James Richard Mensch
Undergraduate student, Faculty
Matriculated in 1962 in Annapolis.
James in Barcelona 2019
List of Publications
- Selfhood and Appearing, The Intertwining (2018)
- Patočka’s Asubjective Phenomenology: Toward a New Concept of Human Rights (2016)
- Levinas’ Existential Analytic, A Commentary on Totality and Infinity (2015)
- Husserl’s Account of our Consciousness of Time (2010)
- Embodiments: From the Body to the Body Politic (2009)
- Hiddenness and Alterity (2005)
- Ethics and Selfhood: Alterity and the Phenomenology of Obligation, (2003)
- Postfoundational Phenomenology: Husserlian Reflections on Presence and Embodiment (2001)
- Knowing and Being: A Post-Modern Reversal (1996)
- After Modernity: Husserlian Reflections on a Philosophical Tradition (1996)
- The Beginning of the Gospel of St. John: Philosophical Perspectives (1992)
- Intersubjectivity and Transcendental Idealism (1998)
- The Question of Being in Husserl’s Logical Investigations (1981)
- Decisions and Transformations: The Phenomenology of Embodiment (2020)
Selfhood and Appearing, The Intertwining (Book)
Year of publication: 2018
Publisher: Boston: Brill
Description: What is the relation between our selfhood and appearing? Our embodiment positions us in the world, situating us an object among its visible objects. Yet, by opening and shutting our eyes, we can make the visible world appear and disappear—a fact that convinces us that the world is in us. We thus have to assert with Merleau-Ponty that we are in the world that is in us. The two are intertwined. James Mensch employs the insights of Jan Patočka’s asubjective phenomenology to understand this double relationship of being-in. He shows how this double relation constitutes the reality our selfhood and thus shapes our social and political relations as well as the violence that constantly threatens to undermine them.
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Click here to orderPatočka’s Asubjective Phenomenology: Toward a New Concept of Human Rights (Book)
Year of publication: 2016
Publisher: Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann (Orbis Phaenomenologicus Studien, vol. 38)
Description: For a reader versed in the Anglo-Saxon tradition of political philosophy, the Czech philosopher, Jan Patočka, appears as a paradoxical figure. A champion of human rights, he seems to present himself and his philosophy in quite traditional terms. He speaks of the "soul," its "care," and of "living in truth." Such concepts are combined with his insistence on the unconditional character of morality. Yet, in his proposal for an "asubjective" phenomenology, he undermines the traditional conceptions of the subject of such rights. In fact, what Patočka forged in the last years of his life was a new conception of human being, one that finds its origins as much in Aristotle as in the phenomenological tradition. This book traces the influence of Husserl, Heidegger, and Aristotle, among others, on the development of Patočka's thought. It shows how the confluence of these influences led Patočka to redefine, not just phenomenology, but also the basic terms in which the debates on human rights have traditionally been cast.
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Click here to orderLevinas’ Existential Analytic, A Commentary on Totality and Infinity (Book)
Year of publication: 2015
Publisher: Evanston, Il.: Northwestern University Press
Description: By virtue of the originality and depth of its thought, Levinas’ masterpiece, Totality and Infinity, An Essay on Exteriority, is destined to endure as one of the great works of philosophy. This commentary fills a long felt need by both teachers and students for a guide to this book, one that lays out its arguments and explicates his novel uses of terms such as such as “desire,” the “face,” and “infinity.” This usage is tied to the fact that Levinas is attempting to present a position that is absolutely novel in the history of philosophy. He aims to reconfigure the philosophical tradition from a different standpoint, one that is founded on the uniqueness of the persons we encounter. Arguing that the totalitarianisms of the 20th century arose from a vision that concealed such uniqueness, Levinas reworks the traditional philosophical themes of ontology, epistemology, ethics, and language to give a completely novel account of human existence. At its basis is an understanding of ethics, rather than ontology, as “first philosophy,” that is, as the starting point for all further philosophical investigation. In detailing his arguments for this position, this commentary provides an introduction to the thought of one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century.
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Click here to orderHusserl’s Account of our Consciousness of Time (Book)
Year of publication: 2010
Publisher: Milwaukee: Marquette University Press
Description: Having asked, What, then, is time? Augustine admitted, I know well enough what it is, provided that nobody asks me; but if I am asked what it is and try to explain, I am baffled. We all have a sense of time, but the description and explanation of it remain remarkably elusive. Through a series of detailed descriptions, Husserl attempted to clarify this sense of time. This book traces the development of his account of our temporal self-awareness, starting with his early 1905-1909 lectures on time consciousness and proceeding through the 1917-18 Bernau Manuscripts, the Analyses of Passive Syntheses of the 1920s and ending with the C, B and E manuscripts on time and instincts of the 1930s. Although it covers all the stages of Husserl’s account of temporality, the book is nonetheless systematic in its approach. It is organized about a number of basic topics in the theory of time and presents and critically appraises Husserl’s positions on the issues pertaining to each.
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Click here to orderEmbodiments: From the Body to the Body Politic (Book)
Year of publication: 2009
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Description: How does the body politic reflect the nature of human embodiment? To pursue this question in a new and productive way, James Mensch employs a methodology consistent with the fact of our embodiment; he uses Merleau-Ponty’s concept of "intertwining"—the presence of one’s self in the world and of the world in one’s self—to understand the ideas that define political life. Mensch begins his inquiry by developing a philosophical anthropology based on this concept. He then applies the results of his investigation to the relations of power, authority, freedom, and sovereignty in public life. This involves confronting a line of interpretation, stretching from Hobbes to Agamben, which sees violence as both initiating and preserving the social contract. To contest this interpretation, Mensch argues against its presupposition, which is to equate freedom with sovereignty over others. He does so by understanding political freedom in terms of embodiment—in particular, in terms of the finitude and interdependence that our embodiment entails. Freedom, conceived in these terms, is understood as the gift of others. As a function of our dependence on others, it cannot exist apart from them. To show how public space and civil society presuppose this interdependence is the singular accomplishment of Embodiments. It accomplishes a phenomenological grounding for a new type of political philosophy.
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Hiddenness and Alterity (Book)
Year of publication: 2005
Publisher: Dusquesne University Press
Description: In spite of the injunction of philosophy to “know oneself,” we realize that we often act from motives that are obscure; we realize that we often do not fully understand how we feel or react. In short, we understand ourselves as not completely knowable. In attempting to know ourselves, we recognize that some aspects of ourselves—not unlike when we try to know others—are hidden from us. In Hiddenness and Alterity, Mensch seeks to define how the hidden shows itself. In pursuing this issue, Mensch also raises a parallel one regarding the nature and origin of our self-concealment. In developing the theme of the exceeding quality of selfhood, in which part of our self is truly “other,” Mensch presents a unified theory of alterity. He examines how our acknowledgment (and suppression) of the other shapes our thought in ethics, politics, epistemology and theology. Further, he demonstrates such “sightings of the unseen” through original readings of the major figures of the phenomenological movement: Husserl, Levinas, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, Nietzsche, Lacan and Fackenheim. He draws further on works by Herman Melville and Joseph Conrad to examine the inherent alterity of our flesh and its implications for the ways in which we relate to the world around us.
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Click here to order on AmazonEthics and Selfhood: Alterity and the Phenomenology of Obligation, (Book)
Year of publication: 2003
Publisher: Albany: State University of New York Press
Description: According to James R. Mensch, a minimal requirement for ethics is that of guarding against genocide. In deciding which races are to live and which to die, genocide takes up a standpoint outside of humanity. To guard against this, Mensch argues that we must attain the critical distance required for ethical judgment without assuming a superhuman position. His description of how to attain this distance constitutes a genuinely new reading of the possibility of a phenomenological ethics, one that involves reassessing what it means to be a self. Selfhood, according to Mensch, involves both embodiment and the self-separation brought about by our encounter with others—the very others who provide us with the experiential context needed for moral judgment. Buttressing his position with documented accounts of those who hid Jews during the Holocaust, Mensch shows how the self-separation that occurs in empathy opens the space within which moral judgment can occur and obligation can find its expression. He includes a reading of the major moral philosophers—Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Mill, Arendt, Levinas—even as he develops a phenomenological account of the necessity of reading literature to understand the full extent of ethical responsibility. Mensch's work offers an original and provocative approach to a topic of fundamental importance.
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Click here to order on AmazonPostfoundational Phenomenology: Husserlian Reflections on Presence and Embodiment (Book)
Year of publication: 2001
Publisher: University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press
Description: This book offers a fresh look at Edmund Husserl’s philosophy as a nonfoundational approach to understanding the self as an embodied presence. Contrary to the conventional view of Husserl as carrying on the Cartesian tradition of seeking a trustworthy foundation for knowledge in the "pure" observations of a disembodied ego, James Mensch introduces us to the Husserl who, anticipating the later investigations of Merleau-Ponty, explored how the body functions to determine our self-presence, our freedom, and our sense of time. The result is a concept of selfhood that allows us to see how consciousness’s arising from sensuous experiences follows from the temporal features of embodiment. From this understanding of what is crucial to Husserl’s phenomenology, the book draws the implications for language and ethics, comparing Husserl’s ideas with those of Derrida on language and with those of Heidegger and Levinas on responsibility. Paradoxically, it is these postmodernists who are shown to be extending the logic of foundationalism to its ultimate extreme, whereas Husserl can be seen as leading the way beyond modernity to a non-foundational account of the self and its world.
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Click here to order on AmazonKnowing and Being: A Post-Modern Reversal (Book)
Year of publication: 1996
Publisher: University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press
Description: Everyone knows that "postmodernism" implies pluralism, anti-foundationalism, and, generally ,a post-normative view of the self and reality. While many embrace it, few bother to tell us what is wrong with modernity. What are the problems that brought about its crisis and ultimate demise as a philosophical and cultural movement? What are the lessons for the postmodern movement that can he drawn from them? James Mensch here explains why modernism failed as a viable philosophical enterprise and how postmodernism must be understood if it is to serve as a defensible intellectual project in its stead. The heart of Mensch's argument is a reversal of the modernist view of the unitary subject as a ground of epistemological and ethical normativity. He substitutes for modernism a view, beholden to Aristotle but adapted to for our present age, that sees subjectivity as temporality in a world where subject and object are interactive. The result is a pluralism of forms of subjectivity corresponding to the different modes of temporality brought about by the world. In a series of analyses on the nature knowing, Mensch shows how we can embrace both the perspectivism of postmodernism while avoiding the skepticism and relativism that have constantly threatened to undermine its insights.
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After Modernity: Husserlian Reflections on a Philosophical Tradition (Book)
Year of publication: 1996
Publisher: Albany: State University of New York Press
Description: After Modernity shows how the passing of modernity provides an opening for doing metaphysics in a new nonfoundationalist manner. The book provides an important new answer to the much-discussed question of the nature and possibility of philosophy following the collapse of the modern foundationalist paradigm. Mensch offers an alternative based in phenomenology. Using Husserl's analysis of temporality to reinvigorate Aristotle's account of time, he shows how the passing of modernity is actually an opening for doing metaphysics in a new nonfoundationalist manner. Positioning Husserl within a wider context, Mensch views him both as a culmination of the modern foundationalist paradigm and as providing a way to overcome it through his descriptive analyses.
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The Beginning of the Gospel of St. John: Philosophical Perspectives (Book)
Year of publication: 1992
Publisher: New York: Peter Lang Publishers
Description: The question of how to read the Bible is a perennial one. How do we interpret the God who claims to transcend our human categories? The difficulty is particularly acute in John's Gospel with its account of a man, Jesus, who claims to be God. Based on the principle that a text can present the radically transcendent only by disrupting itself, this book considers not just the sense of the Gospel, but also the breakdown of this sense. Focusing on its failure to humanly locate its central character and on the many misunderstandings which surround him, it presents a new approach to the Gospel's paradoxes. The result is a new definition of this sacred text based on a new hermeneutics.
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Click here to order from publisherIntersubjectivity and Transcendental Idealism (Book)
Year of publication: 1998
Publisher: Albany: State University of New York Press
Description: The threat of solipcism nagged Husserl. The question of the status of others occupied him during the last years of his life and remained a question that seemed to challenge the foundation of his life s work. This book offers new answers to this persistent philosophical question by defining the question in specifically Husserlian terms and by means of a careful examination of Husserl s later texts, including the unpublished manuscripts.
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The Question of Being in Husserl’s Logical Investigations (Book)
Year of publication: 1981
Publisher: The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Press
Description: This study proposes a double thesis. The first concerns the Logische Untersuchungen itself. We will attempt to show that its statements about the nature of being are inconsistent and that this inconsis tency is responsible for the failure of this work. The second con cerns the Logische Untersuchungen's relation to the Ideen. The latter, we propose, is a response to the failure of the Logische Untersuchungen's ontology. It can thus be understood in terms of a shift in the ontology of the Logische Untersuchungen, a shift motivated by the attempt to overcome the contradictory assertions of the Logische Untersuchungen. In this sense our thesis is that, in the technical meaning that Husserl gives the term, the Logische Untersuchungen and the Ideen can be linked via a "motivated path. "
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Click here to order from publisherDecisions and Transformations: The Phenomenology of Embodiment (Book)
Year of publication: 2020
Publisher: ibidem
Description: To say that we are embodied subjects is to affirm that we are both extended and conscious: both a part of the material world and a place where that world comes to presence. The ambiguity inherent in our being both can be put in terms of a double “being in.” Thus, while it is true that the world is in consciousness taken as a place of appearing, it is equally true that, taken as embodied, consciousness is in the world. How can our selfhood support both descriptions? Starting with Husserl’s late manuscripts on birth and death, James Mensch traces out the effects of this paradox on phenomenology. What does it mean to consider the self as determined by its embodiment? How does this affect our social and political relations, including those marked by violence? How does our embodiment affect our sense of transcendence, including that of the divine? In the course of these inquiries, such questions are shown to transform the very sense of phenomenology.