Despite R. G. Collingwood’s relation to British Idealism, a close reading of his subtle descriptions of imagination and expression reveals important points of contact with the phenomenological tradition. In the first section, I bring together Collingwood’s exploration of the role of imagination in art with Merleau-Ponty’s concepts of intentionality and expression. This provides insights into both thinkers’ attempts to describe lived experience and action, highlighting important aspects of their work overlooked by readers. In the second section, I explore how Collingwood and Merleau-Ponty both describe communication as an open and evolving movement of understanding that does not fall back upon a supposedly isolated consciousnesses, thereby eluding the threat of solipsism. In the third section, I outline the connection between Husserl’s identification of a “crisis” in the European sciences and Collingwood’s invocation against what he calls the “corruption of consciousness,” a particularly modern shirking of our responsibilities as expressive and active members of the community.

The Christian can speak meaningfully of Christ as the ground and norm of this mythopoieic faculty and that mythopoiesis in contemporary secularity is finally judged by the mythos of Christ as both myth and myth-maker. Beginning with an observation of the mythopoieic elements in the fantasy fiction of Tolkien, Rowling, Pratchett, and Le Guin, I have attempted to contextualise their employment of and delight in a ‘mythic sensibility’ within a Christian theology of human participation in divine creativity. The implication of all such mythopoiesis into the mythopoiesis of Christ and in Christ is ultimately a seeking after God, a being-drawn into the Trinitarian return of God to God. Even when this desire has gone astray, it remains bound up in the Trinitarian procession, by virtue of God’s grace in creation, and in the redemption of the world through Jesus Christ. Our mythopoieic faculty remains redeemable because it, like all human endeavour, remains hallowed by the Incarnation and taken up by the risen Christ.

Certain stories act upon us. They shape the way that we see, encounter, and understand the world. A phenomenological approach to a narrative encounter with the world in terms of the mythic helps to illuminate a certain sensibility that mediates the world to human persons such that it is experienced as meaningful. Understanding the mythic in terms of a sensibility rather than in terms of a genre of literature or a form of cultural expression sheds light on how mythopoiesis is not a phenomenon restricted to archaic societies and the tales of either a bygone age or a culture or religion not our own. Among the most visible places of such mythopoiesis is so-called ‘mythopoieic literature’, fantasies that actively play with the sense of the possible, with narratives shaping the lives of characters, and what can be brought to the surface when meaning and being more closely and obviously co-inhere. A phenomenology of play, both in terms of the ludic fancy of the mythic and fantastic and the perception-shaping power of a game’s rules over the players, opens up the way that stories act upon our perception of the world and the meaning that we encounter.

This chapter explores the perceptual acts modelled by John Clare’s poetry, especially in encounters with the more-than-human world. Rather than foregrounding the ways a perceiving ego shapes a landscape, Clare details situations and perspectives readers can imaginatively enter and emphasizes the ways that the situations themselves invite receptivity. He normalizes ecologically attuned modes of perception by presenting them as enabled by the places, plants, and animals his speakers encounter more than the speakers themselves. Focusing on poems that place speakers among or beneath birds and weeds, including ‘To an Insignificant Flower’, ‘The Fens’, and some shorter bird poems, Falke describes the poetic means through which Clare encourages epistemological humility and other-directedness. She then articulates a mode of reading Clare’s poetry based on these same perceptual habits.

The interview questions were designed to enable the psychiatrists to reflect on their lived experiences, that is their personal knowledge about the world gained through direct, first-hand experience. This standard definition emphasises the subjective knowledge that individuals form through direct encounters, interactions and observations. The authors were particularly interested in learning about how the negotiation between South Asian and British cultures played out in the course of their working lives at the level of the lived experience rather than abstractly. Frantz Fanon’s existential-phenomenology is used as an example of an approach known as ‘critical phenomenology’ understood as a form of politically engaged practice capable of reflecting the concrete conditions of existence. Fanon’s significance within this context is heightened, given his credentials as a psychiatrist and his method of the lived experience as the route to learning about difference. Living through the era of French colonialism, he examined the devastating impact of colonialism and its concomitant effects on the self, on himself, as the colonised but also as the psychiatrist, and had a greater understanding of and empathy with his patients because of their shared experiences. Through powerful phenomenological description, he described his own feelings of being othered and displaced, and how this precarious sense of selfhood had lasting effects on his sense of identity.

In his oft-cited and still fundamental Criticism in Antiquity (1981), Donald Russell wrote that ancient literary history was ‘very rudimentary by modern standards’. Going far beyond Russell’s brief chapter on the subject, this volume seeks to understand ancient literary history on its own terms. The introduction places the present volume in context by considering how the recent history of modern literary history, both inside and outside the discipline of classics, puts us in a better position to re-evaluate its ancient congener. Embracing a more expansive and less essentialist approach to the objectives and methodology of the modern study of ancient literary history can enable us to approach the ancient study of literary history in a fresh light. In other words, abandoning misconceptions about both ancient and modern literary history is a necessary condition for a full ‘rehabilitation’, as it were, of an often neglected subject within Classical Studies: the Greeks and Romans’ perception, study, and representation of their own literary pasts. The introduction closes by drawing out some of the overarching themes of the volume and provides a short introduction to each chapter.

In his book General Psychopathology, first published in 1913, Jaspers presented a methodological framework for exploring the phenomenology of symptoms of psychiatric disorders as well as relating experimental psychology and nosology to phenomenology. This chapter briefly introduces the phenomenological approach to symptoms and how this has influenced symptom- as opposed to diagnostic criterion-based assessment instruments, such as those based on the diagnostic statistical manual. A transcultural and historical perspective is employed to identify relevant symptoms of mood disorders and their temporal course. Descriptions and definitions of classical symptoms are provided and extended based on modern evidence to include changes in self-imagery, moral emotions, self-blame-related action tendencies, as well as mood-congruent biases in the representation of the past and future. Lastly the contribution of psychopathology to future subsyndrome discovery, translational cognitive neuroscience, and network-based approaches to the psychopathology of mood disorders is discussed.

Chapter 6 elaborates on Hans Blumenberg’s arguments highlighting the limits of conceptual history and the necessity of a more powerful theory to the account of conceptual change, or what he calls the metakinesis of the horizons of meaning. This leads him to elaborate his metaphorology that subsequently expanded to a theory of non-conceptuality. As the chapter shows, Husserl’s concept of “Lifeworld” provides the bases for his elaboration aimed at overcoming the limits of conceptual history. It then traces the origin of the difference between ideas and concepts back to Hegel’s Logic, and how Koselleck departs from it, breaking the logic of self-manifestation of the concept in Hegel. Finally, it analyzes how Blumenberg reaches his postulate of the rhetorical foundations of all conceptuality. In his perspective, metaphors and other forms of non-conceptuality perform a pragmatic function, providing answers to the questions on the totality of the world. They are, thus, the articulators of the “lifeworld.” However, the question now is how the horizons of meaning they establish are dislocated. Finally, the chapter discusses on the aporia implicit in the conceptualization of non-conceptuality.

Nietzsche’s late text, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, has an important formal aim: to release images from the demands of reason. It also has a moral aim – to release the human will from its enslavement to preordained images, including from the image of itself. What would an image be for which its viewer still had to be invented? for which its viewer was being invented – in the image itself? This is the adventure of Nietzsche’s major work, which, like some literary works, is drunk with images, but they take a certain path of development, from knowing images to willing images. Instead of an image that presents knowledge for a knower, Nietzsche, through trial and error, develops a “willing image,” which first has a negative task, to liberate the will from its tie to established knowledge. But across the momentous book he also gradually sets aside images that stimulate an already existing will. The aim of Thus Spoke Zarathustra is thus like the aim of some literature, to give desire, wishing, wanting, hoping, and loving a new landscape in which it can change its genre and its objects, where it can learn to self-determine.

In the introduction, I argue that Yeats’s revivalism, far from being prior to or separate from his modernism, is in fact a principal component of it. This claim is based on new research on revivalism as a movement and a way of thinking about Ireland, its past, and its future. My theoretical point of view is determined by three intertwined concepts: recognition, temporality, and the world of the work of art. The concepts of recognition and misrecognition, as I use them, derive from Hegel’s philosophy and are fundamental to his dialectical method. I explore at length Mikel Dufrenne’s phenomenological concept of worldmaking, according to which the aesthetic object consists of a represented and an expressed world. The dialectical relation of these two worlds in the work of art led to the creation of new time signatures, new ways of accounting for time beyond the limits of historical thinking. These innovations, which I argue are characteristic of Yeats’s revivalism and his modernism, sanction, through artistic means, the creation of new histories and stories for understanding Ireland’s past. They also sanction the creation of new worlds – possible and impossible – in art and other cultural forms. Yeats’s work, propelled by a lifelong commitment to revivalism, introduces into modernism a constellation of new worlds.

Schizophrenia is a psychotic illness that erodes the ability to initiate and organise self-directed mental activity and to recognise oneself as the source of such activity. It can produce a diverse array of disturbances within the domains of thought, perception, affect and volition. Typically, the illness follows a course in which acute episodes of hallucinations, delusions and florid disorganisation of thought are superimposed upon more persistent and subtle disorders of the initiation and organisation of thought and behaviour. These persistent disorders can profoundly disrupt occupational activities and social relationships. However, the severity of the persisting disorder varies greatly between cases.

The disorder we think of as schizophrenia is the archetypal exemplar of a spectrum of disorders that extends to schizoaffective disorder, delusional disorder and schizotypal disorder. While there have not been major changes in the specific diagnostic criteria for any of these specific disorders in the 11th edition of International Classification of Diseases, ICD-11, nor the 5th edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association, DSM-5, compared with the immediately preceding editions, a shift towards emphasis on regarding schizophrenia as one pole of a spectrum of psychotic disorders reflects an ongoing debate.

Ways of Living Religion provides a philosophical analysis of different types of religious experience – ascetic, liturgical, monastic, mystical, devotional, compassionate, fundamentalist – that focuses on the lived experience of religion rather than reducing it to mere statements of belief or doctrine. Using phenomenology, Christina M. Gschwandtner distinguishes between different kinds of religious experiences by examining their central characteristics and defining features, as well as showing their continuity with human experience more broadly. The book is the first philosophical examination of several of these types, thus breaking new ground in philosophical thinking about religion. It is neither a confessional treatment nor a reduction of the lived experience to psychological or sociological phenomena. While Gschwandtner’s treatment focuses on Christian forms of expression of these different types, it opens the path to broader examinations of ways of living religion that might enable scholars to give a more nuanced account of their similarities and differences.