Select Page

The Future of an Illusion: Phenomenology and Psychoanalysis

by | Vol 34 (4) 2016

Starting from Sellars’ distinction between the manifest and scientific portrayals of man, we will develop three different philosophical readings of the possible consequences of this opposition with regard to the question of subjectivity: Dennett’s philosophical reconstruction of neuro-cognitive science; Husserlian phenomenology; and, Freudo-Lacanian psychoanalysis. Particular attention will be paid to the various ideas about the rights and limits of the first-person perspective and the issue of truth and fiction.

Related articles

  • Psychoanalysis and Modernity

    This article gives a rough sketch of psychoanalysis as part of modern culture (modernity) and as participating in the problematic of modern culture (modernity). It starts from the present day lack of interest in psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis is minimally defined by its concern for human experience, dividedness and conflict and for the maintenance of a lack. Present day culture can be described by a prevalence of instrumentalism, narcissism and the practice of a culture of immediacy. It can be interpreted in…

  • Psychoanalysis: a symptomatic problem

    In this article the author explores why psychoanalysts are often seen as troublesome people and why they give so much critique. Foucault stated that in modernity the epistèmè changed: ‘man’ came in the thinking frame and human sciences were born. In his opinion psychoanalysis has in this epistèmè the position of a counter-science. In this article the author shows how psychoanalysis is different from human sciences in two aspects. First, psychoanalysis has another subject theory. The subject is not seen…

  • Psychoanalysis beyond good and evil

    The moral criticism of Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil puts the dogmatics behind the philosophy of utilitarianism and deontological ethics at stake. The philosophy of ‘living as art’ and the human rights philosophy are criticised. The subject of autonomy, or the ‘I’, the agent of most ethical theories, is seen as a grammatical fiction. The concept of the ‘will to power’ serves as a way to deal with the complexity of this subject, given as a field of influence.…