TLAG Glossary

(Quick and Dirty) Glossary of terms, phrases, ideas, and people

"Throwing Like a Girl…" by Iris Marion Young

141 Erwin Straus

(b.1892) German phenomenological psychologist who came to US to teach at Black Mountain College in 1938. Major works include The Primary World of the Senses, On Obsession, and Phenomenological Psychology

141 phenomenology

An approach to studying human behavior which places perception and "lived" experience at the center of focus

142 body comportment

How the self carries, inhabits, and uses its physical body.

142 Simone de Beauvoir

(b. 1908) French existentialist and feminist philosopher and writer. Major works include The Second Sex, The Mandarins, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, The Prime of Life, and The Coming of Age.

142 situation

Here it means a person's place in the world in terms of all the possibilities and constraints that result from things like her/his gender, class, age, race, or geographic and historical "location."

144 immanence

Sheer "here and now-ness" as opposed to "possibility-ness". Facticity. Property of concrete objects qua concrete objects.

144 intentionality

Property of human existence by which self directs its activity at objects in the world. Perception is an active act of consciousness which intentionally turns toward the thing perceived (as opposed to passively perceiving the world as presented to it). Basic property of "I" as subjectivity.

144 Maurice Merleau-Ponty

(b. 1907) French philosopher. Most important work is Phenomenology of Perception. Builds theory of perception around idea embodiment. "The body is not one object among many, but our means of belonging to our world, and facing our tasks. The body’s spatiality is not geometrical, but a spatiality of situation, an orientation towards a possible world." Considers implications for body image, gesture, sexuality and speech.

144 modalities

"Ways" or "styles" of doing something where the differences are at the level of fundamental meaning

144 transcendence

Property of being able to go beyond the immediate "here and now." Subjectivity. Being subject of a sentence. Abstraction. Here it means having a sense of self as actor, as living biography with open future of possibilities.

148 object

Property of entity as receiver of action, the "done to" rather than the doer. "Me" as opposed to "I." Self as thing.

148 subjectivity

Property of entity as actor or doer, "I" as opposed to "me." Capacity to act, property possessed by that which can say "I can."

151 Erik Erikson

(b. ) Austrian born psychiatrist. Among other things, known for studying process of growing up in different cultural and social settings. Major works include Childhood and Society, Young Man Luther, Ghandi’s Truth, and Identity: Youth and Crisis.

??? Jean Paul Sartre (b. 1905)

French existentialist philosopher and writer of novels, plays, screenplays, essays, and biographies. Major works include Being and Nothingness, The Flies, No Exit, Nausea, The Critique of Dialectical Reason. For most of his life he was associated intellectually and personally with S. de Beauvoir.