The Iranian Yearbook of Phenomenology (IYP) is an international collaborative project publishing paper on phenomenology and existential philosophy as well as contributions from other fields of philosophy. Papers from researchers in the humanities and the human sciences interested in phenomenological approaches in their subject areas are welcome too. The yearbook also aims to provide a forum for interdisciplinary discussion.
The IYP is published by the Iranian Society for Phenomenology (ISP) in cooperation with Gam_e_no (New Step) and the Iranian Political Science Association (IPSA).
The CFP for each Issue will be announced in mid-December. The Final Drafts are due September 10 next year. Supervisors: Hamid Malekzadeh
The Iranian Political Science Associaion/Gam-e-Nou, 2024
Neuroscience and its attendant subdisciplines, including, so it supposes, philosophy, hold that t... more Neuroscience and its attendant subdisciplines, including, so it supposes, philosophy, hold that there is nothing more to self and society than what is in the brain. However, two centuries have yet to resolve the philosophical objections to such claims, much less resolved the binding problem that would link mind and brain or arrive at a general, materialist explanation of consciousness. Just as ideological and economic blinders beset this discipline, they limit philosophy to account for the nature of this 'thinking organ'-what that means and if it can even exist. Taking the work of Hegel, Heidegger, and Deleuze, and neuroscientific results, I consider the phenomenology of the Organ. I argue that understanding this object requires distinguishing concepts such as function and activity, Capacity and regulation, and surface and recognition. Results show that the ability to arrive at a thinking organ as the Organ is uncertain but worth the pursuit for the services done to science and ethics.
The Iranian Political Science Associaion/Gam-e-Nou, 2024
I will look at immigration from the perspective of phenomenology and its somewhat Foucauldian und... more I will look at immigration from the perspective of phenomenology and its somewhat Foucauldian understanding of governmentality in the third way that Marxism integrates phenomenology. The term economism has been kept as a primary reason for closing the state borders from immigration. Different ideas of which sector of being clearly defined legitimizes the sovereign. I hypothesize that in the economic times of third-way economic policies just behind us, economics is the most clearly defined category to legitimize sovereignty and its borders in many senses. Economism as a reason to keep borders closed is paradoxical since economic activity most clearly penetrates the borders. Poststructuralist analysis of flows like in Gilles Deleuze or of hospitality in a political sense and context in Jacques Derrida is essential. Phenomenology helps to understand governmentality, as I will argue/show. It can also help to see keeping people out of sovereign-like the state as a question of governmentality. The question becomes a technical question of governmentality. The point is to sketch out the technical governmentality concerning the immigration question, mainly phenomenologically.
The Iranian Political Science Associaion/Gam-e-Nou, 2024
In this paper, I aim to show how Josiah Royce's philosophy contains many themes that will be at t... more In this paper, I aim to show how Josiah Royce's philosophy contains many themes that will be at the core of Husserl's philosophical investigations. This paper is divided into two sections. The first one outlines the starting point of these two philosophers, contextualizing their background and showing how they share a common purpose: to put the experience at the center of their thought. For this reason, I want to analyze how they treat the concept of attention concerning intentionality to argue that their philosophies are strictly anchored to the givenness of the experience. In the second one, I deal with the rising of the precategorial dimension (prior to any objectivation) as a possibility of experience itself, paralleling the Husserlian concept of Lebenswelt and the Roycean of the World of Appreciation. Through this distinction, they criticize the scientific, naturalistic, and objectivistic Weltanschauung, showing how its method is founded in an intuitive and non-thematic relation with the world experience that comes ontologically before the scientific description.
The Iranian Political Science Associaion/Gam-e-Nou, 2024
The Heideggerian theme of authenticity (Eigentlichkeit) proves crucial to the task of fundamental... more The Heideggerian theme of authenticity (Eigentlichkeit) proves crucial to the task of fundamental ontology that Heidegger pursues in Being and Time. Unfortunately, clear and textually based commentary on this notion of authenticity has been sparse. Many prominent readings of authenticity fail to stay true to its purpose in Being and Time, opting instead to render a stronger existentialist reading than is warranted. While such readings of authenticity are truly fascinating as independent conceptions worthy of philosophical attention, they cannot be properly ascribed to Heidegger or the project of Being and Time. The present essay serves as an attempt to correct this course in the scholarship, offering a textually supported account of authenticity that recognizes its role as that which makes manifest the transparency that everyday Dasein lacks—a transparency that can do away with self-concealments and assist Heidegger in his pursuit of an answer to the question of Being qua Being.
The Iranian Political Science Associaion/Gam-e-Nou, 2024
This paper analyses social cognition by considering the analytic philosophy of mind, neurophenome... more This paper analyses social cognition by considering the analytic philosophy of mind, neurophenomenology and social neuroscience. Many social neuroscientists rely unconsciously on different philosophical answers to the question "how do we understand each other?". Consequently, we will compare the principal philosophical and experimental approaches to social cognition that have been proposed so far and join them in an integrationist account by taking into consideration the direct embeddedness of social interactors.
The Iranian Political Science Associaion/Gam-e-Nou, 2024
The human being is ontologically a relational being living with others in organized communities a... more The human being is ontologically a relational being living with others in organized communities and institutions. By focusing on the intersubjective and collective levels of human experience, this essay considers the possibility of a critical dialogue between Paul Ricoeur's and Alfred Schütz's phenomenological works toward a renewed socio-phenomenological approach to social reality. I begin with a broad framing of Husserl's second epoché or reduction to the sphere of ownness as performed within the egological sphere and then turn to Ricoeur's and Schütz's critiques of the Husserlian conception of intersubjectivity. These reflections will lead us to discuss the inconsistency of Husserl's idea of the intersubjective acceptance of the common objective nature and his formulation of the higher-order case of the communal constitution.
The Iranian Political Science Associaion/Gam-e-Nou, 2024
Hegel's account of the social conditions of anxiety. While my focus is the modern period, I use H... more Hegel's account of the social conditions of anxiety. While my focus is the modern period, I use Hegel's comments on death in previous epochs-especially in ancient Greece-to bring out the peculiarity of modernity. In the first half of the paper, I discuss the nature and conditions of anxiety. In the second half, I trace Hegel's critique of a common way to avoid-or flee from-anxiety in modernity, which results in social isolation, boredom, and emptiness. As long as the modern individual is only an economic actor in civil society, she is prone to anxiety. To confront her finitude, Hegel argues, she must endorse her political affiliation, namely, be an active and sacrificing citizen of the state.
The Iranian Political Science Associaion/Gam-e-Nou, 2024
Our research pays attention to the problem of the coverage of the realm of semiotic beings. This ... more Our research pays attention to the problem of the coverage of the realm of semiotic beings. This problem is raised by the meeting between the contemporary account of the human animal as a semiotic animal and the possible advent of a technological singularity, meaning a living technological being aware of semiosis. Apart from highlighting the prospective emergence of a complex phenomenon leading to evolutionary pressures on humans, we also pointed to a positive direction toward developing a cooperative relationship between the latter and a sustainable form of technological life: the furtherance of semiotics. To this end, we started by providing a few historical and philosophical references to help us better understand the problem at stake. Next, we described how beings gain semiotic access to reality, the distinction between the realm of semiotic beings and of machines, and the infinite character of the study of semiotics. Finally, we concluded that the realm of semiotic beings is still, despite technological advances, exclusively human.
The Iranian Political Science Associaion/Gam-e-Nou, 2024
This article is structured in two parts. In the first part there is a focus on Deleuze's philosop... more This article is structured in two parts. In the first part there is a focus on Deleuze's philosophy and in particular the question of desert(ed) islands. Running throughout this section is a consistent concern with empathy and sociality, with the changing structure of alterity in the identified movement from neurosis and psychosis to perversion. In this section, I make the argument that several forms of contemporary philosophy are carrying out acts of philosophical autism with regards to species extinction and the question of the absence of the other. I try to counter this trend in the second part of the paper, where there is a concern with thinking the structure "Us-without-world," which is my original contribution. In the time of the coronavirus pandemic, in the time of our forced solitude, in the time of our intoxication with technology, there is a real problem of the life-world, of thinking weexperience in common life, in this new hermetic reality. This is encapsulated in the thought-experiment of the structure "Us-withoutworld".
In his book It’s Not about the Gift: From Givenness to Loving, Steinbock advances a new phenomeno... more In his book It’s Not about the Gift: From Givenness to Loving, Steinbock advances a new phenomenological analysis of the gift. In this analysis, the gift is not about what is being given, but about the event of a loving relation between two subjects. In this interpersonal relation the gift emerges as each beloved withdraws themselves in order to reveal the other as they are by being loved in humility. In this paper, I undertake to express two main challenges for Steinbock’s account of the gift. The first concerns Steinbock’s attempt to disengage the phenomenon of surprise from the possibility of the gift. The second involves his neglecting the body. This neglect raises serious questions on the kind of love during which the gift is supposed to emerge. In the epilogue, instead of a conclusion, I offer some thoughts on the gift that have not been given much attention in the philosophical discussion of the gift.
The aim of this work is to demonstrate that Alfred Schütz's contribution to the social sciences i... more The aim of this work is to demonstrate that Alfred Schütz's contribution to the social sciences is understandable only within the framework of his troubled relationship with Husserl's phenomenology. We will see how Schütz tries to take charge, to face and resolve a good part of the critical issues present in Husserl's work and, above all, to make a turning point in the field of investigation of phenomenology which will prove decisive for the human sciences as it will focus his attention on the question of intersubjectivity, considered no longer as a problem concerning only the phenomenological sphere but as a fundamental category of human existence. Therefore, we will try to show how Schütz's path assumes a considerable critical value as it contributes to raise the expectations of sociology and to strengthen the confidence of this discipline which tends to go beyond the narrow boundaries outlined by Husserl and to go in a direction diametrically opposite to "The Crisis of European sciences" outlined by the father of phenomenology, since Schütz provides stable and adequate bases for the social sciences that allow to analyze the fundamental structures that support the social world, and, in this way, at the same time, he manages to safeguard the basic nucleus of the phenomenological discipline, since, stripped of metaphysical lure and devoid of verbal and oracular enchantments, it is traced back to the Husserlian idea of rigorous science. From this point of view, Schütz's merit lies primarily in having made a critical revision of phenomenology, in having initiated a broad debate on the role of the social sciences, and in having provided the first ideas for the foundation of a phenomenologically oriented sociology.
This paper presents some elements of Marc Richir's political phenomenology. Drawing from the Huss... more This paper presents some elements of Marc Richir's political phenomenology. Drawing from the Husserlian distinction between Leib and Körper and from the ontology of the flesh sketched in the last works of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Richir proposed a novel reading of the relation between phenomenology, the social, and the political. His project is built upon the distinction between incarnation and incorporation, two forms of embodiment that, while corresponding to the two ways of experiencing One's own body noted by Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, concern not only the embodied subject but also the individuation of the social body. This approach can be read as a radically embodied inquiry into the social and the political that constitutes a phenomenological critique of identitarian essentialism and disembodied universalism. In the first section of the article, I explain the role played by intersubjectivity, subjectivity, and embodiment in Richir's understanding of the process of phenomenalization. The second section is dedicated to his elaborations on the joint sensemaking of the ipse and the community, articulated around the distinction between incarnation and incorporation. In the final section, I outline a possible application of the concepts developed by Richir to the contemporary debate around identity-based politics.
In Origin of the Work of Art, Heidegger presents an evocative claim about the way the Temple to A... more In Origin of the Work of Art, Heidegger presents an evocative claim about the way the Temple to Athena on the Acropolis, opens a world rich with meaning and resonant with significance that orients the Athenian people within reality thus allowing their relations to others and to nature to appear as meaningful and ultimately nourishing. In other words, the Temple, like all great works of art, opens a world that is also a home. This article reviews the import of Heidegger’s reflection on monumental art, but we quickly turn to the principle objection to Heidegger’s thought, which is that the entire venture by which an artistic, religious, or poetic event organizes a world for “a people” is fundamentally illegitimate because of the way it binds individuals to an identity that outgroups the “foreigners” that do not belong to this identity and thus marginalizes them.This objection is a central motivating force for liberalism, and since World War II, and particularly since the fall of the S...
The Iranian Society for Phenomenology (ISP) is intending to publish the 3rd issue of “The Iranian... more The Iranian Society for Phenomenology (ISP) is intending to publish the 3rd issue of “The Iranian Yearbook of Phenomenology” in association with the Iranian Political Science Association (IPSA) and Gam-e-Nou (New Step) Publisher. We invite all those researchers that might be interested to contribute to this edited book volume. Authors should submit their final draft (in Persian or English) no later than 20 January, 2024 to the official website of the Yearbook: (http://www.iyphen.ir).
The notion of 'freedom' has gained an emblematic character in contemporary political discourse. I... more The notion of 'freedom' has gained an emblematic character in contemporary political discourse. It is, commonly, viewed as the central value and political goal of modern societies. Similarly, human rights documents conceive of freedom as their founding principle with universal validity. In contradistinction to this prevalent approach to freedom, this paper aims to demonstrate that freedom is, primarily, a political signifier with social-historical variability. One cannot, therefore, simply and uncritically assume that freedom has (or should have) universal validity or transhistorical significance. In the first section of this paper, the structure of the contemporary liberal discourse on freedom is discussed and called into question. In light of Arendt's interpretation of freedom and through her analysis of the public domain, I reflect on the social-historical variability of the meaning of freedom and its inextricable nexus with a particular form of society. In the second section and drawing on Castoriadis, the notion of 'freedom' is approached in view of human signifying practices and imaginary dimension of society. This examination reveals in what way freedom––in the sense of a central social imaginary signification––contributes to the institution of an autonomous mode of society and determines the affective disposition and intentional vector of its inhabitants.
In Origin of the Work of Art, Heidegger presents an evocative claim about the way the Temple to A... more In Origin of the Work of Art, Heidegger presents an evocative claim about the way the Temple to Athena on the Acropolis, opens a world rich with meaning and resonant with significance that orients the Athenian people within reality thus allowing their relations to others and to nature to appear as meaningful and ultimately nourishing. In other words, the Temple, like all great works of art, opens a world that is also a home. This article reviews the import of Heidegger’s reflection on monumental art, but we quickly turn to the principle objection to Heidegger’s thought, which is that the entire venture by which an artistic, religious, or poetic event organizes a world for “a people” is fundamentally illegitimate because of the way it binds individuals to an identity that outgroups the “foreigners” that do not belong to this identity and thus marginalizes them. This objection is a central motivating force for liberalism, and since World War II, and particularly since the fall of the Soviet Union, has been almost hegemonic in many strands of philosophical thought and the globalized culture more widely. Thus, we see that the objection against Heidegger is primarily ethical and political and concerns not only his philosophy but the central and inter-related phenomenological ideas of the horizon, Lebenswelt, and the world—and thus the very relation of phenomenology itself—to contemporary ethical-political thinking. But because the objections are so strongly rooted in motivations, our phenomenological inquiry into the ‘world’ will have to be supplemented by recourse to hermeneutics.
This contribution focuses on Heidegger’s critique of the vulgar nationalism contained in the Blac... more This contribution focuses on Heidegger’s critique of the vulgar nationalism contained in the Black Notebooks (1931-1938), and it follows the rejection of ideologisms that many of his works entail. According to Heidegger’s juridical reflection, “freedom is the ground of the inner possibility of correctness” with which external ideologies such as that of nationalism are avoided. This suggestion contrasts with Heidegger pro-Semitic orientation, testified by his rector’s speech in 1933, but is in line with the distance Heidegger sets between both the moral and the epistemological-ontological world, supported in his writings since the Marburg lectures (1923-1928). In the type of society, Heidegger figures out individuals live together in the πόλις by ek-sisting into the truth of being and by understanding the assignment of those directives that must become their laws and rules. These principles can’t be merely something fabricated by human reason, because they are a) the expression of social thinking made upon a juridical and normative framework close to liberalism. According to Heidegger, humanity is conceived to be free-in and able to choose the avoidance of totalitarian regimes voluntarily, as well as of eternal values supporting ideologies. With the freedom-in concept Heidegger b) solves the problem of coercive violence caused by the restriction of the ought to (i.e. the obligations that come from ideologies) towards the Being, to show the significance of ἦθος in which Dasein is placed. The choice to be in the ἦθος c) provides an explanation based on Heidegger’s critique of technology in his post-Turning writings. This critique clarifies why a national socialist ideology, making use of such technical instruments and supporting ethical materialism, is not in line with the political ontology Heidegger promotes in his writings.
This paper continues applying the notion of the “Luciferian Existential” as a way of accounting f... more This paper continues applying the notion of the “Luciferian Existential” as a way of accounting for the extreme violence humans seem to be willing to perpetrate both in nuclear war and in ignoring climate change. We begin by letting humankind and Lucifer mutually reflect what initially seems to be their distinguishing attributes. This is done as a speculative attempt to shed light on the seemingly impossible sin or crime of the greatest of all creatures in relation to God and, on the side of human beings, the unimaginable horror of the actualization of the preparation for nuclear war and continued ignoring of climate change. The hope is that we may illuminate human experience as it underwrites both horrors and how possibly human experience may illuminate the mythic-theological figure of Lucifer. Although we feature human kind’s essential being out of balance, its dodging of its mortality, and its ontological restlessness, culminating in blinding “Luciferian” rage as a way of understanding the human propensity to extreme violence, it is clear that neither the build-up of nuclear armaments nor ignoring climate change seem to be rooted in ontological restlessness or sort of blindness caused by suppression of death, or its capacity for rage or even jealousy, but in something else. Antiquity singled out pride or inordinate self-love as the perennial culprit. There is doubtless inordinate self-love in play here too, but here we suggest that it is also [inseparably the dulling of a sense of what is of ultimate importance, i.e., there is a loss of interest in what used to be called wisdom.
In this paper, my aim is to put into question Heideggerian versions of political ontology. In the... more In this paper, my aim is to put into question Heideggerian versions of political ontology. In the first section of this article, I will discuss the main tenants of Heideggerian political ontology. I will then suggest that political ontologies indebted to Heidegger are based on a mistaken inference, which functions as an incorrect evidence for the political effectiveness of Heidegger’s concepts: the Heideggerians believe that the continuous changes which characterise ontic politics are an observable proof for the existence of a negative ontological foundation. My belief – which I will argue for in the second section of this paper – is that political phenomena do indeed appear as contingent (here I agree with the Heideggerians); however, this phenomenological fact does not necessitate the Heideggerian conclusion that ontic politics presupposes negative ontological foundations. Drawing on the phenomenological descriptions of Edmund Husserl, Emmanuel Levinas, and Catherine Malabou, I will demonstrate that phenomena might simultaneously appear as contingent and as grounded in positive objects and processes. Phenomenology, therefore, provides resources to critique Heideggerian political ontology, and its conviction that ontic contingency is an evidence for the existence of negative foundations. I will conclude the paper by offering a sketch of an alternative, positive political ontology centered on the notion of antagonism, and the concomitant concept of political change.
In his interpretation of Aristotle, Heidegger points out that Aristotle's natural community is pa... more In his interpretation of Aristotle, Heidegger points out that Aristotle's natural community is part and parcel of his more general attempt to account for the presencing (ousia) of things in nature (physis). That is, in order for things in nature to be they need to fulfill their definitions. Consequently, for humans, community is the place where humans as life-possessing-logos (zoōn logon ekhon) and at the same time life-in-the-polis (zoōn politikon) can reveal their genuine definition (horismos). This will render possible the first formulation of the community as a natural community. Yet, just like the status of abnormalities and accidents in nature, prioritizing the fulfillment of justice as laws of the society over the singular expression of individuals would eventually complicate the status of justice with regard to the abnormal and unprecedented cases. Derrida’s critique of the laws shed a good light on the limitation of all laws with a universal claim which will be applied here to the Aristotelian formulation of them. Finally, this essay highlights the moments that Aristotle’s admission of the impossibility of universal laws provides the possibility of alternative comportment towards otherness and alternative ethics. In effect, it is Aristotle's mistake or "missing the mark" (hamartia) that opens the door for a new mode of following the laws, I call nomadic following.
The Iranian Political Science Associaion/Gam-e-Nou, 2024
Neuroscience and its attendant subdisciplines, including, so it supposes, philosophy, hold that t... more Neuroscience and its attendant subdisciplines, including, so it supposes, philosophy, hold that there is nothing more to self and society than what is in the brain. However, two centuries have yet to resolve the philosophical objections to such claims, much less resolved the binding problem that would link mind and brain or arrive at a general, materialist explanation of consciousness. Just as ideological and economic blinders beset this discipline, they limit philosophy to account for the nature of this 'thinking organ'-what that means and if it can even exist. Taking the work of Hegel, Heidegger, and Deleuze, and neuroscientific results, I consider the phenomenology of the Organ. I argue that understanding this object requires distinguishing concepts such as function and activity, Capacity and regulation, and surface and recognition. Results show that the ability to arrive at a thinking organ as the Organ is uncertain but worth the pursuit for the services done to science and ethics.
The Iranian Political Science Associaion/Gam-e-Nou, 2024
I will look at immigration from the perspective of phenomenology and its somewhat Foucauldian und... more I will look at immigration from the perspective of phenomenology and its somewhat Foucauldian understanding of governmentality in the third way that Marxism integrates phenomenology. The term economism has been kept as a primary reason for closing the state borders from immigration. Different ideas of which sector of being clearly defined legitimizes the sovereign. I hypothesize that in the economic times of third-way economic policies just behind us, economics is the most clearly defined category to legitimize sovereignty and its borders in many senses. Economism as a reason to keep borders closed is paradoxical since economic activity most clearly penetrates the borders. Poststructuralist analysis of flows like in Gilles Deleuze or of hospitality in a political sense and context in Jacques Derrida is essential. Phenomenology helps to understand governmentality, as I will argue/show. It can also help to see keeping people out of sovereign-like the state as a question of governmentality. The question becomes a technical question of governmentality. The point is to sketch out the technical governmentality concerning the immigration question, mainly phenomenologically.
The Iranian Political Science Associaion/Gam-e-Nou, 2024
In this paper, I aim to show how Josiah Royce's philosophy contains many themes that will be at t... more In this paper, I aim to show how Josiah Royce's philosophy contains many themes that will be at the core of Husserl's philosophical investigations. This paper is divided into two sections. The first one outlines the starting point of these two philosophers, contextualizing their background and showing how they share a common purpose: to put the experience at the center of their thought. For this reason, I want to analyze how they treat the concept of attention concerning intentionality to argue that their philosophies are strictly anchored to the givenness of the experience. In the second one, I deal with the rising of the precategorial dimension (prior to any objectivation) as a possibility of experience itself, paralleling the Husserlian concept of Lebenswelt and the Roycean of the World of Appreciation. Through this distinction, they criticize the scientific, naturalistic, and objectivistic Weltanschauung, showing how its method is founded in an intuitive and non-thematic relation with the world experience that comes ontologically before the scientific description.
The Iranian Political Science Associaion/Gam-e-Nou, 2024
The Heideggerian theme of authenticity (Eigentlichkeit) proves crucial to the task of fundamental... more The Heideggerian theme of authenticity (Eigentlichkeit) proves crucial to the task of fundamental ontology that Heidegger pursues in Being and Time. Unfortunately, clear and textually based commentary on this notion of authenticity has been sparse. Many prominent readings of authenticity fail to stay true to its purpose in Being and Time, opting instead to render a stronger existentialist reading than is warranted. While such readings of authenticity are truly fascinating as independent conceptions worthy of philosophical attention, they cannot be properly ascribed to Heidegger or the project of Being and Time. The present essay serves as an attempt to correct this course in the scholarship, offering a textually supported account of authenticity that recognizes its role as that which makes manifest the transparency that everyday Dasein lacks—a transparency that can do away with self-concealments and assist Heidegger in his pursuit of an answer to the question of Being qua Being.
The Iranian Political Science Associaion/Gam-e-Nou, 2024
This paper analyses social cognition by considering the analytic philosophy of mind, neurophenome... more This paper analyses social cognition by considering the analytic philosophy of mind, neurophenomenology and social neuroscience. Many social neuroscientists rely unconsciously on different philosophical answers to the question "how do we understand each other?". Consequently, we will compare the principal philosophical and experimental approaches to social cognition that have been proposed so far and join them in an integrationist account by taking into consideration the direct embeddedness of social interactors.
The Iranian Political Science Associaion/Gam-e-Nou, 2024
The human being is ontologically a relational being living with others in organized communities a... more The human being is ontologically a relational being living with others in organized communities and institutions. By focusing on the intersubjective and collective levels of human experience, this essay considers the possibility of a critical dialogue between Paul Ricoeur's and Alfred Schütz's phenomenological works toward a renewed socio-phenomenological approach to social reality. I begin with a broad framing of Husserl's second epoché or reduction to the sphere of ownness as performed within the egological sphere and then turn to Ricoeur's and Schütz's critiques of the Husserlian conception of intersubjectivity. These reflections will lead us to discuss the inconsistency of Husserl's idea of the intersubjective acceptance of the common objective nature and his formulation of the higher-order case of the communal constitution.
The Iranian Political Science Associaion/Gam-e-Nou, 2024
Hegel's account of the social conditions of anxiety. While my focus is the modern period, I use H... more Hegel's account of the social conditions of anxiety. While my focus is the modern period, I use Hegel's comments on death in previous epochs-especially in ancient Greece-to bring out the peculiarity of modernity. In the first half of the paper, I discuss the nature and conditions of anxiety. In the second half, I trace Hegel's critique of a common way to avoid-or flee from-anxiety in modernity, which results in social isolation, boredom, and emptiness. As long as the modern individual is only an economic actor in civil society, she is prone to anxiety. To confront her finitude, Hegel argues, she must endorse her political affiliation, namely, be an active and sacrificing citizen of the state.
The Iranian Political Science Associaion/Gam-e-Nou, 2024
Our research pays attention to the problem of the coverage of the realm of semiotic beings. This ... more Our research pays attention to the problem of the coverage of the realm of semiotic beings. This problem is raised by the meeting between the contemporary account of the human animal as a semiotic animal and the possible advent of a technological singularity, meaning a living technological being aware of semiosis. Apart from highlighting the prospective emergence of a complex phenomenon leading to evolutionary pressures on humans, we also pointed to a positive direction toward developing a cooperative relationship between the latter and a sustainable form of technological life: the furtherance of semiotics. To this end, we started by providing a few historical and philosophical references to help us better understand the problem at stake. Next, we described how beings gain semiotic access to reality, the distinction between the realm of semiotic beings and of machines, and the infinite character of the study of semiotics. Finally, we concluded that the realm of semiotic beings is still, despite technological advances, exclusively human.
The Iranian Political Science Associaion/Gam-e-Nou, 2024
This article is structured in two parts. In the first part there is a focus on Deleuze's philosop... more This article is structured in two parts. In the first part there is a focus on Deleuze's philosophy and in particular the question of desert(ed) islands. Running throughout this section is a consistent concern with empathy and sociality, with the changing structure of alterity in the identified movement from neurosis and psychosis to perversion. In this section, I make the argument that several forms of contemporary philosophy are carrying out acts of philosophical autism with regards to species extinction and the question of the absence of the other. I try to counter this trend in the second part of the paper, where there is a concern with thinking the structure "Us-without-world," which is my original contribution. In the time of the coronavirus pandemic, in the time of our forced solitude, in the time of our intoxication with technology, there is a real problem of the life-world, of thinking weexperience in common life, in this new hermetic reality. This is encapsulated in the thought-experiment of the structure "Us-withoutworld".
In his book It’s Not about the Gift: From Givenness to Loving, Steinbock advances a new phenomeno... more In his book It’s Not about the Gift: From Givenness to Loving, Steinbock advances a new phenomenological analysis of the gift. In this analysis, the gift is not about what is being given, but about the event of a loving relation between two subjects. In this interpersonal relation the gift emerges as each beloved withdraws themselves in order to reveal the other as they are by being loved in humility. In this paper, I undertake to express two main challenges for Steinbock’s account of the gift. The first concerns Steinbock’s attempt to disengage the phenomenon of surprise from the possibility of the gift. The second involves his neglecting the body. This neglect raises serious questions on the kind of love during which the gift is supposed to emerge. In the epilogue, instead of a conclusion, I offer some thoughts on the gift that have not been given much attention in the philosophical discussion of the gift.
The aim of this work is to demonstrate that Alfred Schütz's contribution to the social sciences i... more The aim of this work is to demonstrate that Alfred Schütz's contribution to the social sciences is understandable only within the framework of his troubled relationship with Husserl's phenomenology. We will see how Schütz tries to take charge, to face and resolve a good part of the critical issues present in Husserl's work and, above all, to make a turning point in the field of investigation of phenomenology which will prove decisive for the human sciences as it will focus his attention on the question of intersubjectivity, considered no longer as a problem concerning only the phenomenological sphere but as a fundamental category of human existence. Therefore, we will try to show how Schütz's path assumes a considerable critical value as it contributes to raise the expectations of sociology and to strengthen the confidence of this discipline which tends to go beyond the narrow boundaries outlined by Husserl and to go in a direction diametrically opposite to "The Crisis of European sciences" outlined by the father of phenomenology, since Schütz provides stable and adequate bases for the social sciences that allow to analyze the fundamental structures that support the social world, and, in this way, at the same time, he manages to safeguard the basic nucleus of the phenomenological discipline, since, stripped of metaphysical lure and devoid of verbal and oracular enchantments, it is traced back to the Husserlian idea of rigorous science. From this point of view, Schütz's merit lies primarily in having made a critical revision of phenomenology, in having initiated a broad debate on the role of the social sciences, and in having provided the first ideas for the foundation of a phenomenologically oriented sociology.
This paper presents some elements of Marc Richir's political phenomenology. Drawing from the Huss... more This paper presents some elements of Marc Richir's political phenomenology. Drawing from the Husserlian distinction between Leib and Körper and from the ontology of the flesh sketched in the last works of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Richir proposed a novel reading of the relation between phenomenology, the social, and the political. His project is built upon the distinction between incarnation and incorporation, two forms of embodiment that, while corresponding to the two ways of experiencing One's own body noted by Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, concern not only the embodied subject but also the individuation of the social body. This approach can be read as a radically embodied inquiry into the social and the political that constitutes a phenomenological critique of identitarian essentialism and disembodied universalism. In the first section of the article, I explain the role played by intersubjectivity, subjectivity, and embodiment in Richir's understanding of the process of phenomenalization. The second section is dedicated to his elaborations on the joint sensemaking of the ipse and the community, articulated around the distinction between incarnation and incorporation. In the final section, I outline a possible application of the concepts developed by Richir to the contemporary debate around identity-based politics.
In Origin of the Work of Art, Heidegger presents an evocative claim about the way the Temple to A... more In Origin of the Work of Art, Heidegger presents an evocative claim about the way the Temple to Athena on the Acropolis, opens a world rich with meaning and resonant with significance that orients the Athenian people within reality thus allowing their relations to others and to nature to appear as meaningful and ultimately nourishing. In other words, the Temple, like all great works of art, opens a world that is also a home. This article reviews the import of Heidegger’s reflection on monumental art, but we quickly turn to the principle objection to Heidegger’s thought, which is that the entire venture by which an artistic, religious, or poetic event organizes a world for “a people” is fundamentally illegitimate because of the way it binds individuals to an identity that outgroups the “foreigners” that do not belong to this identity and thus marginalizes them.This objection is a central motivating force for liberalism, and since World War II, and particularly since the fall of the S...
The Iranian Society for Phenomenology (ISP) is intending to publish the 3rd issue of “The Iranian... more The Iranian Society for Phenomenology (ISP) is intending to publish the 3rd issue of “The Iranian Yearbook of Phenomenology” in association with the Iranian Political Science Association (IPSA) and Gam-e-Nou (New Step) Publisher. We invite all those researchers that might be interested to contribute to this edited book volume. Authors should submit their final draft (in Persian or English) no later than 20 January, 2024 to the official website of the Yearbook: (http://www.iyphen.ir).
The notion of 'freedom' has gained an emblematic character in contemporary political discourse. I... more The notion of 'freedom' has gained an emblematic character in contemporary political discourse. It is, commonly, viewed as the central value and political goal of modern societies. Similarly, human rights documents conceive of freedom as their founding principle with universal validity. In contradistinction to this prevalent approach to freedom, this paper aims to demonstrate that freedom is, primarily, a political signifier with social-historical variability. One cannot, therefore, simply and uncritically assume that freedom has (or should have) universal validity or transhistorical significance. In the first section of this paper, the structure of the contemporary liberal discourse on freedom is discussed and called into question. In light of Arendt's interpretation of freedom and through her analysis of the public domain, I reflect on the social-historical variability of the meaning of freedom and its inextricable nexus with a particular form of society. In the second section and drawing on Castoriadis, the notion of 'freedom' is approached in view of human signifying practices and imaginary dimension of society. This examination reveals in what way freedom––in the sense of a central social imaginary signification––contributes to the institution of an autonomous mode of society and determines the affective disposition and intentional vector of its inhabitants.
In Origin of the Work of Art, Heidegger presents an evocative claim about the way the Temple to A... more In Origin of the Work of Art, Heidegger presents an evocative claim about the way the Temple to Athena on the Acropolis, opens a world rich with meaning and resonant with significance that orients the Athenian people within reality thus allowing their relations to others and to nature to appear as meaningful and ultimately nourishing. In other words, the Temple, like all great works of art, opens a world that is also a home. This article reviews the import of Heidegger’s reflection on monumental art, but we quickly turn to the principle objection to Heidegger’s thought, which is that the entire venture by which an artistic, religious, or poetic event organizes a world for “a people” is fundamentally illegitimate because of the way it binds individuals to an identity that outgroups the “foreigners” that do not belong to this identity and thus marginalizes them. This objection is a central motivating force for liberalism, and since World War II, and particularly since the fall of the Soviet Union, has been almost hegemonic in many strands of philosophical thought and the globalized culture more widely. Thus, we see that the objection against Heidegger is primarily ethical and political and concerns not only his philosophy but the central and inter-related phenomenological ideas of the horizon, Lebenswelt, and the world—and thus the very relation of phenomenology itself—to contemporary ethical-political thinking. But because the objections are so strongly rooted in motivations, our phenomenological inquiry into the ‘world’ will have to be supplemented by recourse to hermeneutics.
This contribution focuses on Heidegger’s critique of the vulgar nationalism contained in the Blac... more This contribution focuses on Heidegger’s critique of the vulgar nationalism contained in the Black Notebooks (1931-1938), and it follows the rejection of ideologisms that many of his works entail. According to Heidegger’s juridical reflection, “freedom is the ground of the inner possibility of correctness” with which external ideologies such as that of nationalism are avoided. This suggestion contrasts with Heidegger pro-Semitic orientation, testified by his rector’s speech in 1933, but is in line with the distance Heidegger sets between both the moral and the epistemological-ontological world, supported in his writings since the Marburg lectures (1923-1928). In the type of society, Heidegger figures out individuals live together in the πόλις by ek-sisting into the truth of being and by understanding the assignment of those directives that must become their laws and rules. These principles can’t be merely something fabricated by human reason, because they are a) the expression of social thinking made upon a juridical and normative framework close to liberalism. According to Heidegger, humanity is conceived to be free-in and able to choose the avoidance of totalitarian regimes voluntarily, as well as of eternal values supporting ideologies. With the freedom-in concept Heidegger b) solves the problem of coercive violence caused by the restriction of the ought to (i.e. the obligations that come from ideologies) towards the Being, to show the significance of ἦθος in which Dasein is placed. The choice to be in the ἦθος c) provides an explanation based on Heidegger’s critique of technology in his post-Turning writings. This critique clarifies why a national socialist ideology, making use of such technical instruments and supporting ethical materialism, is not in line with the political ontology Heidegger promotes in his writings.
This paper continues applying the notion of the “Luciferian Existential” as a way of accounting f... more This paper continues applying the notion of the “Luciferian Existential” as a way of accounting for the extreme violence humans seem to be willing to perpetrate both in nuclear war and in ignoring climate change. We begin by letting humankind and Lucifer mutually reflect what initially seems to be their distinguishing attributes. This is done as a speculative attempt to shed light on the seemingly impossible sin or crime of the greatest of all creatures in relation to God and, on the side of human beings, the unimaginable horror of the actualization of the preparation for nuclear war and continued ignoring of climate change. The hope is that we may illuminate human experience as it underwrites both horrors and how possibly human experience may illuminate the mythic-theological figure of Lucifer. Although we feature human kind’s essential being out of balance, its dodging of its mortality, and its ontological restlessness, culminating in blinding “Luciferian” rage as a way of understanding the human propensity to extreme violence, it is clear that neither the build-up of nuclear armaments nor ignoring climate change seem to be rooted in ontological restlessness or sort of blindness caused by suppression of death, or its capacity for rage or even jealousy, but in something else. Antiquity singled out pride or inordinate self-love as the perennial culprit. There is doubtless inordinate self-love in play here too, but here we suggest that it is also [inseparably the dulling of a sense of what is of ultimate importance, i.e., there is a loss of interest in what used to be called wisdom.
In this paper, my aim is to put into question Heideggerian versions of political ontology. In the... more In this paper, my aim is to put into question Heideggerian versions of political ontology. In the first section of this article, I will discuss the main tenants of Heideggerian political ontology. I will then suggest that political ontologies indebted to Heidegger are based on a mistaken inference, which functions as an incorrect evidence for the political effectiveness of Heidegger’s concepts: the Heideggerians believe that the continuous changes which characterise ontic politics are an observable proof for the existence of a negative ontological foundation. My belief – which I will argue for in the second section of this paper – is that political phenomena do indeed appear as contingent (here I agree with the Heideggerians); however, this phenomenological fact does not necessitate the Heideggerian conclusion that ontic politics presupposes negative ontological foundations. Drawing on the phenomenological descriptions of Edmund Husserl, Emmanuel Levinas, and Catherine Malabou, I will demonstrate that phenomena might simultaneously appear as contingent and as grounded in positive objects and processes. Phenomenology, therefore, provides resources to critique Heideggerian political ontology, and its conviction that ontic contingency is an evidence for the existence of negative foundations. I will conclude the paper by offering a sketch of an alternative, positive political ontology centered on the notion of antagonism, and the concomitant concept of political change.
In his interpretation of Aristotle, Heidegger points out that Aristotle's natural community is pa... more In his interpretation of Aristotle, Heidegger points out that Aristotle's natural community is part and parcel of his more general attempt to account for the presencing (ousia) of things in nature (physis). That is, in order for things in nature to be they need to fulfill their definitions. Consequently, for humans, community is the place where humans as life-possessing-logos (zoōn logon ekhon) and at the same time life-in-the-polis (zoōn politikon) can reveal their genuine definition (horismos). This will render possible the first formulation of the community as a natural community. Yet, just like the status of abnormalities and accidents in nature, prioritizing the fulfillment of justice as laws of the society over the singular expression of individuals would eventually complicate the status of justice with regard to the abnormal and unprecedented cases. Derrida’s critique of the laws shed a good light on the limitation of all laws with a universal claim which will be applied here to the Aristotelian formulation of them. Finally, this essay highlights the moments that Aristotle’s admission of the impossibility of universal laws provides the possibility of alternative comportment towards otherness and alternative ethics. In effect, it is Aristotle's mistake or "missing the mark" (hamartia) that opens the door for a new mode of following the laws, I call nomadic following.
Uploads
Papers by the Iranian Yearbook of Phenomenology
This objection is a central motivating force for liberalism, and since World War II, and particularly since the fall of the Soviet Union, has been almost hegemonic in many strands of philosophical thought and the globalized culture more widely. Thus, we see that the objection against Heidegger is primarily ethical and political and concerns not only his philosophy but the central and inter-related phenomenological ideas of the horizon, Lebenswelt, and the world—and thus the very relation of phenomenology itself—to contemporary ethical-political thinking. But because the objections are so strongly rooted in motivations, our phenomenological inquiry into the ‘world’ will have to be supplemented by recourse to hermeneutics.
This objection is a central motivating force for liberalism, and since World War II, and particularly since the fall of the Soviet Union, has been almost hegemonic in many strands of philosophical thought and the globalized culture more widely. Thus, we see that the objection against Heidegger is primarily ethical and political and concerns not only his philosophy but the central and inter-related phenomenological ideas of the horizon, Lebenswelt, and the world—and thus the very relation of phenomenology itself—to contemporary ethical-political thinking. But because the objections are so strongly rooted in motivations, our phenomenological inquiry into the ‘world’ will have to be supplemented by recourse to hermeneutics.