The concept of experience by John Dewey revisited: conceiving, feeling and “enliving”. Dewey takes a few steps towards a differentiation of the concept of experience, such as the distinction between primary and secondary experience, or between ordinary (partial, raw, primitive) experience and complete, aesthetic experience. However, he does not provide a systematic elaboration of these distinctions. In the present text, a differentiation of Dewey’s concept of experience is proposed in terms of feeling, “enliving” (a neologism proposed in this paper) and (...) conceiving. Feeling refers to the basic mode of experience where action, emotion, cognition and communication constitute an original unity. Enliving, aesthetic experience, constitutes the lifeworld, as a person-in-world experience. Even though enliving is holistic and relational, a certain distance emerges between action, emotion and cognition which allows contemplation and choice. Conceiving, on the other hand, refers to the isolating and abstracting understanding of the world with even greater distance between action, emotion and cognition. Such a differentiation provides a clearer understanding of the scope of education. It avoids the risks of regressive tendencies in the concept of experience, and it helps to include conceiving within the realm of experience. (shrink)

The work of Anthony J. Steinbock on emotions―particularly moral emotions―and on religious experience is closely related to a methodological claim. This claim is that the concepts of “experience” and “manifestation” should be understood in a broader manner than that of classical phenomenology, particularly Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology. In this paper, I examine the way in which Steinbock understands and conceptualizes the kind of givenness to which he refers with the notion of “vertical experience”. I focus on his claim that vertical experiences (...) are irreducible to the kind of experiences that can be described in terms of what he calls “provocation”, “presentation” and the “noesis-noema structure”. Even though I make a criticism of his assertion that the latter implies that they should not be understood as forms of givenness founded on the above-mentioned structure, I agree with some major implications that he draws from them. In the last part of the paper, I discuss his suggestion that the Husserlian conceptualization of emotional givenness should be revised to set forward their structure in terms of what he calls “evocation” and try to give additional reasons, drawn from Husserl himself, to support this claim. The paper comes concludes by stressing the relevance of Steinbock’s analyses concerning what he calls “idolatry”. I argue that his analyses of attitudes that negate the vertical dimension of experience have far reaching implications that go beyond the field of philosophy of religion and open new, promising paths for phenomenological research on social and moral problems. (shrink)

Nach der üblichen Interpretation löst der Rationalist Descartes empirische Fragen durch einen Rekurs auf die Evidenz der Vernunft, wobei er dieser den Vorzug gegenüber offensichtlich widersprechenden Erfahrungstatsachen einräumt. Dieser Aufsatz stellt 1. einige relevante Züge der Cartesischen Theorie des Subjekts des Erfahrungswissens dar; 2. untersucht er die Vielfalt der Bedeutungen, in denen Descartes das Wort expérience gebraucht, und 3. sucht er zu zeigen, daß die Texte, in denen Descartes behauptet, er ziehe die Vernunft der Erfahrung vor, in Übereinstimmung mit 1. (...) und 2. interpretiert werden können als eine Wahl zwischen zwei Arten von empirischer Evidenz und nicht als Zusammenstoß konkurrierender Vermögen. (shrink)

Abstract A principle aim of this paper is to convince friends and critics of deconstruction that they have overlooked two crucial aspects of Derrida's work, namely, his rearticulation of the concept of experience and his account of the experience of undecidability as an ordeal. This is important because sensitivity to Derrida's emphasis on the ordeal of undecidability and his rearticulation of the concept of experience-a rearticulation that is already under way in his early engagement with Husserl and continued in later (...) work-necessitates a rethinking of what the `experience of undecidability' entails. Rather than signaling a withdrawal from politics or a normatively impotent ethics of `mere openness to the other,' Derrida's account of the experience of undecidability not only points to a fundamental aspect of our basic ethical experience but also leads to a number of ethico-political demands, which I summarize as the demand to maintain an ethos of interruption. (shrink)

This essay explores the idea of experience and its epistemological and practical role in maintaining the health of a household among early modern English Royalists. A number of prominent royalists during the mid-seventeenth century British Civil Wars expended quite some effort in the collection of medical recipes, including Queen Henrietta Maria herself, as well as William and Margaret Cavendish, and the Talbot sisters—Elizabeth Grey and Alethea Howard. This essay looks at these Royalists and four of their collections: three published (Henrietta (...) Maria, Grey, Howard), and one manuscript (the Caven­dishes), in order to determine how they conceptualized experience and its role in medical practice. The claim that such recipe collections represent a new, anti-Aristotelian idea of experience as a specific, particular event is disputed through a quantitative and qualitative analysis of these collections. Instead, it is argued that there a number of related conceptions of experience found in these Royalist recipe collections, but the basic idea is one where experience indicates long experience or expertise, an idea that can traced back at least to humanist medicine of the Renaissance, and likely back to Galen. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Concept of Experience in Locke and Hume JOHN W. YOLTON THE EMPIRICISTPROGRAM has been designed to show that all conscious experience "comes from" unconscious encounters with the environment, and that all intellectual contents (concepts, ideas) derive from some conscious experiential component. Some empiricists, but not all, have also argued that experience reports about the world. A strict empiricism would have to reject this latter claim, as Hume did, (...) although even to consider the possibility of knowledge being related to an external world is to operate on a reflective level, to seek to make sense of experience. The distinction between an account of the nature of experience--its structure, relations, and contents-and explanations of experience--its causal antecedents, its reference--is an important one. The phrase "the concept of experience" refers to the use made of some account of experience. The concept of experience need not be restricted to the experiential contents. Thus, Locke sought to show how experience is of the world, Hume tried to show how experience restricts our valid conceptual contents to certain sorts of ideas, eliminating others. Any account of experience will already be a conceptualization of experience: it must be made from the reflective level. But the account need be no more than a careful record of how the organism comes to the conscious level. Of course, such an account cannot be a straightforward description, since we cannot directly observe all of the processes operating in the production of awareness. The psychology of awareness is forced to extrapolate and conjecture. Nevertheless, we can still distinguish the psychological or descriptive account of experience from the metaphysical use made of that account. It is my purpose here to explore the accounts given and the uses made of experience by two representative empiricists, that is, by philosophers whom we look upon as advancing the empiricist metaphysic of experience. Locke's Derivation o[ Ideas From Experience Locke claimed that all mental contents come from two sources, sensory experience of the world and introspective awareness of our mental processes. The program of Book II of his Essay was to exemplify, by reference to a [53] 54 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY number of different ideas and concepts, this derivation of our mental contents. The counter claim for Locke was innatism, the view held by many of his contemporaries and refuted in the first book of his Essay. In order to appreciate what Locke's alternative to innatism was, we must try to discover what the program of derivation of ideas amounts to in his epistemology and what precisely he understood by the term "experience." We must first note that he offers the program of derivation in conjunction with a complex theory of mental operations. H. H. Price has remarked that it is "historically false that the empiricist thought the human mind passive. It would be more just to criticize them for making it more active than it can possibly be.''1 Mental processes play a most active and decisive role in the genesis of all ideas in Locke's account. In the case of simple ideas of sense even, the mind must be attentive to what the senses report, else that report will go unrecorded, or be recorded only at the neural level (II, I, #6, #8, and II, IX, #3). Locke frequently draws the distinction between mental contents or processes and physical processes. In the "Epistle to the Reader," where he defines "idea," he is careful to distinguish idea from the sound we "use as a sign of it." In I, I, #2 he draws a distinction between the "physical consideration of the mind" and the non-physical consideration, although he does not have a name for the latter. He also speaks there of "sensations by our organs" and "ideas in our understanding." Locke disclaimed any intention of going into the physical account of sensation. He simply accepted the current corpuscular theory. But although he is not always as precise as we would be about the physical and physiological levels of encounter, in distinction from the mental levels, he does hold to this division. II, I, #3, for instance, speaks of the senses conveying "into the mind" several "distinct perceptions... (shrink)

In this paper, I develop a comparison between the philosophies of Husserl and James in relation to their concepts of experience. Whereas various authors have acknowledged the affinity between James’ early psychology and Husserl’s phenomenology, the late development of James’ philosophy is often considered in opposition to Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology. This is because James’ radical empiricism achieves a non-dual dimension of experience that precedes the functional division into subject and object, thus contrasting with the phenomenological analysis of the dual structure (...) of intentionality. However, I argue that the later “genetic” development of phenomenology converges with some central aspects of James’ radical empiricism. This is because genetic phenomenology leads us to conceive of the flow of primal impressions as a fundamental dimension of experience that precedes the subject-object duality and is at the base of the process of co-constitution of the subject and the object in reciprocal dependence. At the same time, Husserl conceives of the impressional core of experience as structured by formal conditions that depend on the concrete constitution of an embodied subject. For this reason, I argue that Husserl’s genetic phenomenology can complement James’ radical empiricism, thus leading to the development of the doctrine of pure experience as a form of empirical and not metaphysical realism. (shrink)

Context: The idea to write this paper sprang up in a casual conversation that led to the question of how the word “experience” would be translated into German. Distinctions between the German “Erleben” and “Erfahren,” and their intricacies with “Erkennen” and “Anerkennen,” soon led to the conviction that this was a thread worth pursuing. Problem: Much has been written about the nature of experience, but there is little consensus, to this day, regarding the role of consciousness in the process of (...) experiencing. Although RC acknowledges the significance of tacit or sensorimotor knowledge in the individual’s practical operating, it cannot admit it as a basis to the formation of conceptual structures that, by definition, are conscious. Method: Drawing from our backgrounds in epistemology and psychology, and a shared interest in Piaget’s psychogenetic approach, we investigate the origins and development of human experience, in this case the mastery of space, time, causation, and object-permanency. We focus on how “noticeable encounters” are gauged, reflected upon, and ultimately worked through, consciously or unconsciously, by the “experiencer.” Results: A child’s abilities to enact a certain action pattern in a given situation no more demonstrates a re-presentation of the pattern than does recognition in the case of objects. In his studies with children, Piaget has shown that the Kantian categories of space, time object, and “causality” are co-constitutive of the child’s own motion – and its felt impact – as a means to make the world cohere. Of importance here are the concepts of “effective causality,” felicitous encounters, and agency. Implications: Understanding the circumstances under which some “lived” events, whether self-initiated or striking as if out of nowhere, become noticeable and able affect a person’s life is a daunting task. This joint essay is no more than a conversation-starter and an invitation to further explore the intricacies between agency and causation, sensation and cognition, and, yes, motions and emotions in the making of consciousness itself. (shrink)

Heidegger’s exegesis of Hegel’s concept of experience was not published under copyright until 1950, when, as part of Holzwege, it appeared under the Klostermann imprint. Previously, it had been aired in the 1942–43 academic year as a seminar topic, conceived as a comparison between the “Introduction” of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind and the fourth and tenth books of Aristotle’s Metaphysics; and, at the same time, as two lectures to a private group of interested scholars. This volume unites the Dove translation (...) of the Hegelian Introduction with the Harper and Row translation of the Heideggerian exegesis. (shrink)

In this article I argue that the contested concept of Bildung, with its roots in the late 18th century, remains of interest in the postmodern era, even if there is also certainly a debate about it having had its day. In the specific discussion about Bildung and democracy, I suggest that Dewey's reconstructed concept of experience has several points in common with a more recent understanding of Bildung, at the same time as it can provide insight into how democracy can (...) be understood within the field of Bildung. In brief, in this article I suggest that if we wish to discuss democracy and Bildung, Dewey's notion of experience might offer a bridge between the two concepts, as well as an understanding of subjectivity, learning, and communication as a whole. Finally, I argue that communication is a necessary part of both democracy and Bildung—not because of certain human similarities, but because of the similarities in some of the problems which we humans encounter, and which we think are worth reflecting upon. (shrink)

Hans-Johann Glock develops a capacity-based alternative to the currently widespread view that concepts and experiences are mental representations. He claims that experiences must be explained by way of perceptual and sensory capacities and that concepts must be explained by way of intellectual ones, in particular, by way of capacities for classification and reasoning. Glock does not, however, identify concepts with intellectual capacities. He rather conceives of them as rules that guide the application of capacities. He defines the relationship between perceptions (...) and concepts by coupling rationalistic, Aristotelian, and Kantian motifs: perceptions are to be strictly distinguished from concepts; perceptual capacities genetically, causally, and conceptually precede conceptual ones; and conceptual capacities must, in principle, be applicable to objects of experience. Glock's “capacity approach” can accordingly be understood as a variant of non-conceptualism. (shrink)

The article is devoted to the reception of the concept of religious feeling by F. Schleiermacher in the works of such Russian philosophers of the early 20th century as S.L. Frank, I.A. Ilyin, S.N. Bulgakov, F.A. Stepun, V.V. Zenkovsky, etc. The author of the article identifies the following ways of interpreting this concept: religious feeling can be understood as “psychologism” and “immanentism”, either detracting from the meaning of Revelation (reducing religion exclusively to personal experiences), or evaluated positively in terms of (...) the existential significance for a person of these experiences (in this case, Schleiermacher is considered as a precursor of modern psychology); religious feeling can be interpreted closely to Dilthey’s ideas as the original unity of consciousness. In addition, religious feeling in the works of Schleiermacher (as well as other representatives of German Romanticism) becomes the subject of analysis of research on the psychology of religion. In general, the study of the interpretations by Russian philosophers of the concept of religious feeling in Schleiermacher’s teaching helps, rather, to approach the understanding of religious experience by the considered thinkers themselves, in whose works this concept is of great importance, but is often not explicated. (shrink)

On 3 June 2008 the National Family Policy Concept was adopted by Seimas that states the goals and principles of the state family policy and several times refers to historical and scientific experience. The present article aims to reveal the historical and legal experience of the ancient Rome that laid foundations of contemporary private law and to compare the goals of the National Family Policy Concept and the state policy of the ancient Rome regarding family issues. The concept of family (...) framed by the National Family Policy Concept is based on matrimony. This is why the authors of the article focus on Roman matrimony. Having discussed the ancient Roman concept of marriage and Roman state policy regarding issues of matrimony and family and comparing it with the aims of the National Family Policy concept it might be stated that policy of encouraging family and promoting family relations based on matrimony that is provided by the Lithuanian state is not a new invention but may also refer to legal resolutions of the ancient Rome. (shrink)

The concept of hermeneutical experience is conceived analogously to that of aesthetic, religious or empirical experience. The unique nature of hermeneutical experience is the comprehension of the meaning of artificial signs or sign-systems, such as art, literature, laws, institutions, actions, etc. It may be questioned how far and to what extent hermeneutical experience is second-hand experience, i.e., secondary to primary experience expressed in signs, or, following a well-known formula of Boeckh, a ‘recognition of what has been recognized before’.

The editor’s preface to the special issue “Kant’s concept of experience” introduces into the circle of the main theoretical problems associated with the concept of experience in Kant’s transcendental theory of knowledge.

In this paper I will present some important ideas about the relation between religious experience and metaphysics in Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy. This endeavor is significant for the topic from two points of view: firstly, Whitehead’s thinking is among the most comprehensive and widely extended from the 20th Century, the applications of his ‘speculative scheme’ covering issues from ecology, physics and the foundations of mathematics, to art and religion; secondly, the concept of ‘God’, with a meaning ascribed to it by (...) Whitehead in relation both with the history of philosophy and with his own ideas, plays a key-role in Process and Reality, his most important treatise. For Whitehead, religion is linked, broadly speaking, to the most intimate inner evolution of a human person. Although this assertion may seem trivial, in the context of his thinking, which defines terms such as ‘process’, ‘value’ or ‘satisfaction’ as essentially bounded with the evolution of any actual being, to associate a kind of experience, the religious one, to the fact itself of inner becoming conveys to this experience a fundamentally profound and inalienable metaphysical character. It is this character and ‘definiteness’ which I will describe and analyze. (shrink)

Whatever one thinks of Heidegger's philosophy, he is one of the most incisive philosophic commentators of our time. He is frequently at his best and is most lucid in his close examinations of other philosophers. The introduction to Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit has been overshadowed by the much more famous preface. In his paragraph-by-paragraph analysis, Heidegger reveals how much we learn from this introduction about Hegel's conception of knowledge, philosophy, and experience. At the same time that Heidegger illuminates Hegel's text, (...) he also reveals the direction of his own thought. The translation of Heidegger's essay is published together with Kenley Dove's felicitous new translation of Hegel's "Introduction."--R. J. B. (shrink)

The book is a history of the concept of experience in philosophy. Minakov focuses mainly on Western 19-20th century philosophical movements and their use of the experience concept. Author uses topological method to describe growth of the conseptual content of experience, as well as decline in its use in the end of 20th century.

This paper deals with the following questions: What features of modern natural science are responsible for the fact that, of all forms of science, this form is technologically exploitable? The three notions: concept of nature, epistemic ideal, and experiment, suggest the most important components of my answer. I will argue, first, that only the peculiar interplay of the modern concept of nature with an epistemic ideal attuned to it can cast experiment in the specific, highly central role it (...) plays in the pursuit of knowledge about nature. It will then become clear that the form of science in which experiment plays such a role will, necessarily, prove technologically exploitable. (shrink)

§1 The Disjunctive Conception of Experience Descartes was surely right that while normal waking experience, dreams and hallucinations are characteristically distinguished at a purely phenomenological level, — by contrasts of spatial perspective, coherence, clarity of image, etc., — it is not essential that they be so.1 What is it like for someone who dreams that he is sitting, clothed in his dressing gown, in front of his fire can in principle be subjectively indistinguishable from what it is like to perceive (...) that one is doing so, fully conscious and awake. The same holds for multi-sense hallucination and, it is assumed, would hold of the experience of an envatted brain in the usual postulated scenario. This thought — that normal perceptual experience allows in principle of perfect phenomenological counterfeit — is, to the best of my knowledge, nowhere seriously challenged in John McDowell's writings.2 What he rejects is an idea that builds upon and would be potentially explanatory of it: the Lockean idea that, as far as the states enjoyed by the experiencing subject are concerned, there is actually no generic distinction between dream, hallucination, and wakeful perception: — that one and the same type of state of consciousness is involved in all three cases, and that which (if any) of the three a particular occurrence of the type falls under is a matter of how it is caused. On this model, the distinction between Descartes' notional fully lucid dream and the corresponding raft of perceptions of his dressing-gowned, sedentary state is like that between a certain kind of sunburn and nettle rash. For Disjunctivism, however, the Lockean — as McDowell likes to say, “Highest Common Factor” — conception of perceptual experience and its potential counterfeits is a conceptual error. There is no single type of state of consciousness present in each of dreaming, perceiving and hallucinating, whose instances fall under one or other of those characterisations purely by virtue of their aetiology.. (shrink)

Do philosophers and ordinary people conceive of subjective experience in the same way? In this article, we argue that they do not and that the philosophical concept of phenomenal consciousness does not coincide with the folk conception. We first offer experimental support for the hypothesis that philosophers and ordinary people conceive of subjective experience in markedly different ways. We then explore experimentally the folk conception, proposing that for the folk, subjective experience is closely linked to valence. We conclude by considering (...) the implications of our findings for a central issue in the philosophy of mind, the hard problem of consciousness. (shrink)

One might think that a healthy respect for the deliverances of experience would require us to give up any claim to nontrivial a priori knowledge. One way it might not would be if the very admission of something as an episode of experience required the use of substantive a priori knowledge -- if there were certain a priori standards that a representation had to meet in order to count as an experience, rather than as, say, a memory or daydream. This (...) paper argues that, surprisingly enough, we can find elements of this essentially Kantian line about experience even in the work of empiricists, such as John Locke and Bas van Fraassen. (shrink)

This article analyzes the innovations produced by the concept of experience, introduced from the feminist theory during the eighties. The experience was an epistemic invention to give account of what used to result exceeding, subsidiary, or invisible to the science legitimated as such. This theoretical-methodological tool led to redefinitions around the sense of objectivity and pointed out the political condition of a perspective that was declared as neutral. This work tries to throw some light over the critical strength that this (...) epistemic tool had during those years, for which it chooses the historical perspective. At the same time, this article advances towards a critical analysis around certain modelling of the tool. In this sense, the article aims to sharpen the epistemic surveillance and to review the commitments that this has been acquiring with the institutionalization of the feminist perspective during the last decades. El presente artículo analiza las innovaciones que produjo en el campo del conocimiento la herramienta de la experiencia, introducida desde la teoría feminista en los años ochenta. La experiencia fue una invención epistémica que tuvo como objetivo dar cuenta de aquello que resultaba excedente, subsidiario o invisible a la ciencia legitimada como tal. Este instrumental teórico-metodológico conllevó redefiniciones en torno al sentido de la objetividad y señaló la condición política de una perspectiva declarada neutral. El presente trabajo apunta a alumbrar la potencia crítica que dicha herramienta epistémica tuvo en aquellos años, para lo cual elige la perspectiva histórica. Asimismo, el artículo avanza en un análisis crítico en torno a ciertas modelizaciones contemporáneas de dicha herramienta. En este sentido, el artículo aspira a agudizar la vigilancia epistémica y a revisar los compromisos que ha ido adquiriendo con la institucionalización de la perspectiva feminista de las últimas décadas. (shrink)

In 1971, answering a question concerning one of the main motifs of his works, Derrida declared that ‘if there were a definition of différance, it would be precisely the limit, the interruption, the destruction of the Hegelian “relève” [i.e. Aufhebung] wherever it operates’. It is apparent that such an approach to Hegel is indebted to Heidegger's program of a ‘destruction’ (Destruktion) of the history of ontology. But what does Derrida's reading of Hegel owe to Heidegger exactly? In this paper, I (...) investigate this question and the genesis of Derrida's reading of Hegel more generally by looking into the interpretation which can be found in the 1964–65 lectures about Heidegger: The Question of Being and History. In the process of interpreting Heidegger, Derrida produces extensive comments about Hegel which document the early elaboration of his perception of the author of the Phenomenology of Spirit. Here, I focus on Hegel's conception of experience, which Derrida compares to Heidegger's understanding of the historicity of Dasein. As will become clear, however, this question involves the way Derrida presents the relationship between the two thinkers throughout these lectures. Specifically, I show that Derrida significantly bases his account of Heidegger's ‘destruction’ of Hegel's philosophy on the former's interpretation of the latter's concept of experience. By examining such an interpretation, I intend to challenge the way Derrida portrays Hegel and I argue as a result that it is questionable whether Heidegger's departure from Hegel can be taken to be as ‘radical’ as Derrida makes it seem. (shrink)

This article explores Hegel's conception of experience, positing it as the entry point for grasping the implications of the philosophy of nature. The article briefly examines Hegel's view of nature, focusing on its transformative journey from externality to integration with the conscious I. Subsequently, the purpose of Hegel's philosophy of nature is discussed, and recent interpretations are compared. The article unfolds the notion of experience as a bridge between the subjective dimension explored in the Phenomenology of Spirit and the understanding (...) of reality presented in the Encyclopedia. Experience, considered in its threefold meaning of unveiling, actively interpreting, and generating rationality within nature, dynamically shapes both the self‐conscious subject and the natural world across logic, nature, and spirit. Finally, the article highlights experience as mediating both the epistemological and the metaphysical relationship between nature and spirit. The article concludes by arguing that the transformative power of experience plays a central role in overcoming the separation between spirit and nature, fostering a mediated unity between the human subject and the natural world. (shrink)

The subject of this article are Martin Heidegger’s and Eugen Fink’s interpretations of Hegel’s concept of experience of consciousness examined in the light of the history of the development of German Hegelian studies. Article aims at revisiting and comparison of those original interpre- tations formulated by the prominent followers of phenomenological philosophy. Furthermore, in the course of the article those interpretations also get compared to the general approach of con- temporary Hegelian studies to interpreting the concept of experience of consciousness. (...) The experience of consciousness is indeed one of the most problematic concepts of Hegel’s philosophy and the key concept of the “Phenomenology of Spirit”. Therefore, with regard to the role this concept has in the narrative of “Phenomenology...”, the interpretations of this concept, examined in the present article allow us to inspect, in a general outlook, Fink’s and Heidegger’s interpretational approaches towards all the “Phenomenology...”. Having examined each of the interpretations, a comparison of the two is conducted, that results in pointing out the key differences between those, which also relate to the interpretations of all the “Phenomenology...”. The article closes up with a brief inspection of the relation of Heidegger’s and Fink’s interpretational approaches to the contemporary scholar consensus on the experience of consciousness in the “Phenomenology of Spirit”. (shrink)

The theme of this paper is Husserl’s concept of experience, through which I hope to show that and how Husserl’s description points the way toward a more adequate account of experience than traditional ones operating within realist-idealist and rationalist-empiricist frameworks.