Phenomenology of Individual Agency

Dr. William S. Smith is the Executive President of the World Phenomenology Institute. Dr. Jadwiga S. Smith is the Co-President (American Division) of the World Phenomenology Institute. They both have worked closely with Dr. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka since the mid-1980s. Drs. William and Jadwiga Smith published widely in the Analecta Husserliana and the Phenomenological Inquiry, organized international conferences, and participated in the WPI at all levels. They are professors emeriti of English at Bridgewater State University, Bridgewater, Massachusetts, USA.

• Part I The Philosophy of Jan Patočka.- Jan Patočka’s Concept of Boredom and Everydayness.- Patočka’s Philosophy of Meaning in Literature and Myth.- Patočka’s Heresy: The Chorismos as Negative Freedom: The Problematization of Truth - Philosophy, Politics and History.- Part II        Phenomenology of Perception: Merleau-Ponty.- How to Turn Around Trouble: Phenomenological Aesthetics, Merleau-Pontean Institution, and the Metaphor of “Woman”-as-Hinge.- Phenomenology and the Relationship between Philosophy and the History of Philosophy:  A Critical Remark with Reference to Bernhard Waldenfels’ Reception of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception.- Le Corps Propre in the World of Perception: Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Human Reality.- Part III    Phenomenology and Individual Agency.- The Primordial Insight into “Mediality” and the Contours of a “Medial” Philosophical Anthropology.- From Success to Excess: A Reflection on the Current Experience of Time and the Limits of Socio-individual Agency.- The Abysmal and Sleepless Blink of Being.- Holistic View of the World: Interdisciplinary Nature of Music and Human Experience.- Part IV        Phenomenology and Aesthetics.- The Heteromorphic Sublime.- The End of Aesthetics.- The Possibilities of Aesthetic and Ethical Sensibility in Light of the Primordial Sense of Philosophizing.- Gadamer: Between Tradition and Beauty.- Part V        Phenomenology in Practice.- Art as Creative Energy and Comprehension of the World: Jan Patočka’s Considerations on Artistic Education.- Phenomenological Ambiguity in Ibsen: A Doll’s House, Ghosts and Hedda Gabler.- ANDENKEN: Hölderlin on the Caesura of Eros and Mourning.- Merleau-Ponty Between Image and Text: Origins, Ends and the Play of Meaning.- Spiritualization of the Body and Possible Revelation of Being in Birth Giving Petroglyphs near Big Bend National Park.- Experiential Nature of Music, Lived Experience, Musicality and Edith Stein’s “Empathy Theory”.- Anna Letitia Barbauld and the Process of Genius.