Thursday 17 May 2012

Conference Programme and Abstracts


Speaking the Phenomenon

Graduate Conference in Phenomenology, University of Sussex, UK

24th  & 25th May 2012


Conference Programme


Thursday, 24th May 2012, Room: MS 3.07A (Medical School)


09:00 - 10:00          Registration & Coffee


10:00 - 10:15          Plenary Welcome Session
Welcome address by the organisers and Dr. Tanja Stähler (University of Sussex)


10:20 - 11:40          Session 1: Phenomenology and the Question of Method
Chair: Christos Hadjioannou

Speaker 1: Steven Delay (Rice University, US)
Title of Paper: Phenomenology’s Method and Matter: Reflection and the “Care of Self” in Husserl and Heidegger

Speaker 2: Fintan Neylan (University College Dublin, Ireland)
Title of Paper: On a Reduction without an epoche: Heidegger's Phenomenological Method


11:40 - 11:50          BREAK
 

11:50 – 13:10          Session 2: Phenomenology and Hermeneutics
Chair:  Gabriel Martin

Speaker 1: Miri Mahabad Kuttin (Bar-Ilan University, Israel),
Title of Paper: Husserl's phenomenology as a hermeneutic stance

Speaker 2: Sidra Shahid (University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
Title of Paper: Heidegger’s Transcendental Method as a Non-Reductive Account of Phenomena


13:10 - 14:00          LUNCH


14:00 - 15:20          Session 3: Language, Authenticity and Integrity      
Chair: Jana Elsen

Speaker 1: Charlotte Knowles (Birkbeck College, University of London, UK)
Title of Paper: Discourse and Authentic Disclosure: The Call of Conscience in Being and Time

Speaker 2:  Peter Hanly (Boston College, US)
Title of Paper: The Mark of Failure: Heidegger and Herder on Word and Origin


15:20 - 15:30 break


15:30 - 16:50          Session 4: Heidegger and Moods
Chair: Dr. Zoe Sutherland

Speaker 1: Christopher Merwin (The New School for Social Research, US)
Title of Paper: Between Hope & Calm: The Question of Why Gelassenheit is not a Mood in Being & Time

Speaker 2: Christos Hadjioannou (University of Sussex, UK & Freie Universität Berlin, Germany)
Title of Paper: The “binding necessity” of phenomenology: Heidegger’s turn to Stimmung


16:50 - 17:15        break


17:15 - 19:15 Keynote Address
Professor Miguel de Beistegui (University of Warwick)
Title of Paper: The Phenomenology of Desire in France
Chair: Dr. Paul Davies

Conference Dinner
 
Friday 25th May 2012, Room: Friston 108


08:30 – 09:00         Registration and Coffee


09:10 – 10:30         Session 5: Critical perspectives on phenomenology
Chair: Arthur Willemse

Speaker 1: Danny Smith (University of Warwick, UK)
Title of Paper: Philosophy of Experience, Philosophy of the Concept

Speaker 2: Rauly Nykanen (University of West England, UK)
Title of Paper: Superchaos meets the Extended Mobile: Meillasoux’s contingency and Ravaisson’s identity


10:30 – 10:40        BREAK


10:40 - 12:00     Session 6 : Humanism and Technology       
Chair: Dimitri Kladiskakis

Speaker 1: Noah Gabriel Martin (University of Sussex, UK)
Title of Paper: tba

Speaker 2: Carolina Christofidaki (University of Sussex, UK)
Title of Paper: Being beyond Humanism: A Phenomenological Approach on the Human Position


12.00 – 13:00             LUNCH


13:00 - 14.20           Session 7: Phenomenology and Language
Chair: Patrick Levy

Speaker 1: Alexander Malt (University of Durham, UK)
Title of Paper: Tearing Meaning from an Undivided Whole

Speaker 2: Seferin James (University College Dublin, Irelands)
Title of Paper: Derrida and the Voice that Keeps Silence


14:20 - 14:30          BREAK


14:30 - 16:30          Keynote Address
Professor Joanna Hodge (Manchester Metropolitan University)
Title of Paper: Phenomenology at the limit; phenomena speaking and spoken
Chair: Dr. Tanja Stähler.


17:30 – 18:00             break


18:00 - 19:30          Closing Discussion
Discussion of the themes and findings of the conference led by Dr. Paul Davies in conversation with Professor Béatrice Han-Pile (University of Essex).


19:30                             Closing Remarks

Conference Dinner

 
Abstracts of Graduate Speakers


Name: Steven DeLay (Rice University, US)

Title of Paper: Phenomenology’s Method and Matter: Reflection and the “Care of Self” in Husserl and Heidegger

Abstract: This essay addresses an aporia that has long vexed the phenomenological tradition: what is the true method and matter of phenomenology? Taking my cue from Heidegger's early Freiburg and Marburg lecture courses, I shall argue that the genuine sache of phenomenological philosophy is factical life in its temporal, historical, and factical becoming. Now, according to the early Heidegger, the philosophical tradition, including the works of Husserl's own Logische Untersuchungen and Ideen I, has largely failed to examine factical life adequately. Indeed, as is well known, though Heidegger acknowledges that Husserl “gave him eyes to see,” he nevertheless criticizes his mentor's static phenomenology for failing to actualize the full potential of phenomenological method. And yet, though much has been made of Heidegger's supposed repudiation of Husserlian phenomenology, it turns out that Husserl's genetic and generative phenomenology is expressly suited to describe the very temporal becoming of factical life and the socio-historical world which Heidegger himself was keen to plumb. Perhaps unexpectedly, then, the early Heidegger and later Husserl articulate an uncannily similar view of the genuine matter of phenomenological philosophy. The fundamental matter of phenomenology, they agree, is the investigation of the interrelation among factical life, history, and world. Accordingly, the method of phenomenological philosophy is one of critical reflection that deigns to comprehend the self-movement of individual and historical existence. In other words, on this view, because life is understood to be the genuine concern of philosophy, the phenomenologist's existential commitment to investigate factical life constitutes a unique intersection between method and matter. A manner of philosophizing ever concerned with examining factical life, phenomenology amounts to a philosophy whose raison d'être is the attempt to uncover and understand the very Boden, concrete life, from whence it originates.



Name: Fintan Neylan (University College Dublin, Ireland)

Title of Paper: On a Reduction without an epoche: Heidegger's Phenomenological Method

Abstract: In the lectures given in 1927, the year of Being and Time’s publication, one finds a Heidegger somewhat polemical to the phenomenological reduction of his mentor, Edmund Husserl: but was he on a path out of phenomenology altogether, already making the moves toward his so-called later position?
This paper will argue that this position is superficial and that Heidegger only wishes to expel the epoche from phenomenology: the task he takes on is to reformulate the reduction into one which does not bracket (or in his mind constrict) beings, but allows them to guide the apprehender back to an originary givenness of Being. Indeed, I argue that what Heidegger wishes to make explicit is that the reduction is not a methodological tool which the phenomenologist happens upon, but is actually the thematic manifestation of the “basic act”, later characterised as a decision [Entscheidung], through which Dasein primordially gained a pre-ontological understanding of Being.
It is this basic act/decision which makes both beings and their determination originally available to Dasein, thus I will argue that Heidegger’s initial goal is to rekindle this act in the terms of a reduction in order to alight from oblivious everydayness toward the truth of Being.



Name: Miri Mahabad Kuttin (Bar-Ilan University, Israel),

Title of Paper: Husserl's phenomenology as a hermeneutic stance

Abstract: Heidegger, a prominent student of Husserl’s school, described his work Being and time as both phenomenology and hermeneutics. The second literature emphasizes that Heidegger differs from Husserl by adding the concept of interpretation and highlighting it. However, I hold a broad view of hermeneutics, which does not see it as contrary to phenomenology. As part of my PhD I embody the hermeneutic implications of the Husserlian phenomenological method. I assert that it is not enough to distinguish between Heidegger's manner of investigation in Being and time and Husserl's manner of investigation only by adding the adjective "hermeneutic' to Heidegger's investigation because the difference from Husserl does not lie only in what Heidegger ‘adds’ to phenomenology, i.e., hermeneutics, but in the character of his hermeneutics.
Indeed, Husserl characterized phenomenology as the science of phenomena and not referred explicitly to hermeneutics. He did not perceive phenomenology as hermeneutics but as a strict philosophical method. However, during his investigations of meanings, Husserl used the terms understanding and interpretation. For interpretation is part of the act of granting meaning. Husserl did not constitute an interpretive method but studied the constitution of objects and aspired to describe the way to reach an ultimate understanding. A hermeneutic stance can be extracted from his writings although Husserl himself did not discuss the matter of hermeneutics. For example, according to Husserl, description is a decisive part of understanding the phenomena. The phenomenology as Husserl's hermeneutic stance outlines what we understand as a phenomenon as well as how we examine the phenomenon and try to understand it.
The phenomenological hermeneutic stance strives to make the implicit explicit. This position aims to reach a faithful expression of the phenomenon, clarity and distinction in its presentation, which are obtained from devotion to the givenness of the phenomenon and from reflection. This hermeneutical position is distinguished by the relying on the immediate experience and the phenomenon in its usual modus. The criterion for understanding in this position is the point of convergence between the intention and the given.



Name: Sidra Shahid (University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands)

Title of Paper: Heidegger’s Transcendental Method as a Non-Reductive Account of Phenomena

Abstract: This paper addresses the possibility of providing a non-reductive account of phenomena through an examination of the transcendental and pragmatic strands of Heidegger’s philosophy. It has been argued that Heidegger’s early philosophy presents an ontological project that is at once pragmatic and transcendental. A pragmatic construal of experience seems irreconcilable with a transcendental outlook. After all, one of the central ideas underpinning Heidegger’s account of being is the primacy of practice which places precognitive skills and capacities at the heart of intelligibility and cognition and is, seemingly, at odds with transcendental philosophy, which rejects the practical nature of such claims. Transcendental philosophy, generally conceived, disavows pragmatic justifications, since it seeks out the indispensable and necessary conditions for phenomena. However, Heidegger maintains an apparently transcendental stance arguing that understanding is a necessary condition for the possibility of interpretation and that, broadly, the primordial orientation of being-in-the-world is a necessary condition for the possibility of intentionality. Heidegger’s position emerges as partially pragmatic and partially transcendental. Can these strands be reconciled?
I argue that these seemingly opposing strands can be reconciled by acknowledging that Heidegger is not a full-fledged pragmatist and that, further, he offers a unique conception of transcendental inquiry best characterized as transcendental- hermeneutic. Heidegger’s transcendental inquiry already presupposes the primacy of practice and, as such, is not at odds with the practical thrust of his work. I argue this is largely due to his unique conception of the transcendental method, which, in beginning with experience, is an account that instead of subsuming phenomena to their conditions illuminates the interdependence of ontological structures and their elements. As such, Heidegger’s transcendental method functions from within phenomena and by appealing to the phenomena itself and in this sense accommodates practices. Such an account does not distort phenomena by breaking experience down to its bare components; on the contrary, it attempts to lay bare the grounds of experience through the experience itself. An examination of how the practical and transcendental come together in Heidegger’s philosophy brings to light the capacity of a transcendental-hermeneutic project to investigate phenomena while leaving its richness intact.



Name: Charlotte Knowles (Birkbeck College, University of London, UK)

Title of Paper: Discourse and Authentic Disclosure: The Call of Conscience in Being and Time

Abstract: In Being and Time Dasein comes to understand itself authentically through hearing and understanding the call of conscience. But Dasein not only hears the call, it is also the caller. This may appear contradictory and some have even argued it constitutes an ‘incoherent process of internal bootstrapping’. However, I hope to show that for Heidegger the call of conscience exemplifies discourse as a mode of authentic disclosure and can be explained in Heidegger’s own terms without contradiction. I argue that with regard to conscience, the question is not how Dasein can call to itself from its lostness in the “they”, but rather how Dasein can come to hear itself. Through analogy with Heidegger’s discussion of the circle of understanding in division one, I argue that the call of conscience manifests as a hermeneutic circle and that hearing is key to finding a way into this circle. I suggest that Dasein is constantly calling, always understanding and has the possibility to be always hearing, but that this possibility must first be ‘awakened’ in Dasein. I suggest that the “they” prevents Dasein from hearing, but that it is also through an encounter with the “they”, in terms of its inability to capture Dasein in the fullness of its Being, that Dasein’s ability to hear itself is unlocked. The call of conscience is at once a speaking, a hearing and an understanding of the phenomena. It discloses to Dasein its ownmost authentic potentiality for Being and as such helps to suggest a way in which we can avoid misunderstanding ourselves, Others and the world around us. The call of conscience ultimately endorses and reflects the phenomenological method, letting the Being of entities, and indeed of one’s own Dasein, ‘show[]-itself-in-itself’.



Name: Peter Hanly (Boston College, US)

Title of Paper: The Mark of Failure: Heidegger and Herder on Word and Origin

Abstract: It is clear that the question of language is of utmost importance to Heidegger’s work of the late 1930’s, the period of the so-called seynsgeschichtlich treatises. This preoccupation is increasingly evident  thematically – as the recent publication of GA 74, Zum Wesen zur Sprache attests – but is equally apparent in the interruptive and fragmentary presentation of the writing itself, a writing which seems to seek to bring into question the very possibility of philosophical discourse.
This paper will argue that decisive to the unfolding of the question of language in Heidegger’s work, both in this period and beyond, is the confrontation with Herder, as evidenced in the 1939 seminar on the latter’s ‘Treatise on the Origin of Language.’ It is the notion of originary ‘mark’ that Herder develops here that enables Heidegger to conceive of the word as dislocating, as disruptive in its very essence. In addition, Herder’s multi-layered centralization of listening allows for a re-configuration of the discourse of subjectivity in terms of a ‘gathering’ towards a listening which is always grounded in, and directed towards, this disruption. If Heidegger is able to write, in the Beiträge zur Philosophie, that ‘the word fails, not as an occasional occurrence…but originarily,’ this originary failure must be understood not as the index of the unreachable plenitude of the phenomenon, but as a break, an interruption that belongs to the word itself. An interruptive and fragmentary discourse will thus become not merely the paradigm for an address to the question of language. Rather, the interruption will represent – paradoxically – the very core of our experience of language itself.



Name: Christopher Merwin (The New School for Social Research, US)

Title of Paper: Between Hope & Calm: The Question of Why Gelassenheit is not a Mood in Being & Time

Abstract: This paper seeks to interrogate the complex relationship between hope and calm or ‘releasement’ (gelassenheit) in Heidegger’s Being and Time and to the special phenomenological way that both of these concepts relate to anticipation, futurity, and time.  Special emphasis will be placed on a proper phenomenological distinction between mere hope and gelassenheit as a privative characteristic of Daseins possibility to be.  More broadly, we must first understand the complex way in which gelassenheit relates to Dasein with a view toward the relation of mood to Dasein’s other existential structures.  As a terminus technicus Heidegger’s usage of gelassenheit acts already as a construction, harkening back to Meister Eckhart’s rhetorical usage of the terms and a similar conception within Aristotle’s Rhetoric.  Yet the question must be begged of Heidegger as to why gelassenheit is not a mood of Dasein when mood itself inhabits understanding, speech, and a mode of being-in.  Final attention will placed on the way in which gelassenheit relates to Dasein’s future and a formal Heideggerian means to understand the phenomenological differences implicit between hope on the one hand, and the calmness of anticipation on the other.



Name: Christos Hadjioannou (University of Sussex, UK & Freie Universität Berlin, Germany)

Title of Paper: The “binding necessity” of phenomenology: Heidegger’s turn to Stimmung

Abstract: One significant characteristic that marks out Heidegger’s phenomenology is the central role he ascribes to mood [Stimmung], which he sees as the main way that Dasein is brought before its facticity. The operation of mood also figures prominently in late Heidegger, for example in the lecture What is Philosophy? (1955), where Heidegger, following Plato and Aristotle, determines mood as the archē of philosophy. Before that, in Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowing) (1936-38), Heidegger envisioned a cultural transformation that would constitute a “new beginning” of thinking, whose beginning he connected with a Grundstimmung. In this context, it has been argued that moods supply the “binding necessity” for the cultural transformation that Heidegger himself envisioned.

Because of this central role that Heidegger ascribes to moods, he has been accused of reducing philosophy to mere feeling or sheer irrationalism. In order to respond to these issues, it is necessary to see how and why Heidegger himself turns to mood.

The first time that Heidegger used the notion Befindlichkeit was in his 1924 lectures on Aristotle, as rendering the word διαθεσις; it is in this encounter of Heidegger with Aristotle that moods acquire their ontological significance in Heidegger’s own thought. But what is it that compelled Heidegger to return to Aristotle in this way and appropriate these notions? A return to the debates and problems that predominated Heidegger’s thought at that time seems unavoidable.

In this paper I will argue that Heidegger’s initial turn to mood was his attempt to ground transcendental philosophy back to facticity. This was Heidegger’s philosophical response to the neo-Kantian predicament (as Heidegger saw it), whereby transcendental philosophy was left with an unbridgeable cleft between “being” (the reality of the cognitive act) and ideal “logic” (value). This gulf was especially exacerbated by the epistemology of the so-called Southwest School of neo-Kantians which maintained a gap between forms of judgment of traditional logic and the unsynthesized manifold of sensation.

The problem that persisted was that of articulating a binding necessity between transcendental judgment (ideal realm of logic) and the real world of temporal being. Heidegger thought that Husserl’s phenomenology offered a way of grounding transcendentally these “two realms” through his notion of categorial intuition; however, Heidegger thought that Husserl’s phenomenology relied too much on reflective intuition and that his notion of epoché was not binding, or grounding transcendental philosophy to real existence (being).

In this context, Heidegger re-anchored philosophy back to concrete, practical comportment [Verhalten], primarily manifested as mood, which enabled him to account for the pre-reflective aspect of all intentional (and categorial) relations while maintaining the dynamic aspect of the act.



Name: Danny Smith (University of Warwick, UK)

Title of Paper: Philosophy of Experience, Philosophy of the Concept

Abstract: In his text ‘Life: Experience and Science’, Michel Foucault famously divides French philosophy of the twentieth century into two camps, the ‘philosophy of experience’ on the one side, and the ‘philosophy of the concept’ on the other. On the one side, thinkers such as Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, who investigated life as it is lived, taken to be irreducible to scientific description. On the other, the ‘épistémologistes’: Cavaillès, Bachelard, Canguilhem. Almost twenty years later, in ‘The Adventure of French Philosophy’, Badiou repeats Foucault’s gesture, opposing the ‘existential vitalism’ of Bergson, Sartre and Deleuze to the ‘conceptual formalism’ of Brunschvicg, Althusser and Lacan. These divisions are perhaps more strategic and polemical interventions than strictly accurate characterisations, but I would like to argue, nonetheless, that this ‘philosophy of the concept’ offers an important and often-neglected alternative to phenomenological methodology.
The critique provided by these authors, in short, is that phenomenology only deals with one aspect of subjectivity, remaining constitutively blind to the effect of structure. This argument takes different forms in different authors: for the épistémologistes, phenomenology does not grasp the specificity of science, only interpreting it as only one ‘ontic’ discourse among many; for Althusser, its ignorance of structure means that phenomenology cannot see when it is captured by ideological mechanisms; for Lacan, phenomenology can give us a rigorous description of the Imaginary order, but is unable to think the Symbolic. This paper will explore some of these arguments, trying to show that this other neglected strand of twentieth-century French philosophy offers us a genuine methodological alternative to phenomenology which works with innovations in formal logic, mathematics and the sciences whilst remaining as implacably opposed to positivism and scientism as phenomenology.



Name: Rauly Nykanen (University of West England, UK)

Title of Paper: Superchaos meets the Extended Mobile: Meillasoux’s contingency and Ravaisson’s identity

Abstract: In this paper we wish to draw attention to the phenomenologist aspect in the speculative materialist enquiry by Meillasoux in After Finitude, namely his correlationist critique of absolute facticity that he terms unreason. The aim is to give a reading of this unreason in relation to Felix Ravaisson’s Of Habit which we see as containing an argument as to the inseparability of mind and body such that mind or reason is in no way some necessary correlate with body, or the outside, nor is it impossible to surpass the limit that mind is argued since the transcendental critique to entail as to its access to its surroundings. On the contrary, it is the very fact that mind cannot explain itself that gives rise to its finitude and that as such it is clear that nature comes first. Thus, the argument which would have it that unreason is reason is suspicious since the argument of reason presupposes that since unreason is not manifest to reason because it is but a concept of reason itself, there is no ground or truth‐ maker for unreason. As Meillasoux criticises, the argument of reason denies the reality of the intelligibility of an open possibility, an outside not correlated to us, making an open possibility subject to our reason. It seems to us that unreason has no need to appeal to any identity for its validity, whereas reason entails an identity as ground if it is to criticise unreason. This notion of unreason then has a veritable hold over any phenomenologies of identity. It is the illegitimacy of any argument of reason which at the same time would maintain the openness of the outside which suggests that phenomenology and metaphysics should not be treated as separate fields.



Name: Gabriel Martin (University of Sussex, UK),

Title of Paper: tba

Abstract: tba



Name: Carolina Christofidaki (University of Sussex)

Title of Paper: Being beyond Humanism: A Phenomenological Approach on the Human Position.

Abstract: “The need is for the truth of being to be preserved”.
This quote could be the categorical imperative of all Heideggerian philosophy. If we are not to lose our essential humanity we have to remember being. We are the only being who can access the truth of being and we must not forget this “gift” of ours.
In this paper I will attempt to reinterpret the concept of humanism drawing from Heidegger's discussion of the term, primarily in his 'Letter on Humanism'. I will argue that this reinvention is to a great degree conditioned by the the ontological position that Heidegger reserves for the human being (Dasein) as thrown among beings and in-between beings and being. It is precisely this throwness that grounds human ek-sistance, that is, the attentiveness to the truth of being, in contradistinction to the human priority over beings that traditional humanism announces.
Heidegger reproaches Western metaphysics for the oblivion and abandonment of being. This indifference towards being leaves the human being deprived from any authentic relation to beings, yet this relation is constitutive for his very human essence. Dasein's essential distinctiveness from others beings consists precisely into that it is concerned with being and essentially related to beings. What makes us properly human is our access to the being of beings. Therefore the oblivion of being attacks the very essence of humanity per se. In this sense, we could argue that traditional humanism, under a Heideggerian reading is essentially in-human.
Human being is placed (“thrown”) freely into the clearing of being which is the world; this is ek-sistance. To attain their proper humanitas human beings need to remember that they are not the master of beings but the shepherd of being—whose care is the preservation of being's truth. For this to happen we need to understand our essential position in the crossroad where our being-in-the-world, beings and being debouch.



Name: Alexander Malt (University of Durham, UK)

Title of Paper: Tearing Meaning from an Undivided Whole

Abstract: Merleau-Ponty wrote: “Speech is a way of tearing out a meaning from an undivided whole.” This paper takes up the theme of the logos as ‘torn’ from an ‘undivided whole’, but does so in light of the significant research carried out in biolinguistics and syntactic theory after Merleau-Ponty’s death. I follow Merleau-Ponty in arguing – against Cartesian Linguists – that speech and thought are not analogous to smoke and fire. However, I also point to the force of Cartesian criticisms of viewing language purely as an ‘external’/social artefact. Such criticisms –lack of individuation criteria, historical contingency, and lack of (symmetrical) intelligibility – seem also to apply to Merleau-Ponty’s characterisation of languages as ‘gestalts’. Instead, I argue Merleau-Ponty’s concept of ‘chiasm’ should be employed to identify a grammatical intertwining of speaker and world where linguistic acts are reconceived as gestalts, i.e. where each ‘sign’ receives its meaning through its position in a complete syntactic structure. I suggest that: first, an appropriately structured linguistic expression can tear a meaning from a unified whole by serving to draw attention to one of its parts; second, that such a grammatical chiasm is syntactically structured with embedded determiner phrases, performing a deictic function; finally, a further conjecture is that these logoi, once grammatically constituted, can then be successfully used – in a Promethean style – by other animals who are, in themselves, incapable of producing them (as experiments with Chimpanzees have shown).



Name: Seferin James (University College Dublin, Irelands)

Title of Paper: Derrida and the Voice that Keeps Silence

Abstract: Jacques Derrida's La voix et le phénomène has a new title in English. Formerly Speech and Phenomena, Leonard Lawlor has retranslated the text as Voice and Phenomenon. The question of how to translate the title – the difference between voice and speech – is crucial to the whole sense of the text. Lawlor argues that Derrida's title reverses the priority between the logos and the phenomenon as it is usually encountered in the term “phenomeno-logy.” Is there an ordered relation in Husserl's work between the logos and the phenomenon that Derrida reverses? Adopting an aspect of Foucault's 1961 thesis, Derrida challenges Husserl's participation in the decision to determine logos as logic and exclude a broader sense of language from the logos. This exclusion is why Derrida asserts that Husserl never posed the question of the transcendental logos. The exclusion can be linked to the rejection of psychologism in the Prolegomena to the Logical Investigations and the preparation of a phenomenology that would always conform to the demands of its logical necessity through an idea in the Kantian sense. The idea determines experience as the experience of experience, which is to say that it is the eidetic intuition of appearance itself in general and hence the phenomenality of the phenomena as such. Husserl prioritises logic over the phenomenon but only in a restricted sense of the logos. This paper will argue that Derrida involves the logos in both senses as la voix qui garde le silence. It is both the intimate duration of the voice that introduces the écart that constitutes the ideality of presence (that is, voice as a pre-phenomenological phenomenon that “constitutes” through différance the logic of the idea in a Kantian sense) and the intimate otherness of the voice that reveals the modulation of our ownmost “absolute passage” of phenomenological experience by language (the contamination of the voice by speech).


Thursday 29 March 2012

Panel Session Line-up Confirmation!

We can now confirm that the panel discussion which will end the conference proceedings on Friday 25th May will consist of:

Prof. Beatrice Han-Pile (University of Essex)

Dr. Paul Davies (University of Sussex)

Prof. Joanna Hodge (Manchester Metropolitan University)

Dr. Tanja Staehler (University of Sussex)

It will be a great way for speakers to have a chance to debate with, and recieve feedback from, some leading academic philosophers working in the field of phenomenology.