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Joshua Soffer [28]Joshua Soffer Soffer [1]
  1. Heidegger on Anxiety, Nothingness and Time:How Not to Think Authenticity Inauthentically.Joshua Soffer - manuscript
    In his work through the early 1930’s, Heidegger determines what it means to be an authentic self through fundamental attunements such as anxiety, boredom, uncanniness and guilt, and equi-primordially via understanding and thrown projection. The way that attunement and understanding structure authentic disclosure of being involves paradoxical gestures juxtaposing meaning and meaninglessness, presence and absence, affirmation and negation, possibility and reality, holism and individuation, normativity and own-ness. The key to navigating and unifying this tangle of contradictory moments, as Heidegger reminds (...)
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  2. What is a Number? Re-Thinking Derrida's Concept of Infinity.Joshua Soffer - 2007 - Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 38 (2):202-220.
    Iterability, the repetition which alters the idealization it reproduces, is the engine of deconstructive movement. The fact that all experience is transformative-dissimulative in its essence does not, however, mean that the momentum of change is the same for all situations. Derrida adapts Husserl's distinction between a bound and a free ideality to draw up a contrast between mechanical mathematical calculation, whose in-principle infinite enumerability is supposedly meaningless, empty of content, and therefore not in itself subject to alteration through contextual change, (...)
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    Who's to Blame for Injustice? Joseph Rouse's Poststructuralist Critique of Enactivist Ethics.Joshua Soffer - manuscript
    This paper compares Joseph Rouse‘s perspective on the relation between naturalism, social normativity and ethics with the enactivist approaches of Shaun Gallagher and Hanne De Jaegher. Rouse and these enactivists draw from many of the same conceptual resources, including the philosophical insights of phenomenology , hermeneutics, the later Wittgenstein and feminist scholarship, in order to rethink naturalism in the direction of strong interdependence between the individual and their material and social environment. Rouse(2023) has expressed support for embodied, embedded, extended, and (...)
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  4. Heidegger’s World Projection vs Braver’s Concept of Worldview.Joshua Soffer - manuscript
    Heidegger’s analysis of the use of tools under the rubric of the ready to hand , or handiness, introduced in the first division of Being and Time, has been an important influence on Lee Braver’s thinking. Braver reads Heidegger’s ready to hand alongside the later Wittgenstein’s language games as articulations of a mode of creativity he describes as absorbed, engaged coping. This mode is both more immediate and more fundamental than representational, conceptual thinking. In this paper, I compare Heidegger’s account (...)
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  5. Sense and Affect.Joshua Soffer - 2002 - University Press of America.
    Sense and Affect exposes the limits of important recent strands in continental philosophy. It questions the necessity of a certain language of violence, otherness, disruption and pathos saturating Jacques Derrida's texts and the texts of those having a proximity to Derrida's deconstructionist project. This book establishes a connection between such affective terminology and a common, if heterogeneously expressed, theoretical inadequacy binding Derrida and writers such as Lyotard, Foucault, Caputo and Nancy. Their failure to penetrate a presumed irreducibility of suffering in (...)
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  6. Investigations in Radical Temporality.Joshua Soffer - manuscript
    My central research focus over the past 30 years has been the articulation of what I call a radically temporal approach to philosophy. In the papers below, written between 2001 and 2022, I treat the varying ways in which radically temporal thinking manifests itself in the phenomenological perspectives of Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger and Eugene Gendlin. I also discuss Jacques Derrida's deconstructive project and George Kelly's personal construct theory as examples of radically temporal thinking. With the aim of clarifying and (...)
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  7. Heidegger, Gendlin and Deleuze on the Logic of Quantitative Repetition.Joshua Soffer - manuscript
    Philosophers such as Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, Deleuze and Gendlin pronounce that difference must be understood as ontologically prior to identity. They teach that identity is a surface effect of difference, that to understand the basis of logico-mathematical idealities we must uncover their genesis in the fecundity of differentiation. In this paper, I contrast Heidegger’s analyses of the present to hand logico-mathematical object, which he discuses over the course of his career in terms of the ‘as’ structure, temporalization and enframing , (...)
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  8. Reducing the Actual: A Phenomenological Bracketing of Deleuze’s Qualities and Extensities.Joshua Soffer - manuscript
    Deleuze is prominent among those philosophers who pronounce that difference must be understood as ontologically prior to identity. He teaches that identity is a surface effect of difference, so to understand the basis of logico-mathematical idealities we must uncover their genesis in the fecundity of differentiation. Deleuze wants to offer a foundation of number and mathematics as a subversive, creative force, an affirmation of Nietzsche’s eternal return as the ‘roll of the dice’. But he begins too late. For Deleuze, virtual (...)
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  9. Beyond the Morality of Justice: Gergen’s Radical Constructionist Critique of Relational Autonomy.Joshua Soffer - manuscript
    This paper draws attention to a divergence in approach to the social between Ken Gergen’s radical form of social constructionism and the more moderate constructionist approaches exemplified by the thinking of Shaun Gallagher, Jan Slaby and Karen Barad. Specifically, I argue that the latter stop just short of radical constructionism’s ontological and ethical implications. The ethical question for Gergen is not whether and how we achieve just relations but whether and how we deal with the struggle between competing goods, how (...)
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  10. A Phenomenological Critique of Mindfulness.Joshua Soffer - manuscript
    Evan Thompson and Francisco Varela ground the affectively, valuatively felt contingency of intentional acts of other-relatedness in what they presume to be a primordial neutral point of pre-reflective conscious auto-affective awareness. Through meditative practice, we can access this pre-reflective state , and avail ourselves of ‘unconditionally intrinsic goodness', 'spontaneous compassion', 'luminosity', 'blissfulness', and ' a calm and peaceful life guided by the fundamental value of nonviolence'. But how do such feelings emerge as ultimate outcomes of a philosophy of groundlessness? Aren't (...)
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  11. Personal Construct Theory as Radically Temporal Phenomenology: George Kelly’s Challenge to Embodied Intersubjectivity.Joshua Soffer - manuscript
    There are many consonances between George Kelly’s personal construct psychology and post-Cartesian perspectives such as the intersubjective phenomenological project of Merleau-Ponty, hermeneutical constructivism, American pragmatism and autopoietic self-organizing systems theory. But in comparison with the organizational dynamics of personal construct theory, the above approaches deliver the person over to semi-arbitrary shapings from both the social sphere and the person’s own body, encapsulated in sedimented bodily and interpersonally molded norms and practices. Furthermore, the affective and cognate aspects of events are artificially (...)
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  12. Beyond Blame and Anger; New Directions for Philosophy.Joshua Soffer - manuscript
    Despite the diversity of viewpoints throughout the history of philosophy on the subject of blame, one thing philosophers appear to agree on is that blame is an irreducible feature of experience. That is to say , no philosophical approach makes the claim to have entirely eliminated the need for anger and blame. On the contrary, a certain conception of blameful anger is at the very heart of both modern and postmodern philosophical foundations. As a careful analysis will show, this is (...)
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  13. Time as Relevance: Gendlin's Phenomenology of Radical Temporality.Joshua Soffer - manuscript
    In this paper, I discuss Eugene Gendlin’s contribution to radically temporal discourse , situating it in relation to Husserl and Heidegger’s analyses of time, and contrasting it with a range of interlinked approaches in philosophy and psychology that draw inspiration from, but fall short in their interpretation of the phenomenological work of Husserl and Heidegger. Gendlin reveals the shortcomings of these approaches with regard to the understanding of the relation between affect, motivation and intention, intersubjectivity, attention , reflective and pre-reflective (...)
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  14. Zahavi, Husserl and Heidegger on I, You and We: For-Meness or Ownness?Joshua Soffer - manuscript
    Zahavi offers a model of ‘I’, You and We consciousness that is grounded in the transcendentality of a minimal pre-reflective self-awareness , which he calls ‘for-meness’. Zahavi’s formulation of transcendental self-belonging as ‘for me-ness’ relies on the notion of a felt non-changing self- identity accompanying all intentional experiences. Zahavi’s treatment of the subject and object poles of experience as, respectively, self-inhering internality and externality, makes of self-awareness an alienating opposition between a purely self-identical felt for-meness and an external object, a (...)
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  15. An Enactivist Critique of Protevi’s Political Affect.Joshua Soffer Soffer - manuscript
    John Protevi’s project aims to combine the embodied school of affective cognition with Deleuze’s poststructuralist philosophy. I examine the validity of Protevi’s claim that his reading of Deleuze manages to “sharpen, extend and / or radicalize some of their [4EA] explicit presuppositions, that Deleuze lets us go “above” and “below” the abstract subject of embodied cognitive psychology, “above” to politics, and “below” to biology. I argue that rather than radicalizing phenomenologically-informed 4EA, Protevi’s reductive reading of Deleuze falls short of both (...)
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  16. A Phenomenological Critique of Ratcliffe's Existential Feeling: Affect as Temporality.Joshua Soffer - manuscript
    Matthew Ratcliffe’s model of existential feelings can be seen as a critical engagement with perspectives common to analytic, theory of mind and psychological orientations that view psychological functions such as cognition and affectivity within normative objective propositional frameworks. Ratcliffe takes a step back from and re-situates objective reifications within an interactive subject-object matrix inclusive of the body and the interpersonal world. In doing so, he turns a mono-normative thinking into a poly-normative one, in which determinations of meaning and significance are (...)
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  17. Phenomenology of Radical Temporality- Heidegger, Derrida, Husserl, Gendlin and Kelly.Joshua Soffer - manuscript
    Welcome to my philosophy page. My central research focus is the elucidation of what I call the radically temporal approach to philosophy. In the papers below I endeavor to articulate the varying ways that radical temporality manifests itself in the phenomenological perspectives of Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger and Eugene Gendlin. I also discuss Jacques Derrida’s deconstructive project and George Kelly’s personal construct theory as examples of radically temporal thinking. With the aim of clarifying and further defining the nature of this (...)
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  18. Husserl's Challenge to Merleau-Ponty's Embodied Intersubjectivity.Joshua Soffer - manuscript
    In this paper, I show how Husserl, via the method of the epoche, dissolves Merleau-Ponty’s starting point in the gestalt structuralism of primary corporeal intersubjectivity, revealing a more radically temporal foundation that has nothing of gestalt form in it. Whereas for Merleau-Ponty, the dependency of the parts belonging to a whole is a presupposed unity, for Husserl, a whole instantiates a temporal story unfolding each of its parts out of the others associatively-synthetically as the furthering of a continuous progression or (...)
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  19. Reading Derrida against Jean-Luc Nancy.Joshua Soffer - manuscript
    Jean-Luc Nancy would appear to have avoided the aura of conceptual determinativeness plaguing John Caputo's reading of Derrida. His rendering of the interweaving of experience is vigilant at depriving us of the ability to capture and possess a temporary presence in the event itself. In 'Elliptical Sense' (Research in Phenomenology,pp.175-190) and `Differance' (Sense of the World, pp.34-36) he thinks Derrida's quasi-transcendental as a being-singular-plural. But is Nancy's differential communication of events understanding itself as Derridean differance? Nancy himself reminds (Ellipsis34) that (...)
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  20. Heidegger and Derrida on Structure, Form and State.Joshua Soffer - manuscript
    Writers endorsing a general account of meaning as non-recuperable or non-coincidental from one instantiation to the next may nonetheless treat the heterogeneous contacts between instants of experience as transformations of fleeting forms, states, logics, structures, outlines, surfaces, presences, organizations, patterns, procedures, frames, standpoints. When thought as pattern, the structural- ranscendental moment of eventness upholds a certain logic of internal relation; the elements of the configuration mutually signify each other and the structure presents itself as a fleeting identity, a gathered field. (...)
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  21. Reading Derrida Against John Caputo.Joshua Soffer - manuscript
    If for Caputo the universality of desire as self-appropriation and the singularity of the gift as desire-beyond-desire depend on and interweave with each other, they nevertheless do so as the communication between discrete and separable moments, that of the `sensible, rational circle of time' and the `exceeding and surpassing of ourselves'. The subject for Caputo seems to function as the temporary self-identity of construct. It is the "desire for restitution, fulfillment, reappropriation, well being". This agent-subject "always intends to act for (...)
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  22. Reading Heidegger Against Levinas.Joshua Soffer - manuscript
    A prevalent interpretation of Heidegger today is what I will call for the sake of convenience, the Levinasian reading. According to this perspective, Heidegger's Being as Ontological Difference grapples with the contradiction between the subjectivism of representationality and the absolute other to representation. But the concept of Being as Ontological difference risks risks being mistaken for a Kantian unconditioned ground of possibility. Derrida argues that the Levinas reading mistakes the ontic for the ontological. Being is not a concept, the ontological (...)
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  23. Heidegger Against Embodied Cognition.Joshua Soffer - manuscript
    Current approaches in psychology have replaced the idea of a centralized, self-present identity with that of a diffuse system of contextually changing states distributed ecologically as psychologically embodied and socially embedded. However, the failure of contemporary perspectives to banish the lingering notion of a literal, if fleeting, status residing within the parts of a psycho-bio-social organization may result in the covering over of a rich, profoundly intricate process of change within the assumed frozen space of each part. In this paper (...)
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  24. Heidegger, Will to Power and Gestell.Joshua Soffer - manuscript
    For Heidegger Nietzsche is the last metaphysician because he determines truth in relation to the establishment of value-scheme. Heidegger argues that beginning from schematism and its overcoming is starting too late. Starting from beings as value-structures turns Will to Power itself into a value, the highest value. What Nietzsche fails to do is think from WITHIN, that is , AS the supposed self-presencing lingering of the schematism. The fore-structuring gesture of transcendence is not what goes beyond schematism, or before it (...)
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  25. Guilt and Anger in Heidegger and Derrida.Joshua Soffer - manuscript
    It has been said that we can't look the other in the eye in guilt. We don't have to be accused by another to feel we have failed her or him. The other need not be disappointed in us, nor even be aware of our failure at all. Guilt as self-blame would be the realization of our failure to behave in the way we expected of ourself, the hurt and disappointment we feel when we are not quite what we thought (...)
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  26. Critique of Embodied Affective Cognition:Against Gallagher, Ratcliffe , Varela.Joshua Soffer - manuscript
    Current approaches in psychology have replaced the idea of a centralized, self-present identity with that of a diffuse system of contextually changing states distributed ecologically as psychologically embodied and socially embedded. However, the failure of contemporary perspectives to banish the lingering notion of a literal, if fleeting, status residing within the parts of a psycho-bio-social organization may result in the covering over of a rich, profoundly intricate process of change within the assumed frozen space of each part. In this paper (...)
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  27. Embodied Perception: Redefining the Social.Joshua Soffer - 2001 - Theory and Psychology 11 (5):655-670.
    Common to different versions of social constructionism is the definition of discourse as taking place between persons. Experiences which take place in the absence of immediate others, such as thinking to oneself or reading a text, are treated as secondary phenomena, as introjected versions of social utterance-gestures. This article asserts that representative constructionist articulations of between-person relationality rest on abstractions masking a more primary locus of sociality. I offer an alternative formulation of the social as the embodiment of sensate experience, (...)
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  28. Reading Derrida Against Geoffrey Bennington.Joshua Soffer - manuscript
    One may locate in Geoffrey Bennington's reading of Derrida a formalization of deconstructive terms reminiscent of Caputo's thematizing of the moment of the sign. In Bennington's hands, Derrida's differance seems to be thought as a conceptual form programmatically configuring subjective, or `actual', events. Bennington reads Derrida's possible-impossible hinge, the `perhaps', as pertaining to definitive events which either conform to convention or break away from those norms. Bennington's quasi-transcendental, in thinking itself via the pure structurality of internal relation, unknowingly succumbs to (...)
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