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146905

(2013) The phenomenology of embodied subjectivity, Dordrecht, Springer.

The structure of interpersonal experience

Matthew Ratcliffe

pp. 221-238

This chapter develops a phenomenological account of what it is to encounter someone as a person, an achievement that many discussions of intersubjectivity presuppose rather than address. I take, as a starting point, Sartre's view in Being and Nothingness that our sense of others is pre-conceptual, bodily and involves a distinctive way of experiencing possibilities. I concede that Sartre's emphasis on the loss of possibilities is too restrictive, but defend this more general view. In so doing, I consider some alterations in the structure of interpersonal experience that can occur in psychiatric illness. I propose that they are best interpreted as changes in a felt sense of possibility that is constitutive of our sense of others as persons.

Publication details

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-01616-0_12

Full citation:

Ratcliffe, M. (2013)., The structure of interpersonal experience, in D. Moran (ed.), The phenomenology of embodied subjectivity, Dordrecht, Springer, pp. 221-238.

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