Philosophy of experience

The philosophical line of inquiry opened by Edmund Husserl remains one of the most inspiring ones for contemporary thinking, insofar as it places the experiential dimension at its center. Yet its initial disposition rests upon a fundamental misunderstanding. While phenomenology scolded the traditional representationalist accounts, for which we never have the things themselves, but ever only internal representations of it, its major advanced consisted in stressing that in experience, we have the things in themselves and not just emissaries or representatives. However, this advance, which we will qualify as the " principle of selfhood " led to imprudently make another assumption, that is that in experience, we do not only have the things themselves (principle of selfhood) but that we also have them immediately (principle of immediacy). A deconstructive analysis of experience provides such a postulation to be problematic: what appears (phainestai) is never given right off the bat, but appears through something else (dia phainestai). The paper indicates where a deconstruction of Husserl's theoretical framework is necessary, and sketches the transformations of phenomenology into a kind of thinking that makes space for the intermediaries of experiences. Diaphenomenology starts off with the assumption that whatever appears appears through something. Experience has to be conceived of as transphenomenality. A diaphenomenological perspective moves away from both a foundationalist account of subjectivity (where the ego is the ground for all appearances) and a merely accusative account of it (where the ego is nothing but a pole of affections). It describes the modes in which the subject is actor, albeit not author of her experiences. 1. Phenomenology as a science of experience: The principle of selfhood

In Le don d'hospitalité : quand recevoir c'est donner, Revue du MAUSS, n°53, premier semestre 2019

Résumé : Cet article met en cause le traitement de l’hospitalité proposé par Jacques Derrida, en revenant sur la conceptualisation du don dessinée dans Donner le temps. Derrida aborde en effet l’hospitalité à partir d’une philosophie du don qui entend disjoindre le « donner » du « recevoir », en s’écartant nettement du modèle du don maussien. L’article montre en quoi la philosophie du don proposée par Derrida s’avère inadéquate pour concevoir l’hospitalité ; d’abord parce que l’hospitalité n’est pas seulement ouverture mais aussi réception, ensuite parce qu’une philosophie de l’hospitalité doit être en mesure de penser la revendication d’hospitalité et les abus d’hospitalité.


Abstract : This article questions Jacques Derrida’s treatment of hospitality by revi- siting the conceptualization of the gift depicted in Donner le temps. Derrida approaches hospitality from the standpoint of a philosophy that seeks to dissociate “giving” from “receiving,” clearly departing from the Maussian model. The article shows how Derrida’s philosophy of donation is inadequate to conceive hospitality ; first because hospitality is not only openness but also receiving, and second because a philosophy of hospitality must be able to think about hospitality claims and abuses.

Steven Katz in 1978 changed how the Academy analyzed mystical experience. This was an important achievement and brought the study to new depths. However, he also created a false description of human experience and many have attempted to challenge him.
'Let me state the single epistemological assumption that has exercised my thinking…There are no pure (i.e. unmediated) experiences. '
A simple statement that was flawed the moment it was made.
This paper will in greater detail than my prior paper on Katz,[RE: article dealing with Donald Evan's challenge to Katz],  ,disclose the flaw in the logic structure of that statement. It will demonstrate why it can not be accept as valid on its face.
This paper will offer a defensible alternative to his assertion concerning experience. One that has implications for the study of mysticism.

Le monde sensible et le monde de l’expression is one of the two earliest courses that Maurice Merleau-Ponty held at Collège de France 1953. It belongs to a period when his philosophy undergoes a radical development, although the texts from these years still remain largely unexplored. This publication, edited by Emmanuel de Saint Aubert and Stefan Kristensen, offers an important elucidation of the very movement of the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty from Phenomenology of Perception to The Visible and the Invisible.
The goal of the course, Merleau-Ponty states, is to deepen the analysis of perception in order to understand:

the expressive relation the body - the sensible, natural or mute world
man - the institutional, cultural or speaking world

The relation between the body and the sensible world is the main theme of this course, whereas the relation between man and the cultural world will be treated in another course the following year. The general aim of both studies is to understand the relation between the sensible and the cultural world, as this was insufficiently elaborated in his earlier works. The first lecture presents an important critique of Phenomenology of Perception, where Merleau-Ponty states that, although he wanted to challenge the classical notions, the book “remained nevertheless ordered by classical concepts.” Therefore, the relation between perception and being remained enigmatic, and the ontological implications of his phenomenology unclear. Thus he again approaches the notion of perception and searches to give an account of it in which it is no longer conceived as sensory givenness, but as an “access to being.”

Any understanding of how we can engage and interact – in digital as well as real worlds – presupposes an understanding of experience. And experience is one of the most formidable philosophical problems. Experience is the basis for all our interactions with the world, our integration in the world and understanding of the world. There is no position outside of experience from which we could investigate experience objectively, we always already are experiencing beings. To make matters worse, insofar as we as experiencing subjects are part of this objective world, this radically subjective experience does not only grant us knowledge of the (objective) world, it is also an actual part of objective reality. This intricate structure, if taken seriously, undercuts the distinction between subjective experience and objective science, between mind and matter – and possibly the distinction between the virtual and the actual. In this chapter I will argue that two of the most prominent process thinkers in the 20th century, Alfred North Whitehead and Henri Bergson, have investigated this Gordian knot of experience tying the real, the subjective, the virtual and the objective together in a similar fashion, providing similar reasons and tools to cut across these traditional distinctions. In the first part of the talk, I will use arguments provided by both thinkers to outline why objective science, traditional philosophy and common sense make it difficult to understand experience. The ultimate reason being that our practical interests and concepts motivate and distort the way we interpret experiences. I will then outline the idea of a philosophy of creativity that emerges from a transformed understanding of engaged experience. This transformed experiential engagement is based on intuition in Bergson and in Whitehead that it rests on causal efficacy, i.e. experiences, feelings and sympathy.

[1] The existence of experience, i.e. conscious experience, is a certainly known natural fact. It is the most certainly known general natural fact. The bedrock of any real or genuine naturalism, any remotely realistic naturalism is, accordingly, outright realism about experience. It follows that many current formulations of naturalism are profoundly anti-naturalistic. [2] By ‘realism about experience’ I mean real realism about experience. Briefly, real realists about experience take experience to be what they took it to be before they did any philosophy, e.g. when they were 6 years old. [3] Physicalism is the view that concrete reality is entirely physical in nature. I take physicalism to be part of naturalism, so I take it that experience is entirely physical. [4] Evidently physicalist naturalism rules out anything incompatible with the truths of physics. There is, however, a crucial respect in which physics only gives structural information about the nature of concrete reality, and has nothing to say about the intrinsic nature of the concrete reality in so far as its intrinsic nature is more than its structure. [5] It follows that physicalist naturalism can’t rule out panpsychism or panexperientialism, which is arguably the simplest theory of the nature of reality (there is no evidence for the existence of any non-experiential reality).