Alien and its sequel Aliens pit small groups of humans against a foe that knows only violence. Actually, much of what goes wrong in these films is due to confused beliefs the characters hold. This chapter uses the approach of an American philosophical school of thought known as pragmatism, and its foremost defender John Dewey, to critically address this problem. Through Alien and Aliens, we can apply pragmatism to political philosophy, and in particular we can see how John Dewey's (...) philosophy in The Public and Its Problems serves to illustrate the social and political failings we viscerally experience in these films. The Alien universe, with its diabolical pact between the United Americas and the Weyland‐Yutani Corporation, provides us with a worst‐case scenario of the future. The Xenomorph is not the big bad enemy of the first two Alien movies. The enemy is our own ineffectual political forms. (shrink)

The topic of alienation has fallen out of fashion in social and political philosophy. It used to be salient, especially in socialist thought and in debates about labor practices in capitalism. Although the lack of identification of people with their working lives—their alienation as workers—remains practically important, normative engagement with it has been set back by at least four objections. They concern the problems of essentialist views, a mishandling of the distinction between the good and the right, the (...) danger of paternalistic impositions, and the significance of democratic authorization. This paper recasts the critique of alienation in a way that vindicates its importance for social and political philosophy and rebuts these objections. First, it provides an analytic framework to understand alienation—distinguishing its various conceptual, explanatory, and normative dimensions. Second, it accounts for the normative aspect of the critique of alienation by articulating it in terms of prudential and moral ideas of positive freedom regarding human flourishing and solidaristic empowerment. Finally, the normative account is developed further, and sharpened to respond to the four objections, through the introduction of the Dignitarian Approach—the view that we have reason to organize social life in such a way that we respond appropriately to the valuable features of individual human beings that give rise to their dignity. (shrink)

People experiencing alien control report that their thoughts, movements, actions, and emotions have been replaced by those of an "other." The latter is commonly a perceived persecutor of the patient. Here I describe the clinical phenomenology of alien control, mechanistic models that have been used to explain it, problems inherent in these models, the brain deficits and functional abnormalities associated with this symptom, and the means by which disordered agency may be examined in this perplexing condition. Our current state of (...) knowledge implicates potentially reversible dysfunction in certain key brain regions (especially the right parietal cortex), which is temporally related to the presence of symptoms. Alien control is quintessentially a disorder of agency. (shrink)

The article presents a model of performative agency in capitalist societies. The first section reconsiders the problem of third-dimensional power as developed by Steven Lukes, focusing on the relationships between universal human needs and social forms. The second section uses the concepts of the ‘self’, ‘I’ and ‘person’ to characterize the relationships between human nature, affect, individual alienation, social institutions and personal judgement. Alienation is argued to be inherent in human agency, rather than being solely created by (...) capitalism. The next section applies this analysis within an agonal theory of civil society that is driven by the individual’s performative participation in associations that compete within institutional settings. Finally the article considers the political ramifications of this model, rejecting contemporary constitutionalist approaches in favour of a revised form of pluralist associationalism. Throughout, the article warns of the dangerous marginalization of emotions (or ‘affect’) by excessively self-conscious, rationalist approaches such as Mead’s social theory, liberal universalism and even some performative theories. (shrink)

The concept of alienation is important part of the 20th century leftwing social criticism and a key theme of Western Marxism and critical theory. It also has a significant impact on various existentialist-inspired cultural criticism. The development of the social and economic dynamics in recent decades has aroused interest for a different interpretations of this classic question. The following text is an attempt for ontological rethinking of the problem through the existential concepts of Martin Heidegger. This happens with (...) the interpretive reading of several of those key concepts. (shrink)

This work, the most comprehensive treatment of alienation ever published, deals with the philosophical, sociological, psychological, religious, political, and literary aspects of the problem. Among the topics discussed are the lost self, the fragmented self, alienated leisure, measurements of social alienation, counterculture, anti-intellectualism, and cures for alienation.

A recent strand in the philosophical literature on addiction emphasizes problems with diachronic self-control. Hanna Pickard, for example, argues that an important aspect of addiction consists in inability to identify with a non-addicted future self. This literature sits alongside another that treats addiction as the product of neural changes that “hijack” mechanisms of reward prediction, habit formation decision making and cognitive control. This hijacking literature originates in accounts that treat the neural changes characteristic of addiction as a brain disease. This (...) paper provides a framework based on predictive processing accounts of self-awareness that integrates the hijacking and diachronic accounts. I discuss a hijacking account proposed to explain disruption of addiction following lesion to the anterior insula cortex. I show how insula activity contributes to the type of identification implicated in diachronic accounts and how deactivation of the anterior insula can disrupt addiction by alienating the subject from her addictive tendencies. This is consistent with neural evidence but also incorporates the personal level features of addiction that are opaque to neural level explanation. (shrink)

In this paper, I offer an account of social alienation, a genre of alienation engendered by contemporary work that has gone largely overlooked in the ethics of labor. Social alienation consists in a corruption of workers’ relations to their social life and the people that make it up. When one is socially alienated, one’s sociality and close relations exist as a mere afterthought or break from work, while labor is the central activity of one’s life. While one (...) might think that existing solutions to alienated labor would resolve this social alienation, I suggest that such solutions at best leave the problem intact and may in fact contribute to it by giving labor the place of priority in workers’ lives. Resolving social alienation, I suggest, requires rethinking the amount of time we commit to work, the rigidity of the work schedule, and most crucially, the value that we attribute to work as the primary source of purpose in our lives. (shrink)

Aldo Leopold once declared that there were two “spiritual dangers” in not owning a farm, with one being “the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace”. The dangers that Leopold was signaling were various, of course, but in that essay they primarily gathered around the problems caused by human distance from nature’s operations, the manners in which we can become divorced from the roots of life by a failure to (...) recognize the processes from which food and heat derive. However, Leopold did not repudiate the technologies involved in running a farm-house, and he clearly recognized that significant paradoxes are involved in the use of... (shrink)

I present a theory of alienation that accounts for the cognitive processes involved with moral thinking and political behavior in modern societies. On my account, alienation can be understood as a particular kind of atrophy of moral concepts and moral thinking that affect the ways individuals cognize and legitimate the social world and their place within it. Central to my argument is the thesis that modern forms of social integration—shaped by highly institutionalized, rationalized and hierarchical forms of social (...) life—serve to constrain the moral- cognitive powers of subjects leading to a condition of alienation as moral atrophy. This state results from the withering of the subject's internal powers of moral reflection and an overriding predisposition to rely on external value schemas to make sense of moral and political problems. I then present an analysis of alienated moral consciousness and its implications for modern social theory. (shrink)

Are we entering a major new phase of modern science, one in which our standard, human modes of reasoning and understanding, including heuristics, have decreasing value? The new methods challenge human intelligibility. The digital revolution inspires such claims, but they are not new. During several historical periods, scientific progress has challenged traditional concepts of reasoning and rationality, intelligence and intelligibility, explanation and knowledge. The increasing intelligence of machine learning and networking is a deliberately sought, somewhat alien intelligence. As such, it (...) challenges the traditional, heuristic foresight of expert researchers. Nonetheless, science remains human-centered in important ways—and yet many of our ordinary human epistemic activities are alien to ourselves. This fact has always been the source of “the discovery problem”. It generalizes to the problem of understanding expert scientific practice. Ironically, scientific progress plunges us ever deeper into complexities beyond our grasp. But how is progress possible without traditional realism and the intelligibility realism requires? Pragmatic flexibility offers an answer. (shrink)

This paper is about the modern-day problem of human alienation and fulfillment in work from the perspective of the Catholic social thought. It analyses the symptoms and causes of work alienation, the meaning of work and its significance in the individual’s quest for fulfillment, and how the Catholic social teachings can shed light on the problems involved in transforming the world of work. Alienation in work affects one’s subjective and psychological fulfillment, but it is not ultimately (...) dependent on material culture or economic models. The problem of alienation in work cannot be dealt with by simply modifying the production process or the wage system, although these are factors that alienate people even more. Social problems cannot be solved without light of faith and the recognition of the moral order that is rooted in God. In the final analysis, alienation is not simply the loss of meaning in human activities. It is the loss of life’s meaning and man’s estrangement from his own authentic nature, including his reason for being and final end, that results from the rejection of God and His teachings. What Catholicism provides is a combination of economic, psychological, moral, social, and spiritual motives for work that will make it personally fulfilling. (shrink)

According to an attractive conception of love as attention, discussed by Iris Murdoch, one strives to see one’s beloved accurately and justly. A puzzle for understanding how to love another in this way emerges in cases where more accurate and just perception of the beloved only reveals his flaws and vices, and where the beloved, in awareness of this, strives to escape the gaze of others - including, or perhaps especially, of his loved ones. Though less attentive forms of love (...) may be able to render one’s continued love coherent and justifiable in these cases, they risk further alienating the beloved precisely because they are less attentive and because of the operations of the beloved’s shame. I argue that attentive love is well-suited to alleviate this problem of alienation, but that in order to do so, it must be supplemented with grace. I propose a conception of gracious love as an affectionate love for the qualities of human nature, distinguishing this from a love of humanity, and show how this complex emotion, in being responsive to the complexities of shame, is able to alleviate the problem of alienation. (shrink)

The problematics of alienation have played a rather significant role in the discussions\nabout the sense and relevance of Marxism which have taken place in\nthe last twenty years. &dquo;Back to Marx&dquo; was at least one of the main slogans of\nthat ideological/intellectual movement, which evolved both in the East and\nWest from the mid-fifties and which is sometimes referred to as the trend of\n&dquo;humanist&dquo; Marxism. The idea of a &dquo;Marx-Renaissance&dquo; was undoubtedly\ndirected first of all against the completely petrified framework of institutionalized\nMarxism, turned (...) into a &dquo;religion of state&dquo; legitimating the domination\nof a bureaucratic apparatus over the population of East European societies.\nThe &dquo;rediscovery&dquo; and &dquo;rehabilitation&dquo; of the young Marx, the emphasis on\nthe continuity of his thought, meant not only a reintroduction of a number\nof categories, problems and ideas, which were thought fruitful in their critical\ninsight into contemporary conditions and which the impoverished and distorted\nversion of Marxism in official communist ideology (deliberately) failed\nto take into account: it also meant a global challenge to the appropriation of\nthe Marxian tradition by an apologetic ideology, which disguised its positivistic\ncontent through the form of an old-fashioned, dogmatic metaphysics; it\nwas an attempt to recover the critical/emancipatory meaning of this tradition\nwithin the realities of the twentieth century. It was in this context that the\nnotion of &dquo;alienation&dquo; again reappeared -- as a concept through which one\ncould articulate an attitude which was critical simultaneously of Western\ncapitalist and so-called &dquo;socialist&dquo; Eastern societies. Within the framework of\nEast European realities even the rather abstract character of this notion found\nin young Marx, was well suited to the theoretical vagueness and the practical\nlimitations of this new-found leftist criticism of home-societies. (shrink)

Schweickart and I both discuss market socialism. Neither of us accepts the traditional Marxist view that market economies necessarily produce contradictions that drive them toward collapse. Both of us think the socialist experiments of the twentieth century show that markets cannot successfully be eliminated. Thus, for market socialism, we keep a market and we work to prevent it from producing contradictions, alienation, and collapse. One question that arises here concerns the role of labor unions. Should they play a major (...) role in market socialism, or are there respects in which they would obstruct it? There is another important issue that Schweickart should discuss. Market socialism, given its commitment to a market, must face the issue of market generated alienation or fetishism. Can market socialism avoid such problems? And if so how? (shrink)

Thought insertion is a common delusion in schizophrenia. People affected by it report that there are thoughts in their heads that have been inserted by a third party. These thoughts are self-generated but subjec-tively experienced as alien (hereafter, we shall call them alien thoughts for convenience). In chapter 5 of Transparent Minds, Jordi Fernández convincingly argues that the phenomenon of thought insertion can be accounted for as a pathology of self-knowledge. In particular, he argues that the application of the bypass (...) model of self-knowledge can shed light on what is amiss in people with thought insertion. In this brief commentary, we examine the proposal by Fernández, highlight some of its strengths, and raise one main objection to it. In mainstream philosophical accounts of thought insertion, people who report the delusion are thought to have ownership of the alien thoughts, but to lack a sense of agency with respect to such thoughts, and this is supposed to explain why they ascribe the thoughts to some-one else. Fernández correctly identifies the limitations of mainstream accounts of thought insertion. First, to claim that people with the delu-sion of thought insertion own the alien thoughts does not sit well with the phenomenology of thought insertion as it is reflected in people’s self-reports. Second, people do not need to experience a sense of agency with respect to a thought in order to ascribe the thought to themselves. Sense of agency is too demanding a condition for self-ascription. Fernández puts forward a novel account of thought insertion, at-tempting to solve the problems identified with mainstream accounts. He defends the view that thought insertion is a failure of self-knowledge that consists in the person failing to ascribe one of her be-liefs to herself. Similar accounts to the one Fernández develops in the chapter have been defended by Bortolotti and Broome (2009) and Pickard (2010). For Fernández, the failure in self-ascription is due to the fact that the person with thought insertion does not feel pressured to endorse the content of a belief that she has [Fernández (2013), p. 142]. Fernández explains this phenomenon in detail by reference to the bypass model of self-knowledge. When Fernández develops his own proposal, he relies on the claim that the alien thought is a belief. We challenge this claim.We agree with Fernández that, in thought insertion, the person does not ascribe the alien thought to herself and does not commit to the content of the thought being true, in spite of the thought being self-generated. Such considerations powerfully suggest to us that the alien thought is not a belief. Given the elusive nature of mental states in general and beliefs in particular, this may seem just a terminological issue. But in the present context, whether the alien thought is a belief is important in order to offer a characterisation of thought insertion that makes jus-tice to the first-person reports and other behavioural manifestations of people with the delusion. One may also argue that, as the model of self-knowledge Fernández applies to alien thoughts, that is, the bypass model, is a model of self-knowledge for beliefs, such a model could only feature in the explanation of thought insertion if alien thoughts were beliefs. But we do not think this is necessarily the case, as in the book Fernández successfully applies his bypass model to other types of mental states, such as desires. (shrink)

This paper proposes to reorient the philosophical debate about peer disagreement. The problem of peer disagreement is normally seen as a problem about the extent to which disagreement provides one with evidence against one's own conclusions. It is thus regarded as a problem for individual inquiry. But things look different in more collaborative contexts. Ethical norms relevant to those contexts make a difference to the epistemology. In particular, we argue that a norm of mutual answerability applies to (...) us when we engage in shared inquiry with others, and precludes us from treating one another's conflicting judgments as evidence relevant to the dispute. From this it follows that standard philosophical accounts of peer disagreement—e.g., the Equal Weight View and the Total Evidence View—presuppose that the disagreeing parties are in a sense alienated from one another. It's doubtful that such forms of alienated disagreement should be treated as the central case. (shrink)

Existentialism claims that propositions that directly refer to individuals depend on those individuals for their existence. I argue for two points regarding Existentialism. First, I argue that recent accounts of Existentialism run into difficulties accommodating the possibility of there being a lonely alien electron. This problem is distinct from one of the better-known alien problems—concerning iterated modal properties of aliens—and can’t be solved using a standard response to the iterated case. Second, though the lonely alien electron problem might (...) seem to be reason to reject the sort of Existentialist view at hand, there’s a plausible way to preserve the view: accept the existence of possible worlds that directly refer to individuals that don’t exist in those worlds. Such a solution might seem incompatible with Existentialism, but I show that Existentialists can avoid the incompatibility and should find the resulting view plausible. (shrink)

Among the problems dealt with by philosophers in the last twenty-five years, that of alienation stands out as having attracted major attention. It is well known that the problem is not new: it can be found in the works of the thinkers of the 18th century Enlightenment and of the German romanticists. It is a central problem for classical German philosophy, especially in the writings of Fichte, Hegel and Feuerbach. In their early works Marx and Engels developed (...) a new, materialistic approach to the problem in connection with the analysis of the origin of private property and the contradictions inherent in a money and business economy. (shrink)

This article argues (contra horowitz et al.) that the origins of the problem of alienation antedate german idealism of the nineteenth century. Specific antecedents to the contemporary concern with alienation can be found in: (1) the medieval school of nominalism and its concern with singulars; (2) the renaissance pre-Occupation with self-Consciousness and (3) descartes' solipsistic dualism. When 19th century thinkers, Particularly hegel, Gave extensive and explicit consideration to the problem of alienation they were in large (...) part articulating traditional philosophical concerns. To be fully grasped the alienation problem must be viewed within the broad mainstream of the history of ideas. (shrink)

Contre les économistes classiques qui se sont pour la plupart concentrés sur l’échange et la valeur, Marx propose dans les Manuscrits de 1844 une réflexion précise sur l’argent qui prend ainsi place dans le procès global de l’aliénation. L’argent se caractérise notamment par sa forme pure et abstraite et participe d’une création de besoins artificiels qui accroissent la dépendance de l’individu. Ce faisant, l’argent est cause d’une aliénation spécifique : il transforme la quantité pure en une valeur à l’aune de (...) laquelle tout est réévalué. Cette abstraction croissante de ce qui au départ n’est qu’un moyen explique qu’il constitue progressivement la règle de tout commerce. Les échanges ne sont plus alors que les occasions de manifester l’argent lui-même. Si c’est bien sur la propriété privée que se fonde la puissance de l’argent, celui-ci a aussi son mécanisme propre.Against the classical econonics who focuses on the problems of exchange and value, Marx thinks in the Manuscripts of 1844 about money and especially its place in the global alienation process. Money is particularly described as an abstraction and plays a role in the making of artificial needs who alienate men. That is why money is a specific form of alienation : it transforms pure quantity in value in order to estimate everything. This increasing abstraction of a simple tool makes money the rule of every deal. Therefore exchanges become only occasions to make money appear. Despite the fact that the power of money is based on the property, money is also a specific form of alienation. (shrink)

This essay considers the multiple, and often conflicting, ways in which capitalism may be said to have impacted on animal experience. Capitalism has intensified a perennial division in human culture between instrumental and affective responses to animals. In their engagement with animals, left and Marxist critics of capitalism have either ignored animals or argued for naturalist and anti-humanist positions of a kind carried over into the contemporary post-humanist paradigm, with its emphasis on human-animal affinities and continuities. I, by contrast, put (...) the case for grounding a more animal-friendly eco-politics in recognition of what is distinctive to human beings, both as agents of environmental crisis and as alone in a position to take action to counter it. In the process, I point to some ways to improve the experience of animals in a post-capitalist society and consider the problems they might encounter. (shrink)

The fundamental laws of logic hold independently of us. Thus, if there were beings who thought in contradiction to these laws, they would be in error. The paper defends this stance of Frege's against Wittgenstein's combination of logical constitutivism and logical naturalism. Frege's arguments against psychologism are more general than his usual wording suggests and are, at their core, directed against the whole of logical naturalism. Contrary to prevailing opinions on this subject, I argue that constitutivism alone cannot deflect Frege's (...) attack. Rather, constitutivism is neutral to the opposition between logical realism and logical naturalism. The later Wittgenstein was not only a constitutivist, but, as will be explained, also a logical naturalist. By shedding new light on the logical alien problem, I attempt to apply Frege's generalized arguments to Wittgensteinian naturalism. This naturalism inevitably leads to a radical and self-undermining relativism. (shrink)

This paper develops an understanding of climate denial as an expression of alienation in the sense described by Marx. We first argue for an expanded and differentiated conception of climate denial, theorizing four distinct types that go beyond the simple rejection of an anthropogenic warming trend: naturalist denialism, technological denialism, gradualist denialism, and politicized denialism. We then claim that these forms of climate denial illustrate and are illustrative of Marx’s concept of alienation from species-being (Gattungswesen). The article is (...) intended as a contribution to the growing literature on climate denial as a social and ideological problem rather than as an individual epistemic or moral issue. (shrink)

This commentary considers the role of Socratic questioning in Alien Landscapes? I discuss the three roles that Glover sees Socratic questioning playing in psychiatry: 1. Questioning to clarify problems, 2. Questioning to treat symptoms, 3. Questioning to reconstruct lives. Although I am broadly sympathetic to the idea that philosophical conversations can help us conceptualise, and deal with, mental distress, I raise two concerns. First, is there any way of providing courses of transformative Socratic questioning cheaply? Second, how close is the (...) connection between helping individuals to develop systems of belief and value that fit epistemic norms and helping them to live flourishing lives? (shrink)

This paper examines the relations between, on the one hand, accounts of the distinction between an agent's identifying with, as opposed to feeling alienated from, their attitudes; and on the other, metaphysical accounts of action. It claims that a commitment to an event-causal conception of agency, which would analyse agency in terms of the causal potency of psychological states and events, appears to render mandatory a particular style of account of identification and alienation – namely, the hierarchical model offered (...) by Harry Frankfurt and Michael Bratman. It is argued that such accounts fall foul of a dilemma: the Authority Problem. The failure of attempts to avoid the Authority Problem is then used to motivate an attractive alternative style of account of the distinction, offered by Richard Moran. However, it is pressed that Moran's account rests on claims about agency which seem incompatible with the event-causal conception of agency. By making the links between the metaphysics of agency and accounts of identification and alienation more explicit, the paper allows us to better comprehend both the apparent need for and characteristic failures of some traditional accounts of identification and alienation, as well as make clear the action-theoretical debt incurred by those who would offer an alternative. (shrink)

In a late manuscript, Husserl explicitly addresses the problem of depersonalization. Depersonalization is described as a rupture in a certain layer of experience, which, however, does not touch the fundamental unity of the underlying genesis. After a brief recapitulation of historical approaches to depersonalization, I’ll come to comment on this passage. To assess Husserl’s contribution to the clinical understanding, and more specifically to the phenomenology of depersonalization, it is essential to understand his concept of personhood. In Husserl’s account of (...) personhood, we can identify a tension between the unity and continuity of the transcendental genesis of the personal ego and the self-alienation and de-presentation at play in this genesis. Drawing on the French reception of Husserl’s phenomenology and Eugen Fink’s notion of de-presentation, I suggest that transcendental temporalization not only cannot function as a fail-safe in the case of depersonalization but may even be at the core of the loss of the sense of personhood. To account for the fact of personalization, one must re-evaluate the notion of empathy in the relation of the self to itself. (shrink)

A well-known Hungarian philosopher, politician, literary and art theorist Georg Lukacs was a notable figure of philosophical thought in XX century. Although he was interested in many problems philosophical-aesthetical matter is the main one in all his works. The problem of human alienation from social forms is outlined in his numerous literary, philosophical, aesthetical works of pre- and post- Marxian periods. The concept of philosophical-aesthetical grounds for overcoming human alienation has been developed in his art from romantic (...) feeling of existential tragedy through the utopian expectancy of “aesthetic ideal” realization to the reliance on being conscious of individual blood nature through dialectic penetration of subjectivity and objectivity in the process of aesthetical perception. Thus he has the unaltered point of view that the art is a particular opposed to alien human nature sphere of being which allows taking away the dual principle of alien forms of human being and its essence. (shrink)

It is not necessarily the case that we ever have experiences of self, but human beings do regularly report instances for which self is experienced as absent. That is there are times when body parts, mental states, or actions are felt to be alien. Here I sketch an explanatory framework for explaining these alienation experiences, a framework that also attempts to explain the “mental glue” whereby self is bound to body, mind, or action. The framework is a multi-dimensional model (...) that integrates personal and sub-personal components, psychological and neural processes. I then proceed to show how this model can be applied to explain the action-related passivity experiences of persons suffering from schizophrenia. I argue that a distinctive phenomenological mark of these experiences is that they are vividly felt, unlike ordinary actions (those taken to belong to self), and I seek to explain these heightened sensory experiences from within the proposed framework. I also propose hypotheses concerning such phenomena as thought insertion and anarchic hand syndrome that are motivated by this framework. Finally, I argue that the proposed model and view of self-experiences is consistent with several aspects of and theories of consciousness, especially theories which indicate that consciousness is more likely to be engaged when we are dealing with novelty or error—e.g. when self seems to have gone missing. I conclude by recommending that if we wish to learn about self, we would be well advised to attend closely to those times when it seems absent. (shrink)

Monstrosity has its recognized place in cultural narratives but in philosophical discourse it remains mostly untouched. In my paper I make an attempt at phenomenological inquiry into the experience of the Other’s monstrous body. I am beginning with some remarks concerning Georges Canguilhem and Michel Foucault, the philosophers who devoted some attention to the problem of monstrosity and the monstrous, but my analysis is mainly based on the works of Bernhard Waldenfels, Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Waldenfels emphasizes that (...) the corporeal self is somehow perceived as alien, always somewhat distanced and not totally graspable. He also argues that the closer the Other, the stronger activation of the boundary between the spheres of the ownness and the alienness is caused. A promising framework for the analysis of the ambivalent reaction brought about by the encounter with a monstrous human body can be provided by Husserl’s phenomenological inquiry into the process of pairing, developed in his Cartesian meditations. It seems that in this experience the pairing process is frustrating and deranged because the process of apperception is disturbed by a cluster of untypical or quite unique characteristics of the monstrous body. In result, its sense remains unclear, puzzling and challenging. Interesting light on the experience of the Other’s monstrous body could shed Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, especially the ideas of flesh and chiasm outlined in his last work. The radical character of the monster, while does not render it something totally different from the own, elucidates, however, the contingency of the order under which the human corporeality is subsumed. (shrink)

Psychology is meant to help people cope with the afflictions of modern society. But how useful is it? Ian Parker argues that current psychological practice has become part of the problem rather than the solution. Ideal for undergraduates, this book unravels the discipline to reveal the conformist assumptions that underlie its theory and practice. Psychology focuses on the happiness of "the individual." Yet it neglects the fact that personal experience depends on social and political surroundings. Parker argues that a (...) new approach to psychology is needed. He offers an alternative vision, outlining how debates in the discipline can be linked to political practice and how it can become part of a wider progressive agenda. Parker's groundbreaking book is at the cutting edge of current thinking on the discipline and should be required reading in all psychology courses. (shrink)

This chapter attempts to show that there are important convergences between Schiller’s and the young Marx’s account of alienation. The common approach to Schiller’s problem of alienation addresses the question solely from an anthropological perspective. The chapter rather focuses on alienation from a political and juridical perspective. It claims that Schiller’s account of alienation is better understood in the context of a politico-juridical debate on the relation between ‘right of mankind’ (Recht der Menschheit) and ‘state’ (...) (Staat) following the French Revolution. Looking at Marx’s early writings, it transpires that he describes the problem of alienation in similar terms to Schiller: as a conflict between particular and universal spheres, that is, private human being (individual) and political human being (species-being, state). (shrink)

It is not necessarily the case that we ever have experiences of self, but human beings do regularly report instances for which self is experienced as absent. That is there are times when body parts, mental states, or actions are felt to be alien. Here I sketch an explanatory framework for explaining these alienation experiences, a framework that also attempts to explain the “mental glue” whereby self is bound to body, mind, or action. The framework is a multi-dimensional model (...) that integrates personal and sub-personal components, psychological and neural processes. I then proceed to show how this model can be applied to explain the action-related passivity experiences of persons suffering from schizophrenia. I argue that a distinctive phenomenological mark of these experiences is that they are vividly felt, unlike ordinary actions (those taken to belong to self), and I seek to explain these heightened sensory experiences from within the proposed framework. I also propose hypotheses concerning such phenomena as thought insertion and anarchic hand syndrome that are motivated by this framework. Finally, I argue that the proposed model and view of self-experiences is consistent with several aspects of and theories of consciousness, especially theories which indicate that consciousness is more likely to be engaged when we are dealing with novelty or error—e.g. when self seems to have gone missing. I conclude by recommending that if we wish to learn about self, we would be well advised to attend closely to those times when it seems absent. -/- . (shrink)

In the work of Levinas, thought of the Other establishes an infinite responsibility and in that of Derrida's latest work an infinite duty of hospitality. Such thought nonetheless leaves a problem of judgement and decision. This paper uses the work of the French philosopher René Girard, and in particular his account of scapegoating, to critically discern between malign and benign otherness. It argues that a logic of undecidability needs an ethical hermeneutics capable of discerning between good and evil.

This is the third volume growing out of Lewis's Gifford Lectures delivered at the University of Edinburgh in 1966-68. In the first volume, The Elusive Mind, Lewis argued for a distinction and interaction between mental and physical processes and in the second volume, The Elusive Self, he focused on the problem of self-identify. Lewis had projected a final volume, The Elusive Self and God, but the first part of that project has been rounded off into a discussion of free (...) will and its implications for morality and religion, now published as Freedom and Alienation. Lewis hopes to add one more volume focusing on the idea of God. (shrink)

This issue is a special investigation into phenomenology of law through the thought of Bernard Waldenfels. Waldenfels, who is presently emeritus professor of philosophy at Ruhr Universität, Bochum, has made a name for himself in his own research and publications on the nexus surrounding the other as non-phenomenon, language as response, and the fissures of corporeality.Along side his expansive introduction and own separate article, guest editor Bert van Roermund has collected together six outstanding contributions to this ‘Waldenfeldian’ phenomenology of law.Waldenfels (...) himself kicks of this number with an original article outlining his conception of the legal order within a phenomenology of the other. Arguing that the legal order, like all orders, must have its own particular ‘outside’ or ‘unsaid,’ he investigates the critical perspectives that thus emerge.Then, David Janssens takes up Waldenfels’ treatment of Plato, which Janssens approaches through a Socratic investigation into the aporias at the foundation of the Platonic legal order. Waldenfels’ Plato seems rather Socratic in his confrontation of the reader with alterity.Next, William Conklin offers an in-depth investigation into the question as to how can human rights be considered universal by the very tribunals that also grant nations the right to define those who may legally be considered persons? Waldenfels’s notion of territorial structure offers its apparatus to Conklin’s substantial critique.Petra Gehring goes into the phenomenological theory of law, looking the ability of the law as an order to respond to claims of the alien. Claiming that law in fact is unable to respond, Gehring argues that phenomenology should legal phenomena critically as a problem of order within the double nature of what Waldenfels calls Anspruch and Antwort.Hans Lindahl analyzes the spatio-temporal borders of the European Union to lay bare the genesis of the Community’s legal order. Lindahl reveals this genesis to embody Waldenfels’ notion of the “chiasm of strangeness,” wherein the foundation of a Heimwelt simultaneously generates a Fremdwelt, and thus questions the very ability of Europe to be its own place.Finally, guest-editor Bert van Roermund supplements his introduction with yet another original contribution arguing that modern legislation is self-legislation. Attempting to identify the different voices comprising this self in an analytical scheme he terms [LEX], van Roermund borrows from Waldenfel’s notion of response and alterity in his analysis of how this structure responds to the classical notion of justice for every subject. (shrink)

This paper focuses on Schellenberg’s Capacitism about Phenomenal Evidence, according to which if one is in a phenomenal state constituted by employing perceptual capacities, then one is in a phenomenal state that provides phenomenal evidence. This view offers an attractive explanation of why perceptual experience provides phenomenal evidence, and avoids difficulties faced by its contemporary alternatives. However, in spite of the attractions of this view, it is subject to what I call “the alien experience problem”: some alien experiences (e.g. (...) clairvoyant experience) are constituted by employing perceptual capacities, but they do not provide phenomenal evidence. This point is illustrated by a counterexample which is similar to, but also different in some important respects from, Bonjour’s famous clairvoyant Norman example. At the end of the paper, I sketch a restricted version of Capacitism about Phenomenal Evidence by putting some etiological constraint on the perceptual capacities employed. (shrink)

Recently, many philosophers and psychologists have claimed that the explanation that grounds both passivity phenomena in the cognitive domain and passivity phenomena that occur with respect to overt actions is, along broad lines, the same. Furthermore, they claim that the best account we have of such phenomena in both scenarios is the “comparator” account. However, there are reasons to doubt whether the comparator model can be exported from the realm of overt actions to the cognitive domain in general. There is (...) a lingering worry concerning such explanations of thought insertion: the "What is compared to what?" problem. Here I examine two ways to tackle this problem. First: thought insertion consists of the misattribution of strings of inner speech which are not attenuated (thought insertion is thus another name for auditory verbal hallucinations). Second: thought insertion is misattributed inner speech which exhibits the same phenomenological characteristics as normal inner speech. After explaining the types of problem that each of these potential solutions faces, I conclude with a set of open questions that the comparator theorist has to tackle. (shrink)

The article examines the problem of alienation as a result of the conflict between consciousness and instincts, which includes aspects of 1) temporal conflict and 2) attempts to self-destruct the individual. Through this conflict, the imperfection of the individual makes it possible for him to develop. The authors also correlate the concepts of alienation and consciousness, which opens up space for criticism of Nietzsche's concepts of herd mentality and the possibility of human cognition of the external world.

In his 1934 essay, “Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism,” Levinas raises important questions about the subject’s relation to nature and to history. His account of the ethical significance of paternity, maternity, and fraternity in texts such as Totality and Infinity and Otherwise Than Being suggest powerful new ways to understand the meaning of kinship, beyond the abstractions of Western liberalism. How does this analysis of race and kinship translate into the context of the Transatlantic slave trade, which not only (...) stole Africans from their families and communities, but also imposed upon them a single “fictive” kinship relation to the master? What if the problem of racialization is not only a matter of being “chained” to one’s identity through (presumed) blood ties, but also being violently separated from one’s kin? What does it mean for the concepts of ethical and political fraternity if the only father recognized by law and society as legitimate is the slave master? Or if the bodies of slave women are exploited, not only for productive labor, but also for the reproductive labor that makes more slaves for the master? If kinship is a way of making sense of the relation between past, present and future generations, then what does a radical disruption of existing kinship relations, and the imposition of one fictive, absolute and unilateral kinship relation, do to the social meaning of time and of history in a particular community? In this paper, I reflect on the significance of fecundity and kinship in the context of US slavery, both in order in order to situate my analysis in the particular history of my own present community, and as a way of demonstrating the significance of a more determinate social analysis for Levinas’ ethics of singularity and politics of universal justice. (shrink)

The problem of alienation has been one of the burning issues in the struggle of international philosophical thought for many years now. Contemporary bourgeois scholars and contemporary revisionists have put it to great use in their writings in mounting a vicious attack on Marxism and Leninism. Furthermore they have created considerable theoretical confusion. In order to clear up the unbearable confusion surrounding this problem it is first necessary to delve into its roots and origins, to make a (...) historical investigation of the problem of alienation. (shrink)

Declaration of independence became a reference point of a new historical epoch - epoch of free, sovereign development of Uzbekistan. Our country from first days of independent development, under direction of President I.A. Karimov, has headed for refusal of a heritage of a command control system, having started to construction of bases of a democratic legal society with the socially-focused market economy. For achievement of these purposes own model of updating and progress which essential features are the selective approach to (...) experience of the developed countries and the account of specificity and features of centuries-oldevolution of national statehood is involved. In Republic of Uzbekistan process of democratization and modernization of a society became stage-by-stage, with a stress on maintenance of deep understanding of an essence of democracy, in view of sociopolitical traditions and features of national mentality. The heritage of sociopolitical culture of our society has acted original “Means”. By means of which modern values and principles of democracy were brought home to people, their perception and understanding was facilitated. Psychological features of national character, such as tolerance, the aggravated feeling of validity, equality before the law, etc. were especially effectively used. It is known, that the basic directions of democratic transformations and formation of a civil society are defined depending on real needs and opportunities of their realization. We have a precise comprehension of that the major condition of formation of a democratic society is strengthening a role and value in a life of a society of not state and public institutes. In Uzbekistan this process goes by practical realization of the concept “From the strong state - to a strong society”. It is a question of stage-by-stage and gradual reduction of a role of the state structures in the decision of social and economic questions and about transfers of these functions to public organizations. Gradually we go to that participation of the state in economic sphere and a field of activity of managing structures, first of all, a private sector - decreases. In parallel the problem of creation of favorable conditions for realization of publiccontrol on the basis of corresponding motivation - public interests is solved. (shrink)

This essay is an exegetical work, the primary intention of which is to present and interpret Hegel’s notion of the “understanding” in the first chapter of his Phenomenology of Spirit. The presentation and interpretation at hand takes as its starting point the work of Slavoj Žižek, who the author feels has begun a new and exciting era of scholarship on Hegel. The overall aim of the essay is modest: to develop the Žižekian reading of Hegel at the micro level. My (...) thesis is that Hegel’s initial development of the “understanding” demonstrates how, from the very first, subjectivity grabs a hold on the incompleteness of reality—a notion that is essential to Žižek’s work. Specifically, I show that the understanding realizes itself, against its will, as an accident of the world, upon which it previously depended for its illusory neutrality. The first chapter of the Phenomenology culminates in the problem of consciousness confronting itself as an accident. Ultimately, I show how Hegel’s accidentality of consciousness, since it is determined by the world, coincides with Žižek’s teaching about the identity of the subject precariously established on the incompleteness of reality. (shrink)

The alienation constraint on theories of well-being has been influentially expressed thus: 'what is intrinsically valuable for a person must have a connection with what he would find in some degree compelling or attractive …. It would be an intolerably alienated conception of someone’s good to imagine that it might fail in any such way to engage him' (Railton 1986: 9). Many agree this claim expresses something true, but there is little consensus on how exactly the constraint is to (...) be understood. Here, I clarify the sense in which the quote offers a basic constraint on theories of well-being—a constraint that should be adopted by (e.g.) hedonists, desire satisfactionists, and objective list theorists alike. This constraint focuses on affective engagement, or positive affective stances in connection with a proposed good. I show that the constraint explains a near-universal intuition, and rules out a number of well-known theories of well-being. (shrink)

An ethical theory is alienating if accepting the theory inhibits the agent from fitting participation in some normative ideal, such as some ideal of integrity, friendship, or community. Many normative ideals involve non-consequentialist behavior of some form or another. If such ideals are normatively authoritative, they constitute counterexamples to consequentialism unless their authority can be explained or explained away. We address a range of attempts to avoid such counterexamples and argue that consequentialism cannot by itself account for the normative authority (...) of all plausible such ideals. At best, consequentialism can find a more modest place in an ethical theory that includes non-consequentialist principles with their own normative authority. (shrink)