The philosophical concept of movement designates any process that modifies reality (be it human or non-human). This definition immediately begs several massive questions: is there any possibility to think of the world other than by mobilizing the concept of movement and by accounting for the processual nature of the all-encompassing totality? Or, to ask the same question in its Greek formulation, does the coincidence between the world as totality and becoming itself imply a coincidence between being and becoming? In this case, the ontology of movement would be the ontology. But other questions arise here: how can we theorize the articulation between the world as becoming (the world as processual nature, as physis) and the movement that we are, the subject in its dynamics of existence expressed in movements of active assumption of meaning? In other words, is there a common measure between nature (physis or kosmos) considered in its own mobility, and in the movements of animal or human life (all the way through historical or social movements)? Can we conceive of a unity, under the same concept of movement, of manifestation as individuation of beings and manifestation as appearance to someone? Briefly, can we make the ontology and the phenomenology of movement coincide, or answer how they overlap otherwise?
Then, it is not surprising that the concept of movement is ever present (albeit mostly implicitly) in the key moments of phenomenology development, both classical and contemporary: for instance, as the deepest layer of perception in Husserlian analysis of kinesthesis; disguised in Heidegger's definition of Dasein as the realization of possibilities; or as the central theme of Merleau-Pontian analysis of the motricity of the own body in the Phenomenology of Perception; but also as a stumbling block and an outline passage towards a new phenomenology for which all perception is already movement, in the last working notes of The Visible and the Invisible; as a middle term that allows us to link together the ontogenetic physical pole and the subjective pole of the phenomenological correlation in Patočka; or as one of the main coordinates of world-articulation in Fink. This notion, just as central to the project of a processual ontology in Whitehead, is far from absent from the contributions of other important thinkers of the twentieth century (Bergson and the philosophy of pure becoming, for example, or Minkowski’s cosmological project). Even more recently, the concept of movement constitutes one of the starting points of the developments leading to a new phenomenological cosmology in Renaud Barbaras.
In this issue, we would welcome contributions that clarify the role of the concept of movement in all these structural stages of phenomenological thought, as well as in both cosmological and ontological reflection.
We would additionally welcome, by way of example:
-
contributions questioning the crossroads between phenomenology and the physical conceptions of movement (ranging from C. Martius’ research in philosophy of nature, physics and biology to the works of M. Bitbol and D. Bell);
-
contributions questioning the movement of life, affectivity, as well as the movements of incarnation (or embodiment) of consciousness or of the mind (in the footsteps of E. Thompson’s, N. Depraz’s, A. Steinbock’s work);
-
contributions addressing the role of movement in identifying the lines of force of a material ontology (for example in the accounting for the difference between Leib and Körper), or the role of this concept in a theory of action, or studying the relationship between phenomenology and the movements of social life.
Abstracts and papers must be submitted to the following e-mail addresses:
Submitted papers (in English, German, French, Spanish or Italian) must follow the basic principles of Metodo and follow all Author Guidelines. The editorial board highly suggests all authors writing in a non-native language to have their texts proofread before submission. All contributions will undergo anonymous peer-review by two referees.
The final deadline for submissions will be September 15, 2023.