Philosophy and Religious Studies

How did the Greco-Roman world of the 2nd century BCE through the 4th century CE conceive of sex-and-gender as a definitive element of personal selfhood and by what means did an individual change their sex? Greco-Roman religion in the late republican and imperial periods engendered a polyphonic moral environment in which a widely diverse range of cultic practices provided religious justification for sexual transition. Focusing on the arrival of the cult of the goddess Cybele into Rome in 204 BCE and ending with the prohibition of pagan worship by the Christian emperor Theodosius in 394CE, this article considers the mythic legitimization and cultic execution of transsexual experience as exemplified by the sect’s clergy, the gallai, and by other individuals and groups. Gender transition in this context denotes a change in physical anatomy, a change in behavior and appearance, and the cultural or countercultural recognition of the legitimacy of the transition. The process had three elements, religiously sanctioned madness, castration accompanied by radical alteration in appearance and behavior, and inclusion in or recognition by a gender-variant community, sometimes accompanied by mainstream public acceptance and the protection and sanction of the Roman state. Each of these three elements was a necessary, and none a sufficient, cause of sexual transformation. Inspired by Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality (vol. 2), this paper uses surveys of the existing textual record in relation to myth, mystery religions, Greek rationalism, comedic literature, and imperial history to sketch the problematization of sexual transition with six distinctive features: 1. A near-total conflation of sex and gender. 2. Divine intervention. 3. Extermination of intersex children 4. Castration as a sacred ritual effecting psycho-sexual union with Cybele-Agdistis. 5. Sexual transformation as non-consensual. 6. The inversion of male power structures. Some aspects of transsexual experience as described in the textual record, e.g. the consent of the subject was not necessary, are difficult to reconcile with contemporary gender theory.

In response to some recent commentaries that interpret Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical development as characterized by revising the results of Phenomenology of Perception, this essay argues that this development is rather marked by an important continuity, namely the articulation a philosophy of “ontological lateness.” I elaborate the theme of ontological lateness through an account of Merleau-Ponty’s critique of transcendental idealism and his account of the phenomenological reduction in the Forward. Through a discussion of the meta-philosophical significance of ontological lateness, the essay concludes by locating this theme as the site of continuity between this earlier work and some later texts.

In response to worries that Merleau-Ponty's pivotal text, Phenomenology of Perception, is committed to a "philosophy of consciousness," this paper addresses the theory of sense-genesis offered in this text. Rather than a theory of "constitution" and its correlate of consciousness, an examination of Le sentir as well as some remarks in La temporalité illustrates Merleau-Ponty's theory of sense-genesis as the becoming or dehiscence of sense precisely as a temporalizing differentiation, an éclatement of sense characterized by a certain non-coincidence and lateness.

In an effort to reassess the status of Phenomenology of Perception and its relation to The Visible and the Invisible, this essay argues that Merleau-Ponty's engagement with Husserl's text and his discussion of the “field of presence” in La temporalité are intended to think through the field in which time makes its appearance as one of passage. Time does not show itself as presence or in the present but manifests itself as Ablauf, as lapse or flow, an écoulement that is simultaneously an explosion, an éclatement. Merleau-Ponty's account of temporality in these pages is thus legible as recovering the primordial experience of time as a self-differentiating déhiscence in its dual power of articulation and erosion. Time is thus simultaneously the vehicle of the world's appearance and of its “disarticulation”, the passage of a rhythm of affirmation and disintegration.

This conference tackles the issue of vulnerability and reassess the ontological framework of philosophical and psychological theories in dialogue with the phenomenological tradition and contemporary moral theory. This event is aimed at (1) facilitating institutional cooperation between American and European philosophers working on phenomenology; (2) creating a transatlantic research network for young researchers interested in phenomenology; (3) showcasing the importance of phenomenology for understanding vulnerability in dialogue with other philosophical areas or other fields (anthropology, feminist theory, cognitive science, mind theory etc.); and (4) raising awareness among the general public and promoting contemporary philosophical research on vulnerability and its potential impact on society.

The Husserl Archive at the New School for Social Research was established in 1966 in honor of Alfred Schütz in an effort to promote the philosophy of Edmund Husserl as well as the phenomenological tradition more generally. To this end, the center hosts small research groups, seminars, workshops, and conferences that bring together international students and scholars working in or near the phenomenological tradition. In concert with this aim, the conference seeks to further establish the Archive as a center for phenomenological research on the east coast for junior scholars working in phenomenology and to strengthen scholarly ties to the Husserl Archives in Leuven and Paris. This conference will be the inaugural event of this organization in an effort to facilitate cross-continental collaboration between American and European scholars in addition to strengthening research activities in the area of phenomenology in the U.S. The groundwork for this organization and conference is already in place to the extent that many of the scholars we intend to invite already have a record of collaboration. Nonetheless, there has not yet been an umbrella research group linking the Husserl Archives in Louvain, New York, and Paris and affiliated researchers. The two-day conference will include a total of twelve (12) invited presentations with representatives from these respective research centers and others.

Phenomenology is often hailed as one of the most important philosophical movements of the 20th century, impacting virtually every area of continental philosophy, including post-structuralism, deconstruction, feminist theory, as well as areas of psychology, anthropology, and sociology. Today, phenomenology has become influential in philosophical psychology, philosophy of mind, and cognitive science for questions of consciousness, and we aim to create a forum for the discussion of phenomenology’s cross and interdisciplinary relevance. Today, the problem of vulnerability has currency for feminist theory, care studies, moral philosophy, as well as for questions of inter-subjectivity and empathy in cognitive science. We hope to reach a wide audience with the conference and to make explicit the importance of phenomenological method and thought for the question of vulnerability, particularly as it relates to the intersection of phenomenology and global issues today.

This essay provides a sketch of Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of
love in relation to human experience and to the conceptualization
of φιλία and σοφία outlined in his later works. In response to what
he calls a “cruel thought … that is more fear of error than it is a
love of truth”, Merleau-Ponty’s reflections on love and jealousy in
Proust offer a concept of “fugitive love”. Opposed to the Cartesian
desire for apodicticity that seeks to seize and arrest, fugitive love
means withholding one’s touch and letting the beloved die. In its
offer of dispossession rather than possession, love requires faith.
This faith, the opposite of faith in an absolute λόγος, invites and
accepts being’s occultation as the very means of its openness.
Merleau-Ponty’s thought offers a mode of philosophizing that no
longer aims to make being its captive but a philosophy of
weakness that allows for its withdraw.

Addressing Merleau-Ponty's work Phenomenology of Perception in dialogue with The Visible and the Invisible, his lectures at the Collège de France, and his reading of Proust, this book argues that at play in his thought is a philosophy of “ontological lateness”. This describes the manner in which philosophical reflection is fated to lag behind its objects and, therefore, an absolute grasp on being remains beyond its reach. This lateness is due to the extent to which reflection finds itself in the grip of a deflagration and splitting open of sense, a deflagration articulated through the unfurling of temporal flux. Insofar as temporality by its very nature never achieves the density of completed being, it constitutes not only the delay of reflection behind its object but also ontological lateness, the lateness of expressivity to being.

Merleau-Ponty articulates this philosophy against the backdrop of what he calls “cruel thought”, a style of reflecting that seeks resolution by limiting, circumscribing, and arresting its object. By contrast, the philosophy of ontological lateness seeks no such final unveiling-no apocalypsis-but is characterized by its ability to accept the veiling-the calypsis-of being and its own constitutive lack of punctuality. To this extent, his thinking inaugurates a new relation to the becoming of sense that overcomes cruel thought. Philia-sophia, loving wisdom, is no longer understood as possession of anything-not of knowledge, truth, the other, or even of oneself. Rather, Merleau-Ponty's work gives voice to a wisdom of dispossession that allows for the withdrawal of being.

This essay examines Merleau-Ponty's proposal to articulate a new ontology by returning to the pre-Socratic idea of φύσις by following a reference he makes to Heraclitus's fragment B52. Interestingly, this fragment refers to αἰών, " eternity, " as a child at play. Against the Laplacean idea that nature is the necessary and calculable unfolding of causes and effects, and anticipating what Deleuze will outline in The Logic of Sense, Merleau-Ponty suggests that φύσις—understood in terms of the temporal disorder of αἰών rather than the Aristotelian order of χρόνος—is an ideal game without rules, what Nietzsche describes as an "innocent caprice. "

This paper explores the significance of Heraclitus’s fragment B45 for Husserl and Merleau-Ponty as it appears in the Crisis of the European Sciences and Merleau-Ponty’s lectures on this text in the late 1950s. I claim that at stake is a revision or mutation of the sense of transcendentality: by naming it psyche, the transcendental is no longer understood as a static set of a priori conditions but what I call, following Jean-Luc Nancy, “outsidedness.” I elaborate this idea in dialogue with Nancy and Derrida in their texts “De l’âme” and On Touching: Jean-Luc Nancy. By identifying the sense transcendentality with the psyche of Heraclitus, we see that the transcendental is something in the process of departing and hence an event for which we always arrive late.

Insight into the influential philosopher's late-career push toward a new ontology The Possibility of Philosophy presents the notes that Maurice Merleau-Ponty prepared for three courses he taught at the Collège de France: "The Possibility of Philosophy Today," given in the spring semester of 1959; and "Cartesian Ontology and Ontology Today" and "Philosophy and Nonphilosophy since Hegel," both given in the spring semester of 1961. The last two courses remain incomplete due to Merleau-Ponty's unexpected death on May 3, 1961. Nonetheless, they provide indications of the new ontology that informed The Visible and the Invisible, a posthumously published work that was under way at the same time. These courses offer readers of Merleau-Ponty's late thought a wealth of references-to painting, literature, and psychoanalysis, and to the works of Husserl, Heidegger, Descartes, Hegel, and Marx-that fill in some of the missing pieces of The Visible and the Invisible, especially its often terse and sometimes cryptic working notes. We see more clearly how Merleau-Ponty's attempt to bring forth a new ontology indicates a fundamental revision in what it means to think, an attempt to reimagine the possibility of philosophy.

In light of more contemporary interest in the concept of an immemorial past, this essay takes up the manner in which this idea figures in Merleau-Ponty’s works by turning to the famous reference to “a past that has never been present” in Phenomenology of Perception. In order to contextualize and think through what Merleau-Ponty means, I turn to a reference in the same text to “primary silence.” Merleau-Ponty’s concern is to disclose the differential between the concatenation of sensibility and expression and what remains beyond the bounds of the sensible. The task of phenomenology, accordingly, is the disclosure of this primary silence, this primary non-sense. Finally, articulating that this differential never ceased to be a concern for Merleau-Ponty, and, turning to texts from the 1950s as well as to The Visible and the Invisible, we see the development of Merleau-Ponty’s thought as the consistent effort to think through this question.  

New York City is home to a thriving immigrant community of Guyanese Hindus. Descended from indentured laborers who left India in the 19th and early 20th centuries, these Hindus moved again to New York in the second half of the 20th century. They have roots in both India and Guyana, and are thus in a position of "double diaspora." In New York, they now have many more opportunities to meet and interact with recent Indian immigrants in their new home. This paper examines how members of this religious community understand themselves and their relationship with their own past and future, how they think and feel about India and the Indians that they meet in New York, and how their situation of double diaspora shapes both their anxieties and their hopes for their community.