Empathy, Embodiment, and the Person: Husserlian Investigations of Social Experience and the Self - Paperback

by James Jardine (Author)

This text explores how self-consciousness and self-understanding differ phenomenologically from the experience and comprehension of others, and the extent to which such relations are constitutively interdependent.

Jardine argues that Husserl's analyses of selfhood and intersubjectivity are animated by the question of what's at stake in recognising an agent's engagement as the situated response of a person, rather than simply as the comportment of an animal or living body. Drawing centrally from the freshly excavated Ideas II drafts and manuscripts, the author develops Husserl's often fragmentary investigations of attention, habit, emotion, freedom, the common world, and action, and considers their implications for subjectivity and the experience of others. Empathy, Embodiment, and the Person also brings Husserlian phenomenology into dialogue with twenty-first century philosophical concerns, from accounts of selfhood and agency from analytic philosophy to the treatment of social experience in critical theory.

The book shows the reader that transcendental phenomenology can be rejuvenated by engaging with a broader philosophical landscape and will appeal to researchers, students, and instructors in the field.

Back Jacket

This text explores how self-consciousness and self-understanding differ phenomenologically from the experience and comprehension of others, and the extent to which such relations are constitutively interdependent.

Jardine argues that Husserl's analyses of selfhood and intersubjectivity are animated by the question of what's at stake in recognising an agent's engagement as the situated response of a person, rather than simply as the comportment of an animal or living body. Drawing centrally from the freshly excavated Ideas II drafts and manuscripts, the author develops Husserl's often fragmentary investigations of attention, habit, emotion, freedom, the common world, and action, and considers their implications for subjectivity and the experience of others. Empathy, Embodiment, and the Person also brings Husserlian phenomenology into dialogue with twenty-first century philosophical concerns, from accounts of selfhood and agency from analytic philosophy to the treatment of social experience in critical theory.

The book shows the reader that transcendental phenomenology can be rejuvenated by engaging with a broader philosophical landscape and will appeal to researchers, students, and instructors in the field.

Author Biography

James Jardine is a Postdoctoral Researcher in Philosophy at the University of Jyväskylä, where he works within the Academy of Finland-funded MEPA research project. He was awarded a Doctorate in Philosophy by the University of Copenhagen in 2017, having previously obtained degrees in Philosophy from the University of Sheffield and the University of Warwick. His doctoral research, supported by the Velux Foundation, was based at the University of Copenhagen's Center for Subjectivity Research and involved research stays at the University of Cologne, Columbia University, and the University of Vienna. From 2017 to 2018, he was a Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow at the UCD School of Philosophy, University College Dublin, a fellowship awarded him by the Irish Research Council.
His research interests include self-consciousness, emotion, and social experience withinand beyond the phenomenological tradition. In addition to authoring journal articles and book chapters on such topics, he is the co-editor of Perception and the Inhuman Gaze.