Natalie Depraz

What about the praxis of Reduction? Between Husserl and Merleau-Ponty

What does it mean to actually practice reduction? The primary method of phenomenology has long been thought of as a sheer possibility that does not need to be and a fortiori must not be really accomplished. I first lay out Husserl’s and Merleau-Ponty’s specific endeavors to give reduction a prominent role, be it as a formal method or as an immanent praxis. Profitingfrom their valuable steps, I then try to combine both efforts in order to provide a sequenced description of such a joint method, both dynamically structured and actually achieved.

Empathy and Compassion as Experiential Praxis. Confronting Phenomenological Analysis and Buddhist Teachings

It is well-known that Husserl’s analysis of intersubjectivity is primarily based on empathy. Now, such an experience of empathy is described in Husserl as involving the peculiar spatiality of our lived body, a temporal pairing of both lived bodies and a specific imaginative transfer of one’s psychic states into those of the other. I would like to confront such a multilayered experience of the other with the way some Buddhist teachings (which first appeared in India and were then transmitted to Tibet) present the experience of compassion within what is called the Mahayana tradition. Indeed, the “tonglen” praxis (as Tibetans call it), which is described very concretely in such a framework, echoes in many ways the Husserlian empathetic experience as far as the bodily rooting, the synchronizing timing are concerned and above all as far as the way imagination is taken into account. By comparing both praxis and analysis with regard to lived space, time and imagination, we will be able to evaluate their affinities, their differences and finally how they may enlight and even generate each other. 1

The Return of Phenomenology in Recent French Moral Philosophy

Gabriel Marcel, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Paul Ricoeur were the main figures in French moral philosophy during the 1950s and 1960s, and other chapters of this handbook deal with their contributions to moral philosophy. But what has happened in French moral philosophy since then? In answering this question, I will proceed in two main steps: first, I will sketch in broad strokes the perspectives recently laid out in French moral philosophy; second, I will comment upon the current re-emergence of phenomenology in this field, a re-emergence that began late in the 1970s with Emmanuel Levinas—on whom there is also a chapter in this handbook— and that is now embodied mainly by Michel Henry.