Stockholm studies in philosophy – serie

This is the first book-length philosophical study of Husserl's transcendental phenomenology and Freud's theory of the unconscious. It investigates the possibility for phenomenology to clarify the unconscious, focussing on the theory of repression. Repression is the unconscious activity of pushing something away from consciousness, while it remains active as something foreign within us. How this is possible is the main problem addressed in the work. Unlike previous literature (Ricoeur, Merleau-Ponty and Derrida) all the resources of genetic phenomenology are employed. The central argument is that the lebendige Gegenwart as the core of Husserl's theory of passivity consists of preliminary forms of kinaesthesia, feelings and drives in a constant process where repression occurs as a necessary part of all constitution. The clarification of repression thus consists in showing how it presupposes a broad conception of consciousness such as that presented by Husserl. By arguing that "repression" is central to any philosophical account of subjectivity, this book takes on the most distinct challenge posed by Freud.

It can only be true that agents acted morally right or wrong if they acted freely. This statement is rather uncontroversial. However, any particular interpretation of "freely" will be controversial. Some philosophers believe that we cannot be free if the universe is deterministic, others that we cannot be free if it is indeterministic, and some think the morally relevant kind of freedom is impossible regardless of how the universe works. Moral philosophy thus has a problem; we discuss the right- and wrong-making features of actions and talk about people as being responsible for what they do, but it is not clear if there can be such things as rightness, wrongness and moral responsibility in the world. Practical freedom is the freedom we have when we must choose what to do and our wills are (at least as far as we know) efficacious. In this dissertation, I argue that practical freedom suffices for moral agency and moral responsibility, because morality is action-guiding. Therefore, what is irrelevant to deliberators and advisers is also morally irrelevant.