Home 9 Category: Scholars

Arendt, Hannah

In The Human Condition, Arendt develops a phenomenological account of action that is provocative and of practical import. She makes a distinction between a hierarchy of human activity (vita active) labor, work, and action. Labor is the most basic human activity that...

Bachelard, Gaston

In his evocative text The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard employs the notion of the “poetic image” to refer to that special epiphanic oneiric quality of language that brings about in the reader a vocative response. The power of a phenomenological text resides in...

Barthes, Roland

What makes phenomenology rewarding is that it is pleasurable to read about existential insights: to passively and actively read and write insightful sources. In his book The Pleasure of the Text, Roland Barthes (1975) reminds us that the act of reading and writing...

Bergson, Henri Louis

The hands of a clock go around and round. They move unendingly along the circumference of the clock-face in a continuous repetition or they move eternally along an infinite line. But that is not how we experience time. While clock-time tends to be seen as a steady,...

Binswanger, Ludwig

Binswanger was a founder of the existential school of psychiatry as he ventured to apply philosophical ideas of Heidegger to the psychological understanding and treatment of psychiatric patients. According to the interpretation of Binswanger’s clinical work by Nassir...

Blanchot, Maurice

Blanchot wrote a variety of genres such as novels, essays, and texts that feature a unique fragmentary philosophical style. He wrote extensively and profoundly on the philosophical thoughts of Hegel and Heidegger, yet he rarely explicitly quoted from their work. The...