Papers by William Tullius
Political theology, Feb 20, 2024
Amidst the human tragedy represented by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the ideological and hist... more Amidst the human tragedy represented by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the ideological and historical justifications for the conflict as they have been framed by Russian president Vladimir Putin themselves call for a philosophical response and ethical critique. Putin's political theological justification for the war, grounded in the commonalities of language, historical affinity, and ecclesial unity, which he posits constitute Ukraine and Russia as one people and justifies the imposition of Russian imperial authority over the Ukrainian state, is philosophically problematic and ultimately totalitarian. In contrast, the phenomenological philosophies of Edith Stein and Jan Patočka, whose political philosophies were shaped in spiritual resistance to similar ethnic and ideologically driven imperialisms of the 20 th century, offer resources for understanding and critiquing the world-historical interpretations of the meaning of civilization, peoplehood, and national destiny which drive Putin's foreign policy, and which have important ethical and political implications far beyond the Ukraine/Russia conflict.
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Husserl Studies, Aug 8, 2016
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International Philosophical Quarterly, 2023
At every level, the study of organic life underlies the relational nature of its subject. Whether... more At every level, the study of organic life underlies the relational nature of its subject. Whether one looks at an organism as a whole and its relationship to its environment or other members of its species, or at the component parts of the organism at an organ system, cellular or even molecular level, there is an externally referential and thus relational nature to lived beings. There is perhaps no place as fruitful to illustrate this relationality than the field of immunology. This paper argues that close attention to the phenomenon of relationality that is evidenced by natural scientific research provides an important occasion to demonstrate the wide-ranging validity of the sort of relational ontology defended by the tradition of phenomenological personalism. Such intersections as one discerns in interdisciplinary engagement between personalist phenomenology and immunology, moreover, can provide a basis for further clarification of the relation of person to the world of nature and vice versa in ways that call into question the dominance of reductive philosophies of nature.
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Political Theology, 2024
Amidst the human tragedy represented by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the ideological and hist... more Amidst the human tragedy represented by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the ideological and historical justifications for the conflict as they have been framed by Russian president Vladimir Putin themselves call for a philosophical response and ethical critique. Putin's political theological justification for the war, grounded in the commonalities of language, historical affinity, and ecclesial unity, which he posits constitute Ukraine and Russia as one people and justifies the imposition of Russian imperial authority over the Ukrainian state, is philosophically problematic and ultimately totalitarian. In contrast, the phenomenological philosophies of Edith Stein and Jan Patočka, whose political philosophies were shaped in spiritual resistance to similar ethnic and ideologically driven imperialisms of the 20 th century, offer resources for understanding and critiquing the world-historical interpretations of the meaning of civilization, peoplehood, and national destiny which drive Putin's foreign policy, and which have important ethical and political implications far beyond the Ukraine/Russia conflict.
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Routledge, Oct 12, 2017
The degree to which Husserl's ethics borrows from Aristotle has not been sufficiently app... more The degree to which Husserl's ethics borrows from Aristotle has not been sufficiently appreciated within the current literature on Husserl's ethical theories. Without seeking to challenge the important roles played by other thinkers, like Hume, Kant, Brentano, and Fichte, in the development of Husserl's ethics, this paper attempts to chart the foundational ways in which Husserl's later ethical philosophy comes to be structured along noticeably Aristotelian lines. Focusing on Husserl's account of motivation and the parallel distinctions between active/passive and rational/irrational motivation, position-taking and the development of habitual moral virtue, and finally the Husserlian theory of the ethical vocation to the 'true self', the paper attempts to show the respect in which each of these structural elements of the Husserlian account of the moral life and ethical calling are ultimately based upon Aristotelian insights and motifs, placing Husserl strongly within the Aristotelian tradition of ethical inquiry.
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The Review of Metaphysics
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Women in the history of philosophy and sciences, 2022
Various commentators have noticed a trajectory in Stein's early thought, which arcs from ... more Various commentators have noticed a trajectory in Stein's early thought, which arcs from focus upon the individual human being as essentially open to the experience of alterity to a philosophy of community in its many forms. This paper argues that, in tandem with this intellectual trajectory, one can also view Stein as developing an account of the moral life, read off the back of her developing anthropology of the human being as interiorly individual and as social. Stein's individual ethics highlights in particular the responsibility to the development and unfolding of an authentic moral personality in attunement with the objective order of values and the absolute value of persons. Her social ethics crystallizes around a theory of repentance, highlighting the solidary sharing of responsibility for the development of community and, through the shaping of culture, for carrying out the process of meaning in history.
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Women Phenomenologists on Social Ontology, 2018
In the 1930s essays, Stein develops a theory of vocation closely resembling Husserl’s ethics of t... more In the 1930s essays, Stein develops a theory of vocation closely resembling Husserl’s ethics of the “true self” as he was developing it in the 1920s (Husserl’s most well-known expression and development of his ethics of vocation may be found especially in his third submission to the Japanese journal The Kaizo, (cf. Husserl 1989, 20–43), but may also be found in the conclusion to the 1920/24 lecture course, Einleitung in die Ethik (cf. Husserl 2004, 244–255), and in numerous manuscript studies from the 1920s and 1930s recently published in Husserliana Vol. XLII (cf. Husserl 2014, 265–526).) as well as Scheler’s thought on personal destiny in the essay “Ordo Amoris” (Scheler 1973b, 106–109). For all three thinkers, vocation is specific both to individuals and to one’s humanity in general in setting before us a particular moral calling to become who one truly is. While Stein’s idea of vocation, here, seems to refer to an individual’s “personal nature” and how this nature sets forth a particular course of life, nonetheless Stein indicates that this “personal nature” and the particular vocational call of the individual is itself conditioned by essentially social processes. I will argue that Stein had already worked out the description of the constitution of the moral self and its vocation through belonging to a community sufficient to support this later position in her early work in phenomenology, and in particular On the Problem of Empathy as well as her Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanities. Stein’s argument is that the moral self is not and cannot be radically individual, nor constituted wholly individually, but is brought to givenness only in the context of a social reality, disclosing a constitutive connection between individual and community in moral contexts. Finding the phenomenological resources for developing an account of the self in this way heads off a certain danger, potentially implicit in a phenomenological account of the moral task as a “personal” vocation, to think of the moral task as radically individual, i.e. as constituted independently of one’s belonging to a community (James G. Hart, for example, in the second volume of his monumental work, Who One Is, offers an explication of the Husserlian notion of the true self, adumbrating this thought through an exploration of the Plotin ian notion of the self as corresponding to an ideal form. The implication here is that the true self might be thought of as eternal, transcendent and thus constituted independently of factual belongingness to a mundane community or social context (cf. Hart 2009, 371–377). Likewise, Timothy Martell sees a similar problem at work in Heidegger’s conception of the authentic self, which seems to see the authentic self as somehow independent of and in tension with social reality (cf. Martell 2013, 122 f.). While I take no position here, on the adequateness of these as authentic readings of either Husserl or Heidegger, it seems nonetheless that Stein’s approach to the problem of social ontology and her later work on the theory of vocation offers an escape from the temptation present in phenomenological readings of moral selfhood to take the moral self and the moral vocation in purely individualistic terms.). Thus, if Stein can show, phenomenologically, that and how one’s moral self is constituted within a social context, then her thought can make an important contribution to the growing field of literature on phenomenological ethical theory. I will attempt to lay bare here the general outlines of Stein’s social ontology as developed in her early works and its applicability to the discussion of the sources of personal moral identity.
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Quaestiones Disputatae, 2013
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Philosophia: International Journal of Philosophy, 2020
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The Ethics and Metaphysics of Edith Stein: Applications and Implications, 2022
Various commentators have noticed a trajectory in Stein's early thought, which arcs from focus up... more Various commentators have noticed a trajectory in Stein's early thought, which arcs from focus upon the individual human being as essentially open to the experience of alterity to a philosophy of community in its many forms. This paper argues that, in tandem with this intellectual trajectory, one can also view Stein as developing an account of the moral life, read off the back of her developing anthropology of the human being as interiorly individual and as social. Stein's individual ethics highlights in particular the responsibility to the development and unfolding of an authentic moral personality in attunement with the objective order of values and the absolute value of persons. Her social ethics crystallizes around a theory of repentance, highlighting the solidary sharing of responsibility for the development of community and, through the shaping of culture, for carrying out the process of meaning in history.
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American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, 2019
While Edith Stein never developed an ethics of her own, her work is nonetheless suggestive of an ... more While Edith Stein never developed an ethics of her own, her work is nonetheless suggestive of an “ethics of renewal,” which appears in nuce in various moments of her corpus. First, in her phenomenological treatises, Stein analyzes the ethical development of personality in the unfolding of the personal “core” as responding to ever higher value domains. During the 1930s, this becomes a project of living out a moral vocation bestowed by God. In Endliches und ewiges Sein, the moral life becomes a work of renewal in connection with the Teresian metaphor of the “interior castle.” Morality, for Stein, emerges from out of an inner, personal work of the soul’s conscious refurbishment according to its essential structure by coming to terms with the value-world and with God. This paper will attempt to develop Stein’s account of the nature of the moral task as renewal and some implications for moral theory.
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Review of Metaphysics, 2019
Eric Voegelin criticized 19 th and 20 th century philosophy, including phenomenology, for its pre... more Eric Voegelin criticized 19 th and 20 th century philosophy, including phenomenology, for its preoccupation with the analysis of immanent time-consciousness, arguing that the analysis of time had become a mere substitute for meditation on God and that philosophy failed to move beyond the domain of immanent temporality to the eternal. However, in Chapter Two of Edith Stein's Finite and Eternal Being, in which an analysis of time-consciousness terminates in an intuition into the category of eternal being and, likewise, in select manuscripts where Husserl appropriates the Platonic symbolism of anamnesis as a temporal irruption of the eternal into the stream of consciousness, we have the example of two phenomenologists whose analysis of time consciousness terminates precisely in meditation upon God and the eternal. On the other hand, it is not infrequent that both Stein and Husserl are criticized as having moved beyond the limits of pure phenomenology and as having breached its methodological restrictions in these texts. I argue that while both thinkers do indeed transgress the limits of phenomenological methodology, this is not philosophically problematic, but represents the teleological aims of phenomenological inquiry as an "erste Philosophie" to be completed by a metaphysics as "letzte Philosophie." Moreover, I argue that a methodological accounting for the leading clues which guide both Stein and Husserl beyond the purely phenomenological domain in their contemplation of divine, eternal being are nonetheless still grounded in experience, although a kind of experience which, as Voegelin rightly argues, requires explication through other than a purely phenomenological analysis.
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International Philosophical Quarterly, 2021
Much of Edith Stein’s work on personhood is influenced by Max Scheler’s ethically focused Christi... more Much of Edith Stein’s work on personhood is influenced by Max Scheler’s ethically focused Christian personalism. But Stein’s own treatment of the ethical implications of personalism is not yet well studied. While the ethical theme is visible early on, it is not until the 1930s that the implicitly Christian dimension of her personalism became explicit. Stein mined her Christian personalism for its ethical and pedagogical implications on the topic of self-formation. This paper reviews the lines of development of Stein’s Christian personalism and examines its centrality for a concept of ethical education.
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Philosophia, 2020
Wojtyła has famously proposed a distinction between two contrasting but complementary interpretat... more Wojtyła has famously proposed a distinction between two contrasting but complementary interpretations of the human being, the personalistic and cosmological understandings, respectively. The latter characteristically treats the human being as reducible to the world of which man is a part, while the former recognizes the irreducibility of the person to her surrounding world. He argues that each understanding is necessary for a complete picture of the nature of the human being in its totality. However, given the history of philosophy’s apparently one-sided emphasis, since Aristotle, upon treating man from the cosmological perspective, Wojtyła argues for the necessity of’ pausing at the irreducible’ following the emergence of philosophical personalism in modern philosophy. Although Wojtyła insists that the two understandings can be harmonized, he gives little indication as to how such a difficult perspective can be accomplished. In Volume V of his Order and History, Eric Voegelin develops a similar distinction to Wojtyła’s personalist and cosmological understandings. For Voegelin, the delimitation of the person as equally an object in the world and as a subject for the world represents the specific paradox of consciousness, which entered into Western philosophy in the Platonic analysis of the structure of human consciousness through the symbol of the metaxy. This paper argues that a dialogue between the personalisms of Voegelin and Wojtyła may hold the key to the advancement of Wojtyła’s anthropology through the recovery of the classical movements in philosophy, which have been the carriers of the personalistic insight up to the present.
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International Philosophical Quarterly, 2021
Much of Stein’s work on personhood is strongly influenced by Scheler’s ethically focused Christia... more Much of Stein’s work on personhood is strongly influenced by Scheler’s ethically focused Christian personalism. However, how Stein treats of the ethical implications of her personalism is not well understood. While the ethical theme is indeed visible early on, it is not until the 1930’s that the implicitly Christian dimension of her personalism becomes explicit and that Stein utilizes her Christian personalism to mine its ethical/pedagogical implications for a teleologically oriented project of self-formation. This paper uncovers the lines of development of Stein’s Christian personalism and its centrality in making possible her explicit efforts to contribute to a concept of ethical education.
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American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly
While Stein never developed an ethics of her own, her work is nonetheless suggestive of an ‘ethic... more While Stein never developed an ethics of her own, her work is nonetheless suggestive of an ‘ethics of renewal’, which appears in nuce in various moments of her corpus. First, in her phenomenological treatises, Stein analyzes the ethical development of personality in the unfolding of the personal ‘core’ as responding to ever higher value domains. During the 1930’s, this becomes a project of living out a moral vocation bestowed by God. In Endliches und ewiges Sein, the moral life becomes a work of renewal in connection with the Teresian metaphor of the ‘interior castle’. Morality, for Stein, emerges from out of an inner, personal work of the soul’s conscious refurbishment according to its essential structure by coming to terms with the value-world and with God. This paper will attempt to develop Stein’s account of the nature of the moral task as renewal and some implications for moral theory.
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The degree to which Husserl's ethics borrows from Aristotle has not been sufficiently appreciated... more The degree to which Husserl's ethics borrows from Aristotle has not been sufficiently appreciated within the current literature on Husserl's ethical theories. Without seeking to challenge the important roles played by other thinkers, like Hume, Kant, Brentano, and Fichte, in the development of Husserl's ethics, this paper attempts to chart the foundational ways in which Husserl's later ethical philosophy comes to be structured along noticeably Aristotelian lines. Focusing on Husserl's account of motivation and the parallel distinctions between active/passive and rational/irrational motivation, position-taking and the development of habitual moral virtue, and finally the Husserlian theory of the ethical vocation to the 'true self', the paper attempts to show the respect in which each of these structural elements of the Husserlian account of the moral life and ethical calling are ultimately based upon Aristotelian insights and motifs, placing Husserl strongly within the Aristotelian tradition of ethical inquiry.
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This paper argues that there is a crucial problem in Edmund Husserl’s ethics of vocation, the res... more This paper argues that there is a crucial problem in Edmund Husserl’s ethics of vocation, the resolution of which is a requirement for the further development of the theory of ethical self-responsibility. This problem revolves around Husserl’s notion of the ethical vocation as a calling of the ‘true self’ to its self-realization. This implies a contrast between the ‘true self’, as an ideal towards which one ought to strive, and the self as it exists factually. Factually, the self, for Husserl, is morally deficient and only becomes virtuous to the extent that it progressively realizes its own ideal self. However, Husserl lacks sufficient conceptual language adequately to account for this contrast between the ‘true self’ and the factually existing self, in order to explain precisely why and in what sense this (factually untrue) idea of the self is to be considered ‘true’, as opposed to a merely poetical self-projection of one’s merely subjective desires. This paper argues that Edith Stein in her Finite and Eternal Being, although not directly attempting to address this ethical theme, clearly develops an ontological framework capable of resolving this central problem in Husserl. Stein’s potential contributions to a Husserlian ethics of vocation can be seen particularly in her rigorous distinction between nature and essence, or essential form, and the essential relationship between the two in the individual human being. Applied to an analysis of the human being, Stein comes to associate nature with that which determines the ‘what’ of the individual. In principle, nature, in the human being is changeable, as can be seen in changes apparent in the ‘character’ of an individual over time. As such, Stein is able to account for the factual moral being of an individual person and its evolution over time. However, this can only be accounted for adequately if there is some element of the being of the individual person which remains constant throughout change and upon which such change may be grounded. This will be the unchangeable, eternal concept of the essential form, which as such contains within it a particular ‘entelecheia’ or end-structure governing the becoming of one’s nature. Ultimately, this distinction between nature and essential form provides a framework within which one may account for the factual difference between one’s actual moral being and the moral being which I ought to realize. Moreover, it is on the basis of this framework that Stein is later able to discuss the possibility of achieving an either true or false poetic conception of one’s self, on the basis of which we can further clarify the truth-value of the Husserlian concept of the ‘true self’. This paper, having briefly outlined Husserl’s ethics of vocation and its relevant problems, sets out to present an account of Stein’s distinction between nature and essential form and its phenomenological, essential justification. Next, it attempts to apply this distinction to the question of the moral becoming and ideal of the human being and the ultimate connection of this discussion to the Husserlian problem of vocation.
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Papers by William Tullius