Methodical Precedence of Intertwining

The book is a research publication in phenomenology for a wider interdisciplinary (philosophy, psychology, environmental studies, political science, geography, aesthetics) interested audience. It offers a fresh conception of phenomenological philosophy by interconnecting topological approaches of late Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty with transitive thinking that can be found in Husserlian, Jamesian, Schützean, and Gurwitschian notion of the stream of consciousness. To clarify the linkage between a stream and an environment the book also employs methods used in theoretical geography (Edward Soja's trialectics). Main philosophical problems solved by the book are related to the intertwining. By this notion phenomenology understands relations between human subject and her environment, including not only other people, animals, plants, things, but also the environment itself. These relations are non-causal and non-direct, usually expressed in a feeling that I am connected not only to with what I immediately interact, but also to a broader situation. In this way humans e.g. feel responsible for people on the other side of the world whom they have never seen. The intertwining is hardly to be captured philosophically, because such attempts may easily lead to a superficiality. A key methodological task of this book is therefore to distinguish a vulgar feeling that everything is interconnected from a methodically serious phenomenological description. The book concludes with a project of a transitive-topological phenomenology, a more elaborated version of the phenomenological topology. The transitive-topological phenomenology claims that intertwining must be understood as a transitive third-space (besides the first-space of objectivity and the second-space of subjectivity). Building on this claim, it shows how human experiences are located and how different layers of experience cross each other.

Autorentext
Martin Nitsche is a senior researcher in the Department of Contemporary Continental Philosophy at the Institute of Philosophy at the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague. His research focuses on phenomenology, phenomenological topology (Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty), philosophy of art, aesthetics, political philosophy, theory of media, philosophy of religion.