Metodo

International Studies in Phenomenology and Philosophy

Journal | Volume | Article

137529

Human embodiment

An eidetic and empirical communicology of phantom limb

Richard L Lanigan(International Communicology Institute, Washington, DC, USA)

pp. 257-287

Abstract

Communicology is the science of human communication. This definition derives from the use of semiotic phenomenology as a logic based method to determine how human beings come to endow (Husserl’s sense of Stiftung) themselves and found their world with meaning. Such an analysis inevitably leads to a description of certain metaphysical and epistemological absolutes: (1) Edmund Husserl’s absolute that “subjectivity is intersubjectivity”, (2) Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s subsequent absolute that “the body is our general medium for having a world”, and the combinatory absolute suggested by Merleau-Ponty that (3) “It is by communicating with the world that we communicate beyond all doubt with ourselves. We hold time in its entirety, and we are present to ourselves because we are present to the world.” These three eidetic absolutes can be demonstrated empirically by describing the communicological extinction of the pain in a human “phantom limb” (a phantasm: mental representation of a real object) as explicated by neuroscientists V. S. Ramachandran and Oliver Sacks. The conjunction of discourse expression and perception in cognition is explored using the pure logics of Edmund Husserl (Parts and Wholes) and Charles S. Peirce (Graphs and Blanks); and, the rhetorical logics of Roman Jakobson (Metaphor and Metonymy), Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Michel Foucault (Le Même et L’Autre [Self : Other :: Same : Different] ).

Publication details

Published in:

Bondì Antonino, La Mantia Francesco (2015) Phenomenology and semiotics. Metodo 3 (1).

Pages: 257-287

DOI: 10.19079/metodo.3.1.257

Full citation:

Lanigan Richard L (2015) „Human embodiment: An eidetic and empirical communicology of phantom limb“. Metodo 3 (1), 257–287.