus Seven (1980), City of Hope (1991), and Lone Star (1996). This article examines Sayles’ portrait of place in Sunshine State (2002), a film set in Plantation Island, Florida, where large-scale corporate development is transforming two communities—one black, the other white—into upscale winter resorts. Sayles’ film probes the place experience of some sixteen vividly drawn characters and illuminates how the same physical place, for different individuals and groups, can evoke a broad spectrum of situations, meanings, and potential futures. One of Sayles’ conclusions is that people cannot escape the place in which they find themselves. They can, however, learn from that place and thereby decide whether and in what ways they will offer that place commitment or not.

• “Place, Belonging, and Environmental Humility: The Experience of ‘Teched’ as Portrayed by American Novelist and Agrarian Reformer Louis Bromfield.” In Writings in Place: John Burroughs and his Legacy, ed. D. Payne (pp. 158-73). Newcastle, Great Britain: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This article explores the phenomenon of “teched” as described by the American novelist and agrarian reformer Louis Bromfield (1896-1956). “Teched” (rhymes with “fetched”) is a colloquial word Bromfield used in his writings to describe a capacity for experiencing an intuitive intimacy with the natural world’s things, creatures, landscapes, and places. Bromfield believed that this kind of direct openness to the world leads to a truer, more sincere understanding of nature and an instinctive wish for working with and using the natural world in a more thoughtful, responsible way. Drawing on two short stories by Bromfield—the 1944 “Up Ferguson Way,” and “The Pond—I explicate several lived dimensions of “teched” as Bromfield understood the experience in relation to the natural world and places.

• “A Phenomenology of Inhabitation: The Lived Reciprocity between Houses and Inhabitants as Portrayed by American Writer Louis Bromfield,” Proceedings: 2008 ACSA Annual Meeting, Houston, Washington, DC: ACSA Press. This paper contributes to Gaston Bachelard’s “topoanalysis” (“the systematic psychological study of the sites of our intimate lives”) by examining houses and inhabitation portrayed by the American novelist and agricultural writer Louis Bromfield (1896-1956). A pivotal theme in Bromfield’s writings and personal life was the lived relationship between human beings and the world in which they find themselves. On one hand, Bromfield emphasized that people play a role in shaping their world, but he also recognized, on the other hand, that the particular world in which people find themselves significantly makes them who they are and what they become. One way in which Bromfield explored the lived relationship between people and their world was in accounts of the interconnections between houses and their inhabitants. Regularly in his writings, Bromfield depicted a lived reciprocity whereby house and inhabitants mutually afford and reflect each other, sometimes in positive ways that facilitate engagement and care; at other times in negative ways that intimate or spur personal or social dissolution. Drawing on Bromfield’s writings, I examine his understanding of the lived reciprocity between houses and inhabitants.

• “Place and Placelessness by Edward C. Relph,” co-authored with Jacob Sowers. An entry in Key Texts in Human Geography, Phil Hubbard, Rob Kitchen, and Gil Valentine, eds. (pp. 43-51). London: Sage. This chapter provides a critical review of geographer Edward C. Relph’s Place and Placelessness (London: Pion, 1996; reprint with new introduction, 2009), still the single most lucid and accessible demonstration of what phenomenology might offer environmental and architectural concerns. Relph’s focus is a phenomenology of place, the lived heart of which he identifies as insideness—i.e., the degree to which an individual or group feels a sense of belonging and attachment to a locale or environment, which thereby existentially is transformed into a place. One of Relph’s central accomplishments in Place and Placelessness is his preserving an intimate conceptual engagement between space and place. Many geographers and other environmental researchers speak of both concepts but ultimately treat the two as separate or give few indications as to how they are related existentially and conceptually. For Relph, the unique quality of place is its power to order and to focus human intentions, experiences, and actions spatially.  Relph thus sees space and place as dialectically structured in human environmental experience, since our understanding of space is related to the places we inhabit, which in turn derive meaning from their spatial context.

Eva M. Simms - simms@duq.edu - psychology - http://duq.academia.edu/EvaSimms

• The child in the world: Embodiment, time, and language in early childhood, Detroit: Wayne State University Press. 2008
  The Child in the World builds a bridge between continental philosophers, who tend to overlook child existence, and developmental psychologists, who often fail to consider the philosophical assumptions underlying their work. In this volume, psychological and phenomenological research are applied to investigate child existence in its cultural and historical context and explore the ways children interact with the world around them. In chapters that proceed from infancy to early childhood, I consider how children live their embodiment, coexist with others, experience the spaces and places of their neighborhoods, have deeply felt relations to things, grasp time intuitively and often in contradiction to adult clock-time, and are transformed by the mystery of the symbolic order of play and language. My approach to existential-[phenomenological psychology is informed by the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, which allows for a descriptive and grounded understanding of child experience as well as sophisticated and critical philosophical thinking about human existence in general.

• "Children's lived spaces in the Inner city: geographical and political aspects of the psychology of place."  The Humanistic Psychologist, vol. 36, Issue 1, January 2008, pp. 72-89. Children's lives are tied to particular places which are the stage where the psychological drama of the human community is played out. This biographical research study investigates and documents the experiences of children�s lived spaces in Pittsburgh's Hill District. The Hill District is a traditionally immigrant and African-American neighborhood, which has suffered through segregation, the turmoil of urban renewal, race riots, gang warfare, and drug related crime. When we look at the history of a particular place, we often forget that its children are raised and participate in the same historical stream.  What was childhood like for the children who grew up in The Hill over the past century? Adapting the ethnographic method of narrative mapping (Lutz et al., 1997), 12 African-American adults (24 to 84 years old), who spent their childhoods in the Hill District, were interviewed and asked about their childhood roaming spaces. The story about lived space which emerged through the choral voices of the participants is of childhood places marked by political and cultural changes. Each generation of 10-year-olds (1930's to 2000) lived in the same geographical area, but experienced and lived their neighborhood places in dramatically different ways.

• "Literacy and the Appearance of Childhood." Janus Head, vol. 10(2), Fall 2008, 445-459
  Van den Berg's describes childhood as a historical invention of post-medieval Europe: childhood appears in response to cultural changes in adult existence and consciousness. This essay supplements van den Berg's argument by showing that the 12th century invention of literacy provides the textual technology to gradually effect these profound psychological changes in child and adult consciousness. A brief phenomenology reveals orality and literacy to be different forms of being in the world. As cultural practices they structure memory, knowledge, and identity in divergent ways.
   

2009

Michael, Barber - Philosophy - barbermd@slu.edu

• “Introduction,” Schutzian Research 1 (2009): 7-10. This paper explains the papers in the first volume.

• Introduction to and editing of “Understanding, Self-reflection, and Equality: Alfred  Schutz’s Participation in the 1955 Conference on Science, Philosophy and Religion,”  Schutzian Research 1 (2009):  273-279. This paper situates Schutz’s contribution to the conference in its setting and highlights what elements are typical of Schutz or, in this case, novel with regard to the rest of his thought.

• “Una Fenomenología de la Experiencia Religiosa y la Teología de la Liberación [A Phenomenology of Religious Experience and Liberation Theology] Acta fenomenológica latinoamericana. Volumen III (Actas del IV Coloquio Latinoamericano de Fenomenología)[Círculo Latinoamericano de Fenomenología Lima, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú; Morelia (México), Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo, 2009],169-177.[available on line at www.clafen.org/AFL/V3 ]. This paper draws connections between Schutz’s theory of multiple realities and the theology of liberation.

• “Social Scientific Theology? Schutz’s Goethe Manuscripts,” Philosophy and Theology 19 (2009): 225-239. This paper argues that Schutz took metaphysical questions more seriously, including that of fate, than his published writings indicate and that his unpublished manuscripts on J.W. Goethe reveal the possibility of an approach to metaphysical questions paralleling that of social science, in particular economics, rather than relying on natural theology.

• “‘The Logic of the Poetic Event’ in Alfred Schutz’s Goethe Writings,” Alfred Schutz and His Interlocutors, ed. Hisashi Nasu, Lester Embree, George Psathas, Ilja Srubar, 471-492. Konstanz: UVK Verlagsgesellschaft, 2009. Schutz insists on the difference between the logic of the poetic event and the logics of everyday life and theory.  To understand the logic of poetry, though, one must do more than merely differentiate poetry and literature from everyday life and theory; one needs to explain what purposes poetic departures from the logic of everyday life serve. While Schutz in places neglects this explanatory task, part two of this paper will reconstruct how Schutz, without being explicit about it, actually discloses such a logic in Goethe’s novels, discerning their inner structure, viewing them in relationship to other literature and arts, and treating them as social scientists would an intelligent being’s artifact.

Greg Bird - gregb@yorku.ca – philosophy

• "What is phenomenological sociology again?", Human Studies, 32:4 (2009), pp. 419-439. This article provides a retrospective account of the formative debates in the Anglo-American tradition of "phenomenological sociology". I use a hermeneutical approach to analyze how "institutional exigencies" interfered with the ways that various theorists sought to integrate sociological methodologies with philosophical insights. I argue that this debate manifests a serious tension that most academics face: the antagonistic relationship between "institutionalization" and the need to "belong".

Richard L. Langan - rlanigan@mac.com -Communnicology -  http://myprofile.cos.com/rlanigan

• “Cosmology and Communicology in an Internet World: Semiotic Perspectives of the East (PRC) and the West (USA)”, Chinese Semiotic Studies [Journal of the Nanjing University International Institute of Semiotic Studies], 1 (June 2009), pp. 228-254. The essay addresses the ongoing logic problematics of postmodernity by illustrating the differential cosmologies characterizing occidental (egocentric) cultures in apposition to oriental (sociocentric) cultures. Various discourse forms are analyzed. The original version of this article was an invited paper entitled “Transcultural Communication in an Internet World: Semiotic Perspectives in the PRC and the USA” presented to the Chinese Academy of Social Science on 28 March 20004 (Beijing, PRC).

• “Mind-Body Identity” in Encyclopedia of Identity, ed. Ronald L. Jackson II (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2009). A review of philosophical and psychological models of the Mind vs. Brain and Embodiment vs. Body problematic and the associated thematics in contemporary research, especially consciousness and verbal/nonverbal comportment.

• “Erving Goffman (1922-1982)” in The Routledge Companion to Semiotics, ed. Paul Cobley (Abingdon, UK: Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group, 2009), pp. 225-226. The entry stresses Goffman’s use of phenomenology and in particular his self-proclaimed use of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s work as a guide to his research program.

Daniel Marcelle - marcelle@fau.edu - philosophy

• “Emmanuel Levinas: Unworldly Aesthetics.” Encyclopedia of Phenomenological Aesthetics. Eds. Hans Rainer Sepp and Lester Embree. Dordrecht: Springer, 2009. Forthcoming. Levinas’s aesthetics are widely discussed here. First, there is an exploration of Levinas’s understanding of the image, which is shown to be a sharp change from that of Heidegger. Then it is discussed how art in its various forms transcends the forms of logic and rationality in order to establish a kind of ethical discourse.

George Psathas - geops1@bu.edu - sociology

• Alfred Schutz and His Intellectual Partners, Co-edited with Hisashi Nasu, Lester Embree and Ilja Srubar, Konstanz: UVK Verlagsgesselschaft mbH , 2009.

• "Goffman and Schutz on multiple realities," in Michael Staudigl (Ed.) Schutz and Hermeneutics, Vienna Conference, 2009. The differences between Schutz and Goffman are addressed: why they never seem to have directly encountered each other; the kinds of alternatives

• "Goffman offers to the study of the world of everyday life; and Goffman’s critical comments concerning multiple realities." Ethnomethodology and conversation analysis at Boston University: A brief history, In W. Leeds-Hurwitz (ed.), The Social History of Language and Social Interaction Research: People, Places, Ideas, Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2009 (forthcoming). An examination of the developments in ethnomethodology at Boston University from the 60’s to the late 90’s including the titles of dissertations of former students. The ways in which various resources were used to develop this approach despite the fact that there were few regular tenured faculty at the university whose interests or research was consistent with ethnomethodological perspectives.

• "Helmut Wagner’s contributions to social science," in Lester Embree and James Dodd (eds.) The Golden Age for Phenomenology at the New School for Social Research, Springer, 2009 (forthcoming). An examination of the distinctive approach and contributions of Helmut Wagner who studied with Schutz and became a major expositor of the phenomenological perspective, concentrating in sociology.

   

2010

Richard L. Langan - rlanigan@mac.com -Communnicology -  http://myprofile.cos.com/rlanigan

• “The Logic of Phenomena: Semiotic Structures of West (USA) and East (PRC) in Communicology”, Chinese Semiotic Studies [Journal of the Nanjing University International Institute of Semiotic Studies], 3 (2010), in press. To explore the “oriental turn” in contemporary phenomenology, I present a brief comparison of West versus East approaches to the logic of phenomena. Because semiotic phenomena are culture specific in the domain of human communication, I take the USA and P.R. China as my exemplars. American culture is egocentric (individual centered) which leads to certain assumptions about logic and experience, i.e., logic is (1) linear, (2) causal, (3) digital, (4) oppositional, and (5) self cognitive. This Western cosmology has one thesis: Consciousness, then Experience (the core of Positivism). Chinese culture is sociocentric (group centered) which leads to alternative assumptions about logic and experience, i.e., logic is (1) curvilinear, (2) combinatory, (3) analogue, (4) appositional, and (5) other affective. This Eastern cosmology also has one thesis: Experience, then Consciousness (the core of Phenomenology). The two logics have direct methodological implications for intercultural communicology.

• “The Verbal and Nonverbal Codes of Communicology: The Foundation of Interpersonal Agency and Efficacy” in Communicology: The New Science of Embodied Discourse, ed. Isaac E. Catt and Deborah Eicher-Catt (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2010). [ISBN 978-08386-4147.7] This book chapter presents the distinctions between eidetic codes that are “verbal” (Linguistic, Mathematic, Logic) and the empirical codes that are “nonverbal” (Proxemics of Space, Chronemics of Time, Kinesics of Movement, Haptics of Touch, Vocalics of Sound, and Olfactorics of Smell-Taste). Examples of current human science research are used to illustrate each semiotic code as a phenomenology of discourse. The discussion of agency relies on the  phenomenology of perception in the work of Merleau-Ponty and the explication of efficacy uses the phenomenology of expression found in Foucault’s writing.

Daniel Marcelle - marcelle@fau.edu - philosophy

• “Aron Gurwitsch's Incipient Phenomenological Reduction: Another Way into Phenomenological Transcendental Philosophy from Psychology.” Studia Phaenomenologica. Forthcoming, 2010. This article validates and advances the kind of reduction that Aron Gurwitsch has discussed. The advances that the author makes is establishing that this is a kind of reduction that makes descriptive research possible for positive scientists engaged in explanatory research. When such a scientists experience the situation of theory loss, this makes available a brief moment in which the explanatory attitude is disrupted; there is no general theory by which the objects or processes being studied can be subsumed to, thus there is a moment in which they appear just as they appear. This change of attitude from explanatory to descriptive is highly unlikely, but if it can be acknowledged there is the possibility for the scientist to actualize a genuine phenomenological reduction when it is considered how such phenomena may appear leading to noematic considerations and description. The conclusion is that there is the possibility of establishing a continuity between phenomenological philosophy and the scientists, and one that is not heavy handed in either direction, but rather displaying a continuity of motivation.

• “The Great Gurwitsch-Føllesdal Debate concerning the Noema: The Connection of the Conceptual to the Perceptual.” Phenomenology 2008. Zeta Books. Forthcoming. A reexamination of the Gurwitsch-Føllesdal debate on the noema that demonstrates that Gurwitsch not only has a perceptual understanding of the noema, but in many prominent places discusses the conceptualization of the noema as well.

• “Making the Case for Gestalt Organization: Edmund Husserl and Aron Gurwitsch on the Problem of Independent Parts.” Advancing Phenomenology: Festschrift for Lester Embree. Eds. Thomas Nenon and Philip Blosser. In the series Contributions to Phenomenology. Dordrecht: Springer, 2010. Forthcoming. The problem that Gurwitsch has with Husserl's ontology presented in the Third Logical Investigation concerns his understanding of independent parts. Particularly, it is the strong sense of independence that he grants. Gurwitsch's contention is that such parts are not like elements that can remain unchanged from context to context, but are rather according to Gestalt theory contextually dependent for their meaning and existence.

Bridgitte Cypress - brigitte.cypress@lehman.cuny.edu - nursing

• "The intensive care unit: Experiences of patients, families and their nurses." Dimensions of Critical Care Nursing, 29(2), 94 – 101. Past studies have examined how nurses can meet the needs of the critically ill patients and their families and the effects of their relatives’ critical illness on the families themselves. However, there is a paucity of research studies in the literature conducted on the triad of nurses, patients, and family members looking at the experience of critical illness and their perspective of each from the other. This qualitative phenomenological study was able to elucidate the experiential descriptions, essential relationships, and meaning of structures of the intensive care unit experiences of the 15 participants during critical illness, and strategies to improve nursing practice, research, and education are presented.

George Psathas - geops1@bu.edu - sociology

• "Alfred Schutz’s influence on American sociology during his lifetime," to be published in Cherry Schrecker (ed.) Exchange and Influence: Transatlantic Travel and the Development of Sociological Ideas, Ashgate Publishers, 2010 (forthcoming). Schutz came to America early enough in his career to have an influence on American sociology but because of his full-time occupation outside of academia, his relative isolation at the New School which remained a bastion of European perspectives in the social sciences, his inability to gain acceptance by major theorists in America, and his distinctive phenomenological approach he was unable to have an effect until his major writings were collected and published after his death.

Robert D. Stolorow - robertdstolorow@gmail.com - philosophy/psychoanalysis - robertdstolorow.googlepages.com

• "The Phenomenology, Contextuality, and Existentiality of Emotional Trauma: Ethical Implications," Journal of Humanistic Psychology (prepublished April 19, 2010), DOI: 10.1177/0022167810363866. Illuminates the ethical implications of the phenomenology of trauma.

• "Heidegger's Nietzsche, the Doctrine of Eternal Return, and the Phenomenology of Human Finitude," Journal of Phenomenological Psychology, Vol. 41 (2010), pp. 106-114. Shows how Nietzsche's doctrine of eternal return, seen through a Heideggerian lens, provides a metaphorical window into the phenomenology of finitude and of the struggle to overcome it.

• "Individuality in Context: The Relationality of Finitude," in Persons in Context: The Challenge of Individuality in Theory and Practice, ed. R. Frie & W. Coburn, New York: Routledge, 2010, pp. 59-68. Explores the context-embeddedness of the phenomenology of individualized selfhood while relationalizing Heidegger's conception of finitude.

Frederick J. Wertz - wertz@fordham.edu - psychology - www.fordham.edu/psychology/wertz/

• "The method of eidetic analysis for psychology."  In T.F. Cloonan (Ed.), The redirection of psychology:  Essays in honor of Amedeo P. Giorgi. Montreal, Quebec:  Collection du Cirp. This chapter addresses the possibility and value of a psychological knowledge of essences which has lost favor among post-positivist and post-modernist psychologists.  Critiques of foundationalism and essentialism have suggested that attempting to know the essential qualities of psychological subject matter involves problems of dogmatism, universalism, reductionism, idealism, and even biological determinism.   This work corrects these misconceptions by clarifying Husserl’s thinking on the intuition of essence and the procedure of eidetic analysis.  Husserl convincingly demonstrates that in order to proceed soundly from a scientific, social and ethical standpoint, psychologists must understand and employ the procedure of eidetic analysis throughout their research and theorizing.  The relationship of eidetic psychology to empirical psychology is clarified.  Eidetic generality is contrasted with empirical generality.  A proper understanding of nature of this procedure shows how it adequately accounts for context, culture, and changeability of psychological phenomena and for the corrigibility of psychological knowledge.

2011

-