James Dodd

Violence and phenomenology

Acknowledgments Introduction: Reflections on Violence Chapter One: Schmitts Challenge (Clausewitz, Schmitt) Chapter Two: On Violence (Arendt, Sartre) Chapter Three: On the Line (Junger, Heidegger) Chapter Four: Violence and Responsibility (Patocka) Conclusion: Six Problems of Violence Notes Bibliography Index

Husserl and Kant on Persönlichkeit

This paper pursues a Kantian critique of Husserl’s theory of moral consciousness as it is found in his lectures on ethics and other shorter pieces on political and moral philosophy from the interwar period. The critique centers on Kant’s conception of moral personality (Personlichkeit), arguing that Husserl fails to appreciate the force of this idea, subsequently leaving himself open to the charge of moral perfectionism. The paper ends with a positive assessment of Husserl’s thought, however, arguing that Husserl provides important resources for understanding moral consciousness as a sensibility for the possible, adding an important dimension to approaches in ethics that tend to center exclusively on questions of motivation and principle.

Phenomenology, Architecture and the Built World

Phenomenology, Architecture and the Built World is an introduction to phenomenological philosophy through an analysis of the phenomenon of the built world as an embodiment of human understanding. It aims to establish the value of phenomenological description in establishing the philosophical importance of architecture.

Aristotle and Phenomenology

This paper explores the centrality of seeing for phenomenological thinking. Through an in-depth discussion of Heidegger’s readings of Aristotle, this paper traces the complex relations between perception, language, truth, and falsity. What emerges is a deep connection between phenomenological concern with the philosophical theme of seeing and Aristotle’s thinking.

Jan Patočka and Built Space

This chapter traces some of the principal influences of the thought of Edmund Husserl on the Czech philosopher Jan Patocka, with particular emphasis on Husserl’s Ideen I. The phenomenology of Patocka that results is characterized by a strong emphasis on the description of incarnate, bodily existence in the development of the philosophical problem of the natural world. In this spirit, this essay pursues a reflection on an essential dimension of human incarnate existence, namely that it is able to comport itself as an access to the world in the form of something built.

The Twentieth Century as War

At the core of Jan Patocka’s formulation of his concept of the “solidarity of the shaken” in the Heretical Essays is a reflection, inspired by Ernst Junger and Martin Heidegger (among others), on what has become a central metaphor of war in the twentieth century: the front line experience. Patocka’s reflections are characteristic of a relatively small but significant trend within philosophy – and phenomenological or existential philosophy in particular – to interpret the trauma, shock, and extremity of the front line experience as paradigmatic of the spiritual reality of the twentieth century, as if war itself had become the fundamental phenomenon that had brought to light the metaphysical essence of the age. This paper argues that this insistence on the centrality of war as “the line” is a key, if often undeveloped aspect of the phenomenological tradition, and that it has played an important role in the orientation of phenomenology as a reflection on the spiritual condition of the age. To understand what is at stake in these “reflections on violence,” and come to terms with the questions and problems they have raised for us, is essential to any assessment of the legacy of phenomenological philosophy in general, and perhaps of Jan Patocka in particular.

Death and Time in Husserl’s C-Manuscripts

This paper outlines a reading of Husserl’s late writings on time and temporality (above all in the C-manuscripts) that aims to fix how Husserl formulates the problem of death from a phenomenological perspective. The guiding question to this end is: what can death tell us about time? The paper explores the possibility of approaching this question by considering first what life has to tell us about time, with the working thesis being that the problem of death bears precisely on how egoic life is conscious of itself as a “whole,” or how the whole of a personal “life” is a given unity of sense for an ego. This approach also promises to illuminate why the theme of death is pursued by Husserl in conjunction not only with the question of birth, but with that of sleep and sedimentation as well, since all of these themes form the basic parameters of Husserl’s conception of egoic life. This paper is meant to be a preliminary exploration of possible ways to approach Husserl’s late writings on time, and concludes with the suggestion that Husserl takes a very different course than other phenomenological philosophers, such as Sartre and Heidegger, who lay much more emphasis on the “ekstatic” character of lived time.