This article analyzes the speech act of confession or avowal to reassess the concept of first-person authority. Central issues frame the discussion of avowal in the debate on self-awareness, self-consciousness, and self-knowledge. In this context, the article demonstrates how avowal involves specific forms of acknowledgment and responsibility, shaping self-knowledge as a commitment that reflects both a self-relation and a relation to others. These relationships are then examined in terms of their temporality, encompassing moments of both appropriation and withdrawal. The exploration of confession and the value attributed to accuracy and sincerity will allow us to reframe questions concerning the authority of the first person by incorporating practical and ethical considerations into the understanding of self-knowledge. Consequently, the authority of the first person will be understood as the authority of self-formation and self-positioning.
Although Husserl condemned a form of relativism he called 'anthropologism,' he nevertheless admitted, notably in his correspondence with L & eacute;vy-Bruhl, that cultural relativism, as a method of anthropological inquiry, was entirely legitimate insofar as it meant "feeling from within a closed humanity, living in a lively and generative sociality." For Husserl, intersubjectivity is the fundamental dimension of the world of human life, constitutive of both the subject and the objective world, and thus the foundation for any anthropological approach that makes sociality the elementary condition for human existence. Yet one can go further than the admission that I am aware of the world through intersubjectivity, if one concedes with L & eacute;vi-Strauss - drawing on a suggestion from Rousseau - that my co-subjects need not be exclusively human alter egos but may also include other living beings. This article explores the philosophical and political consequences of extending the domain of the 'we' beyond humans by advocating the granting of legal standing to non-human collective subjects.
This paper revises Rahel Jaeggi's proposition for a critique of forms of life with insights from Foucault's approach to power and resistance. I address Foucault's comments on counter-conducts and other revolts of conduct through the lens of Jaeggi's critique of forms of life, arguing that Foucault's efforts to localize practices of resistance which counter governmental power involve a critique of forms of life. I suggest that Foucault's power-theoretical paradigm allows us to approach alternative forms of life as corollaries of dominant forms of life. His relational approach to power implies that practices of resistance develop alternative normative horizons to govern social life, thus superseding the denaturalizing moment of genealogical critique. As such, Foucault's work allows us to highlight the revolts of conduct as a politics of forms of life with a normatively significant and transformative character.
Dreyfus claims that Searle's views on intentionality and the social world are similar to Husserl's but criticizes Searle's ideas in light of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. This paper's thesis is that both the analytic and continental traditions have unjustly neglected this critique. The article compares Husserl's notion of the life-world with Searle's philosophy of mind, specifically his concept of Background, which is analogous to the lifeworld in Husserl. Next, the paper examines Dreyfus' criticism, which moves from a Heideggerian to a Merleau-Pontyian perspective. The paper concludes that Dreyfus's viewpoint is closer to Husserl's in The Crisis than is commonly assumed, and that the concept of Background is best understood as arising from the actions of embodied social beings, as Merleau-Ponty proposes.
This article examines two key research questions. First, it explores the philosophical and theoretical relationship between Carl Menger's theory of subjective value and Franz Brentano's concept of intentionality, despite the lack of direct archival evidence linking the two thinkers. While their ideas have been extensively studied, the conceptual and historical connections between them remain under-explored. By focusing on shared intellectual traditions, particularly Aristotelian thought and their engagement with psychology, this study aims to bridge this gap. Second, the article investigates how Menger's and Brentano's approaches contribute to a theoretical framework for understanding modern consumer behaviour. Menger's emphasis on individual needs and preferences intersects with Brentano's concept of intentionality, which highlights the directedness of mental phenomena. This study analyses how these perspectives inform consumer society by examining the intentional relationship between the consumer subject and objects of consumption. Rather than solely establishing a link between Brentano and Menger, the objective is to propose an alternative analysis of consumer culture beyond postmodern or psychoanalytic approaches, using Brentano's theory of intentionality and Menger's subjective value theory.
