David Ciavatta
Toronto Metropolitan University, Philosophy, Faculty Member
- Phenomenology, Continental Philosophy, Philosophy of Agency, G.W.F. Hegel, Henri Bergson, Jean Paul Sartre, and 28 moreMerleau-Ponty, Intersubjectivity, Nineteenth-Century Continental Philosophy, Philosophy, French Revolution, Time Studies, Kant, Kant's Aesthetics, Hegel's aesthetics, Hegel's Philosophy of Right, Phenomenology/Post-Phenomenology, Philosophical Hermeneutics, Early Frankfurt School and Walter Benjamin, Marx and Western Marxism, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Social and Political Philosophy, Philosophy and Literatureocial and, Martin Heidegger, Heidegger's Being and Time, Existentialism, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Philosophy of Nature, Environmental Philosophy, Philosophy of Nature and the Environment, Aesthetics and Politics, Aesthetics, Phenomenology of the body, Phenomenology of Space and Place, Phenomenology of Temporality, Phenomenology of Time, Hermeneutic Phenomenology, Phenomenology of Illness, Phenomenology of the Body (Philosophy), and German Idealismedit
- My main research interests are in 19th and 20th Century Continental Philosophy. Some themes I have been especially i... moreMy main research interests are in 19th and 20th Century Continental Philosophy. Some themes I have been especially interested in are: the nature of freedom and agency, the link between action and perception, the nature and role of intersubjectivity, the nature of property, the nature of time and history, the role of unconscious experience, the nature and significance of familial bonds. The figures I have focused on the most are Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. I also have developed interests in Plato, Aristotle, Descartes and, more recently, in Bergson and Arendt. My current research is focused on the temporal character of action.edit
This study of the role that family life plays in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and Philosophy of Right pays particular attention to Hegel’s characterization of the family as an unconscious form of ethical life rooted essentially in... more
This study of the role that family life plays in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and Philosophy of Right pays particular attention to Hegel’s characterization of the family as an unconscious form of ethical life rooted essentially in affectivity. Ciavatta also looks at Hegel’s account of feeling in the “Anthropology” section of The Philosophy of Spirit, highlighting the inherently porous nature of the self, and this porosity is shown to be constitutive of the distinctive, unconscious form of intersubjective recognition that forms the core of family bonds. The book provides a rich understanding of the role that familial recognition has in the self's development with respect not only to other selves, but also to its experience of the world. Incorporating existential, phenomenological, and psychoanalytic perspectives, Ciavatta offers insightful investigations of many basic Hegelian themes, such as spirit, perception, ethical agency, language, and property ownership.
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Research Interests:
This paper investigates Hegel’s thesis that we are, in our practical relation to the world, inherently committed to certain aspects of idealistic metaphysics. For Hegel, our practical attitude is fundamentally at odds with a naïve realism... more
This paper investigates Hegel’s thesis that we are, in our practical relation to the world, inherently committed to certain aspects of idealistic metaphysics. For Hegel, our practical attitude is fundamentally at odds with a naïve realism that would take the world to consist ultimately of self-contained, self-sufficient individuals whose relations to one another are fundamentally external to their identities. Hegel contends that our practical attitude is premised upon an overcoming of this mutual externality, and especially the externality which is supposed to hold between individual agent and world. It is shown that his argument hinges on conceiving of external things as inadequately individuated, as compared to living agents, and that it is precisely this ontological deficiency that conditions and motivates our action. Hegel’s discussions of morality and property ownership are appealed to in order to illustrate how we might better understand the nature and practical role of this p...
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It is argued that one of Hegel's main strategies in overcoming the opposition between nature and spirit is to recognize a realm of "spiritualized nature" that has a distinctive ontological character of its own, one that,... more
It is argued that one of Hegel's main strategies in overcoming the opposition between nature and spirit is to recognize a realm of "spiritualized nature" that has a distinctive ontological character of its own, one that, though it is rooted in nature, must be understood in essentially historical terms. It is argued that for Hegel the activity of work is premised upon a commitment to the independent standing of such spiritualized nature and its historical character, and a detailed reading of Hegel's account of the slave's work in the Phenomenology of Spirit is developed to show just how it is that work transforms nature into something of historical import.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
The aim of this special issue is to tackle Hegel’s approach to the constitution of the normative on the basis of natural premises and to investigate his original version of naturalism. In the ambit of the American analytical philosophy,... more
The aim of this special issue is to tackle Hegel’s approach to the constitution of the normative on the basis of natural premises and to investigate his original version of naturalism. In the ambit of the American analytical philosophy, scholars like Sellars, Brandom and McDowell have already pointed out that Hegel’s thought is based on the inferential analysis of the logical and pragmatic elements constituting the mind, reason, self-consciousness and the normative. More recently authors like Terry Pinkard, Michael Thompson and Robert Pippin have highlighted that the Hegelian philosophy leads to the investigation about the natural requisites and premises of the cognitive and intentional stances, pinpointing that a naturalistic method of scrutiny is in play. Hegel’s naturalism is therefore a novel version of naturalism enhancing our understanding of the cognitive, intentional and social human dispositions by addressing their dependence on natural elements like life, desires, instincts and perception. As a naturalist Hegel claims that philosophy deals with natural entities and that the occurrence in human life of non observational entities like mind, cognition, self-consciousness, etc. has to be explained as emerging from and depending on natural requisites that the empirical sciences can directly observe like organic and biological properties. The domain of the normative is, following Hegel, constituted by means of the self-conscious life, namely the capacity to articulate concepts and to constitute a social dimension based on norms and interpersonal interaction. Self-conscious life and the normative, namely the domain of freedom and autonomy, are not explained in his thought as irreducible to and independent from nature understood as the domain of causality, but rather as elements proper of a natural substratum with which they establish a mutual dependence. Briefly illustrated, his naturalism consists in keeping the difference between the normative and nature and, nonetheless, avoiding any sort of dualism or unsolvable contrast between them. The advantage of this approach is explaining these two ambits as reciprocally dependent: self-conscious life does not originate by the separation from nature, but rather by establishing and understanding its own bonds and dependence to nature. In contrast to other more naive versions of naturalism, which separate mind from nature by underlining the former’s emergent character, Hegel’s one maintains that the relation nature-mind is based on the mutual dependence between these two ontogenetic factors of human life and that the cognitive and social dispositions originate from the naturalization of logical and inferential categories of thinking. Consequently, understanding the normative requires a naturalized approach to the cognitive and social aspects constituting what Hegel calls Geist, namely the normative substance subjected to a historic evolution and deployed for explaining the logical structure of human civilization. Finally, this special issue intends to account for the naturalistic premises of normativity in order to extend our understanding of the philosophical category of naturalism and to enhance the comprehension of normativity from a naturalized perspective.
Research Interests: Philosophy, Philosophy of Mind, Political Philosophy, Philosophy of Biology, German Idealism, and 10 moreHegel, Self Consciousness, Philosophy of Social Science, Normativity, G.W.F. Hegel, Naturalism, The Hegelian Recognition / The Dialectic of Master and Slave Relationship, Naturalism and Normativity, Hegel's aesthetics, and Classical German Philosophy
Research Interests: Phenomenology, Metaphysics of Time, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Habitus, Phenomenology of the body, and 13 morePhilosophy of Time, Time Perception, Philosophy of Nature, Phenomenology of the Body (Philosophy), Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Temporality, Temporality (Time Studies), Temporality, Existentialism, Phenomenology of Time, Duration, Repression, and M. Merleau-Ponty
In this paper it is argued that the conceptions of embodied meaning and of intuition that Hegel appeals to in the Aesthetics anticipate some of Merleau-Ponty’s insights concerning the distinctive character of pre-conceptual, sensuous... more
In this paper it is argued that the conceptions of embodied meaning and of intuition that Hegel appeals to in the Aesthetics anticipate some of Merleau-Ponty’s insights concerning the distinctive character of pre-conceptual, sensuous forms of meaning. It is argued that, for Hegel, our aesthetic experience of the beautiful is such that we cannot readily differentiate in it the purportedly distinct roles that sensation and thought play, and so that the account of sensuous intuition operative here differs from the one appealed to in more familiar, “intellectualist” conceptions that are premised upon our being able to make such a distinction. Some of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological insights are brought to bear to help support and illuminate some of the implications of Hegel’s conception of such sensuously embodied meaning.
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Research Interests:
Hegel's specifi c interpretation of burial rituals in the Phenomenology is an important part of his general understanding of the development of human freedom and of spirit. For Hegel, freedom is not something immediately given, but... more
Hegel's specifi c interpretation of burial rituals in the Phenomenology is an important part of his general understanding of the development of human freedom and of spirit. For Hegel, freedom is not something immediately given, but something that must be realized by way of the self's ongoing practical engagement with the world, and in particular by way of the self's transformation of the otherwise meaningless realm of nature into a vehicle for realizing a specifi cally human meaning. The practice of burial rites is construed as accomplishing such a transformation, and thereby as a crucial manner in which this dialectic between freedom and nature is played out. Attention is paid to Hegel's conception of the earth as the material condition for freedom's self-realization, and the symbolic dimension of burial rites is shown to have implications for Hegel's overall theory of human agency.
Research Interests: Ritual, Phenomenology, German Idealism, Hegel, Funerary Archaeology, and 16 moreG.W.F. Hegel, Ritual Theory, Phenomenology of Space and Place, Phenomenology of Spirit, Nature, Philosophy of Death, Hegel (Philosophy) (Philosophy), Funerary Practices, German Romanticism and Idealism (mainly Hegel), Freedom, Antigone, German romanticism and idealism, Ritual Practices, Antigone Sophocles, Hegel's Phenomenology of the Mind/spirit, and Phänomenologie Des Geistes
In this paper, one of Merleau-Ponty’s distinctive contributions to the phenomenological conception of the link between time and agency is explored: namely, his attempt to identify a form of agency—that of our standing dispositions—that... more
In this paper, one of Merleau-Ponty’s distinctive contributions to the phenomenological conception of the link between time and agency is explored: namely, his attempt to identify a form of agency—that of our standing dispositions—that subsists across and underlies our temporally individuated actions. The distinctive temporal character of such general dispositions is investigated, and it is argued that Merleau-Ponty’s account of the cyclical temporality of nature, in distinction to the historical temporality associated with our episodic actions, provides a model in terms of which to understand the temporality peculiar to our practical dispositions.
Research Interests: Philosophy of Agency, Philosophy of Action, Embodiment, Phenomenology, Continental Philosophy, and 17 moreHenri Bergson, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of the body, Action Theory, Philosophy of Time, Dispositions, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Paul Sartre, Phenomenology of the Body (Philosophy), Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Temporality, Temporality (Time Studies), Temporality, Sartre, Phenomenology, Hermeneutics, contemporary continental philosophy, axiology (theories and applied research on values), philosophical and cultural anthropology, diversity managment, gender studies, intercultural communication, and translations studies, Contemporary Continental Philosophy, and Phenomenology- Mind/Body Problems/ Merleau-Ponty's Philosophical Thought/Phenomenology and Embodiment
This paper shows that Hegel's ontology of living beings provides us with indispensable conceptual resources for making sense of his account of the ontology of human action. For Hegel, living bodies are ontologically distinct in that their... more
This paper shows that Hegel's ontology of living beings provides us with indispensable conceptual resources for making sense of his account of the ontology of human action. For Hegel, living bodies are ontologically distinct in that their objective presence is thoroughly permeated by the self-reflexivity characteristic of subjectivity, and as such they cannot be adequately conceived in terms of categories (mechanistic, chemical, or generally causal categories) that are appropriate to inanimate, " subject-less " objects. It is argued that actions are similar in this regard, and like organic bodies they need to be conceived as self-realizing, self-articulating, dynamic wholes whose various material parts cannot be thought independently of their internal relations and their place in the whole. It is argued, further, that the categories Hegel appeals to in conceiving how organisms develop through stages are useful for making sense of how the objective shape of an action unfolds over time.