Science in Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology: from the early work to the later philosophy

This chapter considers Merleau-Ponty’s conception of the relation between science and his phenomenology. It sketches one line of thought from his work that uses ideas he takes from Gestalt psychology to argue that science and phenomenology are fundamentally the same sort of investigation. They may employ different concepts to characterize their data and results. They may also investigate different things—a scientist may investigate the effects of climate change on our weather systems; a phenomenologist may inquire into the structure of time consciousness. Yet, even though these investigations are directed at different things, viewed at a certain level of generality, what it is they are discovering and how they are doing so, is the same. Moreover, Merleau-Ponty holds that the different concepts they employ and the different objects they investigate are not essential differences between science and phenomenology. For Merleau-Ponty, therefore, science and phenomenology are “continuous.

Fanon, the recovery of African history, and the Nekyia

Black history is the study of the human past that focuses on people with black skin: the things those people have done, the past societies of Africa, world events from the perspective of Black people, and so on. Nowadays, the recovery of Black history is increasingly seen as important in the United Kingdom and elsewhere.1 People campaign for its inclusion in school curricula; there are documentaries exploring past African civilisations, and university research programmes devoted to it. The recovery of African history was also deemed important by the Négritude Movement (a Black consciousness movement developed in Paris), which was a central part of the intellectual context for Fanon's work. It is perhaps, therefore, surprising to find that Fanon is highly critical in Black Skin, White Masks (Fanon, 2008), of négritude writers' attempts to recover African history. In this paper, I will argue that his critique can only be fully understood if we read his text as adopting an important idea from Césaire (1995) that, following Jung (2009), can be called a nekyia. As such, Fanon's text is a form of therapy. I will begin by briefly explaining what the Négritude Movement is, and why writers associated with it were concerned with African history, before presenting Fanon's explicit objections to their arguments. After this, I will offer a further reason from Fanon's text for recovering African history that is not defeated by his objections. The final part of the paper will present Fanon's nekyia and show how reading Black Skin, White Masks as therapy helps explain why Fanon dismisses attempts to recover African history in the text

Creativity, play and transgression: children transforming spatial design

Spatial designers, who engage children in their design process, most often frame children in this context as experts in their own lives. Findings from a study based at the University of Sheffield, point to new understandings of this participatory role, in which children move towards the role of designer. Drawing on interviews including visual methods with 16 spatial designers and guided by phenemonography, the paper seeks to represent the designers’ perspectives on the under-explored area of child–designer interactions. Findings suggest that the designers understand these interactions to comprise a reciprocal and co-created space – a sphere of behaviours, actions and ways of being which together becomes an enabler of change. It is proposed that what Bhabha (The Location of Culture, 1994) refers to as a ‘Third Space’ in which the ‘dominant culture might be temporarily subverted and its structural systems of power and control renegotiated’ can be re-imagined in this co-design context. The paper weaves together theoretical discourse and empirical illustrations of perceived creativity, play and transgression, which – at their intersection – support a potential transformation of understandings of children as co-designers and of the design process itself

"Now I know the terrain": phenomenological exploration of CFTs learning on evidence-based practice

Couple and family therapists are rarely the focus of research yet are critical for positive outcomes in therapy. The attempts to integrate evidence-based approaches into the practice of couple and family therapy have been controversial resulting in passionate and at times divisive dialogue. The aims of this research project were to explore what do couple and family therapists experience when learning an evidence-based approach to working with couples and families. A total of 14 couple and family therapists were interviewed about their experience with learning an evidence-based approach. The research was guided methodologically by interpretive phenomenological analysis. Three themes emerged from the participants’ experiences including: the supports and challenges in learning; the embodiment of a therapy practice; and the experience of shame while learning

Now-thoughts

‘Now’-thoughts are often categorised alongside ‘I’-thoughts. The word ‘I’- (including its counterparts in other languages) and the thoughts typically expressed with it have long been a source of fascination for philosophers. ‘I’- seemingly behaves in peculiar ways, which many writers take to reflect some interesting features of the thoughts it typically expresses. Whilst the similarities between the behaviour of ‘I’- and ‘now’- have often been noted, the latter has received much less attention in the literature. In this paper, I will take some of the most influential ideas and frameworks that have been used to analyse ‘I’-thought and draw on phenomenological descriptions of temporal experience to provide an account of ‘now’- thought. I will argue that a certain important class of ‘now’-thoughts do not involve thinking about a particular time and predicating something of it, but instead merely involve registering the presence of events. I will end by sketching an account of how these claims might sit with a theory of the word ‘now’