Abstract: The article analyzes three cases through which the avoidance of stigmatization is revealed in very different modes of auto-narration. Each case suggests that the narrators intuitively use a strategy of modal shift: they find ways to resist the metaphorization or universalization of their lives by highlighting the modality of contingency. The article draws primarily…
Abstract: The essay is an introductory reexamination of the notion of realism in film by way of returning to the writings of André Bazin. In a moment when the relation between images and the physical world appears increasingly unstable, Bazin’s phenomenologically inflected understanding of reality offers a productive framework for reconsidering how films engage with the…
Abstract: This article approaches style as an ontological aporia: the condition of appearing that cannot be grasped either as a property of an entity or as Being itself. Beginning from the etymological constellation of stilus/stylus and στῦλος, it reconstructs a tension between writing and architectural space, and shows how visible mappings of space (peristyle, hypostyle) articulate a schema…
Abstract: This paper analyzes the social media trend “Do it for the plot” through Paul Ricoeur’s theory of narrative identity. Although the trend frames itself as enriching, its emphasis on isolated and casual actions conflicts with the ethical depth that a narrative identity entails. Drawing on Ricoeur’s ethical aims outlined in Oneself as Another, the paper…
Abstract: A Heideggerian conception of our narrative self-understanding is compared to Paul Ricoeur’s more familiar version. Where Ricoeur’s threefold mimesis conceives of literary texts as configuring unformed temporal experience and mediating between a writer’s and reader’s understanding, the Heideggerian approach holds our orientation toward our temporal existence to be already narrative in form, though usually implicit; working…
Abstract: This paper explores some of Hegel’s key philosophical commitments concerning biographical narrative, drawing on the narrative aspects of his philosophy of agency in the Phenomenology of Spirit and Philosophy of Right. The important philosophical claim that lies behind both works is that the self is precisely what it does – or,…
Abstract: Chairs, cups, books, and utensils populate our everyday lives and are protagonists of much of our ordinary aesthetic experience. It would seem natural, therefore, for the philosophy of design and everyday aesthetics to constitute intersecting fields of inquiry. Yet the contemporary philosophical debate on the aesthetics of design, articulated through three…
Abstract: I will defend a thesis about the proper way to aesthetically appreciate instances of design that incorporate natural elements. My main case studies will be drawn from the work of fashion designer Alexander McQueen, such as a bodice incorporating mussel shells from the Voss collection (Spring/Summer 2001). I will defend a version of cognitivism about the proper aesthetic…
Abstract: This essay proposes a visualist ontological framework for understanding design, rooted fundamentally in the theories of emergent properties and affordances. Opposing functionalist and intentionalist paradigms, the framework underscores design’s visuality and relational engagement as its core ontological elements. The concepts of emergent properties and affordances are presented as deeply interconnected, reflecting their philosophical…
Abstract: The aim of my paper is to provide a phenomenological outline of solidarity understood as a social phenomenon. I will defend the thesis that solidarity cannot be properly understood either as a concept, or as some institutionalized mechanism grounded in a legal-political order. It precedes and grounds such orders. Solidarity belongs to the social realm within which it can be properly understood only as an…