Donald A. Landes

Spielraum, phenomenology, and the art of virtue: hints of an ‘embodied’ ethics in Kant

Abstract Although the suggestion that Kant offers a significant contribution to Virtue Ethics might be a surprising one, in The Metaphysics of Morals Kant makes virtue central to his ethics. In this paper, I introduce a Merleau-Pontian phenomenological perspective into the ongoing study of the convergence between Kant and Virtue Ethics, and argue that such a perspective promises to illuminate the continuity of Kant’s thought through an emphasis on the implicit structure of moral experience, revealing the insights his perspective contains for establishing an embodied phenomenology of virtue. These two aims are accomplished by exploring Kant’s ‘proto-phenomenological’ descriptions of the weight of the moral law, his implicit ‘existential’ account of human nature, and his notion of the art of navigating the complex moral terrain that involves a certain Spielraum (leeway). When thus viewed, Kant’s virtue ethics sketches out a subtle understanding of embodiment and temporality.

Expressive Bodies: Merleau-Ponty and Nancy on Painting and Ontology

In “The Vestige of Art,” Jean-Luc Nancy argues that art is neither representation nor inscription, but rather exscription. The figure is the vestige of an expressive gesture; it represents neither a separable idea nor the one who traced it but, rather exscribes their presence and their world in the event of expression. As such, Nancy’s aesthetics in The Muses deploys a certain logic of expression best understood in the tradition of Merleau-Pontian phenomenology. Echoing Merleau-Ponty’s notion of speech accomplishing, rather than translating, thought, Nancy’s understanding of the expressive gesture suggests an event that brings forth a self that does not pre-exist its expression and that is paradoxically always already past, always already fallen into material vestiges. By connecting Merleau-Ponty’s notion of a “past that has never been present” to Nancy’s concept of exscription, I argue that reading Nancy’s The Muses and Merleau-Ponty’s “Eye and Mind” together suggests an importantly restructured “phenomenology” of painting that is in fact more of an ontology of intercorporeality.

This Phenomenological Patchwork

In a fascinating and rigorous presentation of the history of the term ‘phenomenology’, included as the final contribution to The Routledge Companion to Phenomenology (Routledge, 2012), Karl Schuhmann discusses the non-systematic emergence of the term in eighteenth-century thought and the ultimate philosophical legitimacy it gained from its use by Hegel in Phenomenology of Spirit (1807). As Schuhmann argues, given the term’s increasing frequency in the history of thought and the evolution of its diverse uses and interpretations, the establishing of a unified tradition under this name depended upon whether, after Hegel, ‘this phenomenological hodgepodge’ would be ‘seized as an opportunity to engage new possibilities for thought’ (p. 663). Regardless of whether the philosophical field we call the ‘phenomenological movement’ today should be read in the tradition of these earlier appearances, what is clear in the depth and rigor of The Routledge Companion to Phenomenology is that the twentieth century’s response – beginning with Husserl – to this call offers much more than a ‘hodgepodge’ of confused phenomenological tidbits. Sebastian Luft and Søren Overgaard, with the help of over sixty contributors, have captured the excitement of this evolving patchwork named ‘phenomenology’. The Routledge Companion to Phenomenology will serve as an invaluable reference volume for students, teachers, and scholars of phenomenology, as well as an accessible introduction to phenomenology for philosophers from other specialties or scholars from other disciplines. And yet, as Schuhmann notes, citing one of Husserl’s contemporaries Alexander Pfänder: ‘To state briefly, and yet clearly, what phenomenology is and what it attempts to do, although in many ways desirable, is hardly possible at the present time’ (p. 658). The enduring truth of this observation is demonstrated in this volume. Indeed, the editors have been forced to sacrifice brevity for clarity: given the difficult decisions International Journal of Philosophical Studies Vol. 20(4), 565–578