Rather than adopting a view of Fichte as a "proto-existentialist," as some scholars have suggeste... more Rather than adopting a view of Fichte as a "proto-existentialist," as some scholars have suggested, I instead aim to develop an account which articulates a fundamental existential structure which helps to elucidate and situate later notions of existential subjectivity by accounting for its condition of possibility. In this vein, existen-tialism not only articulates a certain kind of being in the world but a logical condition of the structure of subjectivity itself. I call this structuring condition existential logic, and locate it in Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre. I develop the term existential logic instead of merely attributing to Fichte the term existential-ism or existentialist, insofar as I aim to locate an operative structure within the being who then becomes an existential subject for whom existential engagement is only then possible. The term existential logic suggests that the striving of the self both with and against the world-as existential phenomenology would have it-is a structure inherent within Fichte's logical deduction and formulation of the Absolute I.
The institution of official platforms that call for, collect, and publish works in burgeoning fie... more The institution of official platforms that call for, collect, and publish works in burgeoning fields of inquiry is a crucial step in the legitimization and promotion of research in those areas. For instance, the 1982 founding of Hypatia instituted a forum crucial for the shaping of the discipline of feminist philosophy itself, and also for those who research and teach in this field. While journals like PhiloSOPHIA, International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics (IJFAB), Radical Philosophy, and, more recently, Critical Philosophy of Race and Latina Critical Feminism are contributing to the sedimentation of fields such as feminist philosophy, critical philosophy of race, and Latina feminism etc., to this day there is not a platform explicitly devoted to the publication of pieces that engage the critical turn in phenomenology. Inspired by the institutional changes brought about by the establishment of these journals, we decided to found what we are now proud to call Puncta: Journal of Critical Phenomenology. The journey of its founding and the publication of its first issue required numerous conversations about the scope of the journal, its target audience, the kinds of publications that we hoped to solicit, and, perhaps most importantly, what we took "critical phenomenology" to be and to be doing. By founding this journal, we endorse and promote a specific kind of phenomenological inquiry or method: a method already being deployed by contemporary feminist thinkers like Lisa Guen-ther and Mariana Ortega. These scholars, inspired by the phenomenology of Mau-rice Merleau-Ponty, Frantz Fanon, and Gloria Anzaldúa among others, conceive of critical phenomenology as a process of inquiry that, grounded in the specificity of the phenomenon it seeks to describe, remains "on its way"-in terms of both its description of the phenomenon and its methodological presuppositions. Given our indebtedness to feminist phenomenology and feminist phenomenolo-gists, the reflection on the resonances between feminist phenomenology and critical phenomenology is essential to the delineation of the contours of the field of critical phenomenology. Our designation of the term critical phenomenology is not meant to mark a limit or an inadequacy in what is now widely recognized and accepted as feminist phenomenology proper, but rather, to suggest that feminist phenomenology and philosophies of social and political critique are already inherently implicated with
Introduction By developing what I call the logic of the mask, I aim to show the import of appeara... more Introduction By developing what I call the logic of the mask, I aim to show the import of appearance-of the shallow-to Nietzsche's thinking. A paradigm of truth which locates it in the metaphysical realm far beyond the sensible world renders the shallow as that which is merely opposed to the deep. On this paradigm, depth is effectively correlated with the meaningful and surface with the meaningless. Philosophical aesthetics, which has appearance as its sole point of investigation, has elided meaningful discussions of fashion and dress with few exceptions. The rejection of dress as a "superficial" topic is predicated on a dualism between shallow and profound linking depth with meaning, and surface with inessentiality. My aim in this paper is to suggest that Nietzsche's rejection of the appearance-reality distinction (and with it, a metaphysical conception of truth) subsequently results in an affirmation of appearances which itself reorients philosophical attention to the "shallow." In their respective works on Nietzsche, Lou Andreas-Salomé and Gilles Deleuze both highlight the significance of the mask and its relationship to Nietzsche's thinking; I use Salomé and Deleuze to develop this interpretation.
Rather than adopting a view of Fichte as a "proto-existentialist," as some scholars have suggeste... more Rather than adopting a view of Fichte as a "proto-existentialist," as some scholars have suggested, I instead aim to develop an account which articulates a fundamental existential structure which helps to elucidate and situate later notions of existential subjectivity by accounting for its condition of possibility. In this vein, existen-tialism not only articulates a certain kind of being in the world but a logical condition of the structure of subjectivity itself. I call this structuring condition existential logic, and locate it in Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre. I develop the term existential logic instead of merely attributing to Fichte the term existential-ism or existentialist, insofar as I aim to locate an operative structure within the being who then becomes an existential subject for whom existential engagement is only then possible. The term existential logic suggests that the striving of the self both with and against the world-as existential phenomenology would have it-is a structure inherent within Fichte's logical deduction and formulation of the Absolute I.
The institution of official platforms that call for, collect, and publish works in burgeoning fie... more The institution of official platforms that call for, collect, and publish works in burgeoning fields of inquiry is a crucial step in the legitimization and promotion of research in those areas. For instance, the 1982 founding of Hypatia instituted a forum crucial for the shaping of the discipline of feminist philosophy itself, and also for those who research and teach in this field. While journals like PhiloSOPHIA, International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics (IJFAB), Radical Philosophy, and, more recently, Critical Philosophy of Race and Latina Critical Feminism are contributing to the sedimentation of fields such as feminist philosophy, critical philosophy of race, and Latina feminism etc., to this day there is not a platform explicitly devoted to the publication of pieces that engage the critical turn in phenomenology. Inspired by the institutional changes brought about by the establishment of these journals, we decided to found what we are now proud to call Puncta: Journal of Critical Phenomenology. The journey of its founding and the publication of its first issue required numerous conversations about the scope of the journal, its target audience, the kinds of publications that we hoped to solicit, and, perhaps most importantly, what we took "critical phenomenology" to be and to be doing. By founding this journal, we endorse and promote a specific kind of phenomenological inquiry or method: a method already being deployed by contemporary feminist thinkers like Lisa Guen-ther and Mariana Ortega. These scholars, inspired by the phenomenology of Mau-rice Merleau-Ponty, Frantz Fanon, and Gloria Anzaldúa among others, conceive of critical phenomenology as a process of inquiry that, grounded in the specificity of the phenomenon it seeks to describe, remains "on its way"-in terms of both its description of the phenomenon and its methodological presuppositions. Given our indebtedness to feminist phenomenology and feminist phenomenolo-gists, the reflection on the resonances between feminist phenomenology and critical phenomenology is essential to the delineation of the contours of the field of critical phenomenology. Our designation of the term critical phenomenology is not meant to mark a limit or an inadequacy in what is now widely recognized and accepted as feminist phenomenology proper, but rather, to suggest that feminist phenomenology and philosophies of social and political critique are already inherently implicated with
Introduction By developing what I call the logic of the mask, I aim to show the import of appeara... more Introduction By developing what I call the logic of the mask, I aim to show the import of appearance-of the shallow-to Nietzsche's thinking. A paradigm of truth which locates it in the metaphysical realm far beyond the sensible world renders the shallow as that which is merely opposed to the deep. On this paradigm, depth is effectively correlated with the meaningful and surface with the meaningless. Philosophical aesthetics, which has appearance as its sole point of investigation, has elided meaningful discussions of fashion and dress with few exceptions. The rejection of dress as a "superficial" topic is predicated on a dualism between shallow and profound linking depth with meaning, and surface with inessentiality. My aim in this paper is to suggest that Nietzsche's rejection of the appearance-reality distinction (and with it, a metaphysical conception of truth) subsequently results in an affirmation of appearances which itself reorients philosophical attention to the "shallow." In their respective works on Nietzsche, Lou Andreas-Salomé and Gilles Deleuze both highlight the significance of the mask and its relationship to Nietzsche's thinking; I use Salomé and Deleuze to develop this interpretation.
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Papers by Amie Leigh Zimmer