Philosophy

This paper examines the agonistic role of Kantian ethical philosophy in the theology of Michael Wyschogrod, and argues that despite his pronounced opposition to the Kantian legacy, Wyschogrod's thought still evinces Kantian influence, particularly in his treatment of conscience. The paper was a joint winner of the Whizin Essay Prize (sponsored by the Center for Jewish Ethics at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College) in 2019.

This article surveys Abraham Joshua Heschel’s writings on Jewish law in order to determine his influences and interlocutors, as well as to evaluate whether his work can serve the needs of those engaged in constructive Jewish thought today. Heschel’s thinking on Jewish law is shaped both by the Kantian critique of Judaism as well as by debates with Reform and Orthodox leaders of his own day. This article concludes that the vagueness in Heschel’s theology of halakhah, as well as a tendency to force halakhic questions into a simple framework of leniency and stringency, limits its usefulness for contemporary Jewish theology.

Through the philosophies of Bergson and Deleuze, my paper explores a different theory of time. I reconstitute Deleuze’s paradoxes of the past in Difference and Repetition and Bergsonism to reveal a theory of time in which the relation between past and present is one of coexistence rather than succession. The theory of memory implied here is a non-representational one. To elaborate this theory, I ask: what is the role of the “virtual image” in Bergson’s Matter and Memory? Far from representing the simple afterimage of a present perception, the “virtual image” carries multiple senses. Contracting the immediate past for the present, or expanding virtually to hold the whole of memory (and even the whole of the universe), the virtual image can form a bridge between the present and the non-representational past. This non-representational account of memory sheds light not only on the structure of time for Bergson, but also on his concepts of pure memory and virtuality. The rereading of memory also opens the way for Bergsonian intuition to play an intersubjective role; intuition becomes a means for navigating the resonances and dissonances that can be felt between different rhythms of becoming or planes of memory, which constitute different subjects.

What does Husserlian phenomenology have to offer feminist theory? More specifically, can we find resources within Husserl’s account of the living body (Leib) for the critical feminist project of rethinking embodiment beyond the dichotomies not only of mind/body but also of subject/object and activity/passivity? This essay begins by explicating the reasons for feminist hesitation with respect to Husserlian phenomenology. I then explore the resources that Husserl’s phenomenology of touch and his account of sensings hold for feminist theory. My reading of Husserl proceeds by means of a comparison between his description of touch in Ideas II and Merleau-Ponty’s early appropriation of this account in the Phenomenology of Perception, as well as through an unlikely rapprochement between Husserl and Irigaray on the question of touch. Moreover, by revisiting the limitations in Husserl’s approach to the body—limitations of which any feminist appropriation must remain cognizant—I attempt to take Husserl’s phenomenology of touch beyond its initial methodologically solipsistic frame and to ask whether and how it can contribute to thinking gendered and racialized bodies. The phenomenology of touch, I argue, can allow us to understand the interplay between subjective, felt embodiment and social-historical context. In opening up Husserl’s account of touch to other dimensions—intersubjective and affective—sociality is revealed as residing within, and structuring of, touch. Such touch can allow us to think embodiment anew.

Borrowing conceptual tools from Bergson, this essay asks after the shift in the temporality of life from Merleau-Ponty's Phénoménologie de la perception to his later works. Although the Phénoménologie conceives life in terms of the field of presence of bodily action, later texts point to a life of invisible and immemorial dimensionality. By reconsidering Bergson, but also thereby revising his reading of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty develops a nonserial theory of time in the later works, one that acknowledges the verticality and irreducibility of the past. Life in the flesh relies on unconsciousness or forgetting, on an invisibility that structures its passage.

Page 1. The racialization of Muslim veils: A philosophical analysis Alia Al-Saji Department of Philosophy, McGill University, Canada Abstract This article goes behind stereotypes of Muslim veiling to ask after the representational structure underlying these images. ...

In this paper, I explore some of the temporal structures of racialized experience – what I call racialized time. I draw on the Martiniquan philosopher and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, in particular his book ‘Black Skin, White Masks,’ in order to ask how racism can be understood as a social pathology which, when internalized or ‘epidermalized,’ may result in aberrations of affect, embodiment and agency that are temporally lived. In this regard, I analyze the racialized experience of coming ‘too late’ to a world predetermined in advance and the distorted relation to possibility – the limitation of playfulness and imaginative variability – that defines this sense of lateness. I argue that the racialization of the past plays a structuring role in such experience. Racialization is not limited to the present, but also colonizes and reconfigures the past, splitting it into a duality of times: one open and civilizational, the other closed, anachronistic and racialized. To understand this colonial construction of the past, I draw on the work of Latin American thinker Aníbal Quijano.

In this essay, I draw on Henri Bergson and Maurice Merleau-Ponty to interrogate what philosophy is and how it can continue to think. Though my answer is not reducible to the views of either philosopher, what joins them is an attempt to elaborate philosophy as a different way of seeing. In this light, I propose a view of philosophy as prosthesis—as a means and a way for seeing differently. Rather than a simple tool, philosophy as prosthesis is a transformative supplement, one that our bodily perception calls for and wherein that perception is recast. Rather than a fixed or assured view, this prosthesis holds open the interval in which thinking can take place. Philosophy, I argue, must wait. It sees and thinks hesitatingly, for the tempo- rality it inscribes is not a foreseeable development but the unfolding of life as tendency, as that which creates its own possibility as it comes into existence.

http://philpapers.org/archive/ALSAPO-3.pdf

Published in the edited volume: Living Alterities: Phenomenology, Embodiment, and Race. Edited by Emily Lee. State University of New York Press, SUNY series in Philosophy and Race, 2014, pp. 133-172.

ABSTRACT:
This paper asks how vision becomes racializing and seeks the means for its critical interruption.  My aim is not only to understand the recalcitrant and limitative structure of racializing habits of seeing, but also to uncover the possibilities within vision for a critical awareness and destabilization of this structure.  Reading Merleau-Ponty and Bergson in dialogue with Fanon, Young and race-critical feminism, I locate within hesitation the phenomenological moment where habits of seeing can be internally fractured.  Hesitation, I claim, makes visible the exclusionary logic of racializing and objectifying vision, countering its affective closure and opening it to critical transformation.