Katherine J. Morris

Chronic Pain in Phenomenological/Anthropological Perspective

This essay is a kind of prolegomenon to an anthropologically informed phenomenology of chronic pain, and has the wider purpose of establishing the potential fruitfulness of a deeper dialogue between phenomenology and anthropology. On the one hand, although a number of the medical anthropologists who have studied chronic pain have, to some degree, actually been influenced by phenomenology, on the whole this influence is rather thin. On the other, phenomenology, as these anthropologists observe, generally pays scant attention to culture. Both parties to the conversation, I argue, have something to offer and something to gain. Medical anthropologists may learn that phenomenology has more to offer than simply a general directive toward attending to ‘patient experience’ and a critique of the ‘medical body’; phenomenologists may learn to acknowledge and elaborate cultural, social and political modes of bodily expressivity, and may even come to see the radical possibilities of cultural critique in their theoretical critiques of ‘objective thought’.

The Phenomenology of Clumsiness

I want here to investigate the phenomenology of clumsiness:1 to explore a way of being embodied that to my knowledge has really only been touched on in passing by philosophers.2 I focus primarily on the phenomenology of the clumsy body in its various dimensions, although all aspects of being in the world are involved in clumsiness and indeed are implicit in descriptions of the clumsy body. Moreover, for reasons that will emerge, this phenomenology is grounded in the experience of the extremely clumsy. This exploration should have an intrinsic interest for those concerned with the phenomenology of the body and will enable a contextualization of those few remarks that have been made. At a deeper level, clumsiness provides a peculiarly good entry into certain philosophical issues surrounding the distinction between ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ which is implicit in Sartre’s and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological descriptions of the body.

Introduction: Sartre on the Body

Human bodies are not simply anatomical, physiological or physical objects. They are our very being-there in the world and that by which there is a world for us; they are that by which we act and express and that in which we feel; they are that which sediments the past and projects toward the future; they are that on whose surface power is inscribed and that by whose powers such power is ‘incorporated’; they are natural symbols, as well as the existential ground of culture.

Cartesian Reflections: Essays on Descartes’s Philosophy

Taylor and Francis RIPH_A_440946.sgm 10.1080/09672550903407684 International Journal of Philosophical Studies 0967-2559 (print)/1466-4542 (online) Original Article 2 09 & F ancis 7 5 00020 K the ine J.morris k t e i e.morr @mansfield.ox.ac.uk Cartesian Reflections: Essays on Descartes’s Philosophy By John Cottingham Oxford University Press, 2008. Pp. xii + 332. ISBN 978–0–19–922697–9.

The Meditations and the logic of testimony

80.00 (hbk).

Intermingling and confusion

The exposition of ‘methodological doubt’ in the First Meditation (M1) is one of the most famous pieces of philosophical prose. Two of its central elements – using dreams to cast doubt on the reliability of sense perception and introducing the fiction of an evil demon – are among the most familiar ideas associated with Descartes. The whole argument has been subjected to repeated scrutiny in the finest detail for more than 350 years. Nonetheless, in our view, its overall structure is now misunderstood. And lack of clarity about what is going on in M1 entails lack of clarity about the whole of the Meditations . A prominent reason for the invisibility to today’s readers of the patterns exhibited in M1 is ignorance of that part of logic then known as the logic of testimony. Descartes’s utilization of this framework is clearly discernable in ¶3, where the faculty of sensory perception is compared to a witness who has been known to lie (to deliver false testimony), and where Descartes cites a well-known principle of the logic of testimony: ‘it is prudent never to trust completely those who have deceived us even once’. But the remainder of M1 can illuminatingly be seen – indeed, we think, ought to be seen – as structured around further principles of the logic of testimony. In fact the whole of the Meditations can be seen in this light. As a first approximation, Descartes, exploiting the logic of testimony, aims to demonstrate that one witness, the intellect or the faculty of pure reason, is more reliable than another witness, the faculty of sensory perception, and hence it is contrary to good sense to prefer the testimony of the latter to that of the former.

Wittgenstein's method : neglected aspects : essays on Wittgenstein

Abstract An understanding of Descartes’ concept of ‘confusion’ is important both for making sense of his epistemological enterprise and for grasping his doctrine of the union of mind and body. An analysis of Descartes’ notion of confusion is offered which is grounded in the (more or less controversial) theses that confused thoughts are thoughts, that confusion is confusion by a thinker of one thought with another, and that confusion both can and should be avoided or ‘undone’. This analysis takes its rise from his contrast between ‘confused’ and ‘distinct’ : it exhibits confusion as a failure to distinguish between meanings of systematically ambiguous expressions. This failure is sometimes due to ‘bad intellectual habits’ which in his view ought to be broken, sometimes to ‘nature’ (where the confusion is in general beneficial to our welfare). Paradigmatically these are expressions which refer ambiguously to substances (i.e. mind and body) which are ‘really distinct’. Moreover, his ‘disambiguations’ indicat...