Zeta books

08/06/2026

Christopher Gutland, "Applying Husserl’s Phenomenology to the Chinese Script: Debunking the Phonocentric Myth". In: Studia Phaenomenologica, Volume 26 / 2026

Abstract: Drawing on Edmund Husserl’s 1913/1914 revisions, this article applies his modality‑neutral account of signification to the Chinese script to challenge phonocentrism. After outlining relevant features of Chinese, it introduces phonocentrism via William Boltz, who holds that written graphs convey linguistic meaning only through associated word sounds. Husserl’s revision, by contrast, holds that a sign is linguistic insofar as it functions within grammatical structures that motivate categorial acts, not insofar as it is acoustic. Accordingly, it is shown phenomenologically how the non‑alphabetic Chinese script can meet this condition even in the absence of phonetic mediation. The paper thus undercuts phonocentrism by showing, via Chinese, that written signs can be linguistic without phonetic mediation and that writing is a primary linguistic modality.

29/05/2026

A new title in our series "Late Antique and Byzantine Studies" is now available:

A Patriarch in Exile: Severus of Antioch and His Pastoral Strategy (518–538)

By David-Gabriel CARPEN
Foreword by Andrei TIMOTIN

ISBN: 978-606-697-199-7 (paperback)
ISBN: 978-606-697-200-0 (electronic)

This book offers a reassessment of Severus of Antioch, one of the most influential and controversial figures of late antique Christianity. Deposed from the patriarchal see of Antioch in 518 and forced into exile until his death in 538, Severus nevertheless continued to guide the non-Chalcedonian communities of the Eastern Mediterranean through an extensive pastoral, theological, and ecclesial activity.

Drawing on letters, homilies, theological treatises, and historical sources, David-Gabriel Carpen reconstructs Severus’ pastoral strategy in exile and examines the ways in which ecclesial authority, doctrinal rigor, and institutional resilience were maintained under conditions of political and religious pressure.

The volume addresses key themes such as: late antique Christianity · Severus of Antioch · non-Chalcedonian Churches · ecclesial leadership · Byzantine theology

👉 View full description & order your copy
https://zetabooks.com/all-titles/a-patriarch-in-exile/

Available formats: paperback and ebook
Price: from €15

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Zeta Books

23/05/2026

Rudolf Bernet, "Le mot d’esprit (Witz) chez Freud". In: Studia Phaenomenologica, Volume 26 / 2026: Phenomenology and Psychopathology

Abstract: The abundant distinctions between different kinds of jokes in Freud’s book on Jokes have discouraged many readers. There is a need to find a unity in this multiplicity – a little like Husserl does in his process of eidetic variation. Does the common essence and benefit of all jokes consist, as is often said, in their avoiding a neurotic repression of unconscious desires? Paying special attention to the linguistic expression of jokes and to the process of their social sharing, the author highlights, instead, what they owe to the pleasure of playing. Although Freud relates this pleasure to a special kind of drive (Spieltrieb) and not to aesthetic imagination, jokes allow us to escape from the constraints of reality, reason, and morals. Playing with words in jokes is like returning to the plays and pleasures of one’s childhood. Emphasizing the playful character of jokes makes one also understand better how they hold the middle between the painful effort to adapt to reality, and the attempt to escape from all reality through the hallucinatory satisfaction of unconscious desires in dreaming.

23/05/2026

Thomas Fuchs, "Trauma as a Bodily Limit Situation". In: Studia Phaenomenologica, Volume 26 / 2026: Phenomenology and Psychopathology

Abstract: Karl Jaspers describes limit situations as experiences that fundamentally challenge our existing worldview and self‑image, bringing us to the brink of existence. In this sense, trauma can also be subsumed under this term: as an event that shatters all previous assumptions about the world and cannot be appropriated and integrated into the context of existing life. The intrusion of something foreign into one’s own body, the experience of powerlessness and helplessness, can irreversibly shake one’s fundamental trust in the world. Those affected remain scarred by the physical limit experience to which they were exposed. How this limit situation can nevertheless be reintegrated into life in the long term is the central question for trauma therapy.

23/05/2026

Agustina María Lombardi, "A Not-So-Minimal Self? The Immutability of the Experiential Self in Question". In: Studia Phaenomenologica, Volume 26 / 2026: Phenomenology and Psychopathology

Abstract: This paper reinterprets the notion of the minimal self, usually identified with the core and experiential self, within phenomenological psychiatry. It criticises the thesis asserting the immutability of the minimal self, positing that this dimension comprises two distinct levels: a more formal, immutable level and a more robust level susceptible to change. In the first section, I show how contemporary phenomenologists identify the minimal self as the experiential and core self. In the second, I question the claim of the minimal self ’s invariability by exploring phenomenological insights into schizophrenia and critiques related to borderline personality disorder. Finally, I advance a nuanced distinction within the core self, arguing that while the more minimal aspect remains stable across psychopathological conditions, the less minimal aspect is vulnerable to alteration.

20/05/2026

Adrian Razvan Sandru, "Navigating Contextual Instability: Revisiting Louis Sass’ Ipseity Model from a Neurocognitive Perspective". In: Studia Phaenomenologica, Volume 26 / 2026: Phenomenology and Psychopathology

Abstract: Louis Sass’s interpretation of schizophrenia as a self‑disturbance has helped advance phenomenological psychopathology. Nevertheless, his ipseity model has received criticism for allegedly treating schizophrenia primarily through “top‑down” reflective processes, neglecting the pre‑reflective layers of experience, and lacking empirical support. I address these critiques by drawing on recent neuropsychiatric studies that indicate a correlation between semantic alterations and disturbances in the broader system of relational knowledge, suggesting contextual instability. I argue that these studies support Sass’s claim that a core aspect of schizophrenia is the disturbance of the sense of contextual relevance that unfolds on both reflective as well as pre‑reflective levels of experience, thus defending the inclusion of passive dimensions of experience in his ipseity model.

19/05/2026

Daniel Schmicking, "Exploring ADHD through a Phenomenological Lens: A New Path toward Understanding Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder". In: Studia Phaenomenologica, Volume 26 / 2026: Phenomenology and Psychopathology

Abstract: Despite its pervasive impact on everyday being‑in‑the‑world, adult ADHD remains largely unexplored in phenomenological psychopathology. This paper argues that pronounced forms of adult ADHD can be described as involving an impairment of “natural self‑evidence” (Blankenburg), that is, a weakening of the taken‑for‑granted anchoring in an intersubjectively constituted lifeworld. Drawing on clinical and experimental research alongside first‑person and second‑person reports, I develop a phenomenological description of ADHD‑related alterations of attention and affectivity, impaired emotional self‑regulation, and executive dysfunctions. On this basis, I show how these disturbances disrupt or hinder habitual cooperation with others—affective attunement, temporal synchronisation, and shared planning—thereby affecting the constitution of practical normality in everyday life. The paper concludes by outlining directions of future research in a phenomenology of ADHD and its potential contributions to psychopathological description and the diagnostic understanding of adult presentations.

19/05/2026

Joseph Zislin & Anastasiia Zinevych, "Structural-Semantic Approach to Delusional Narratives: Between Phenomenology and Psychopathology". In: Studia Phaenomenologica, Volume 26 / 2026: Phenomenology and Psychopathology

Abstract: This study attempts to establish correspondences between delusional narratives and historical or literary texts by applying structural‑semantic analysis of motifs (defined as an image plus a predicate) and plots (defined as sequences of motifs linked by causation). For two groups of delusional narratives (“I as an agens” and “I as a patiens”), corresponding subclasses were identified and compared with non‑psychotic narratives. The analysis demonstrated that the newly identified functions—Auto in the first group and Accept in the second—reflect the patient’s attitude towards their own condition, with clear linguistic analogues and clinical significance. The resulting pool of motifs and plots will, in the future, support a transition—by analogy with corpus‑based folklore studies—to corpus‑based psychopathology and, subsequently, to anthropological psychiatry.

19/05/2026

Natalie Depraz, You Will Be Schizophrenic. Curing Schizophrenia? In: Studia Phaenomenologica, Volume 26 / 2026: Phenomenology and Psychopathology

Abstract: This article questions the widespread assumption that schizophrenia is an incurable condition to be managed primarily through medication and institutional containment. Drawing on the clinical practice of Henri Grivois and on insights from phenomenological psychiatry, I reconsider what it means to speak of “cure.” A comparative reading of two contrasting films—Shutter Island and A Beautiful Mind—shows how different narrative frames influence the way psychosis is understood and judged. These representations are placed alongside autobiographical accounts by persons diagnosed with schizophrenia, in which writing and relational support alter the experience of hallucination and crisis. The disappearance of symptoms cannot serve as the sole measure of recovery. In chronic forms of schizophrenia, what often changes is the person’s relation to what happens to them: the way voices are interpreted, the way episodes are anticipated, and the way one remains connected to others. Healing, in this sense, concerns the possibility of living with the disorder without being reduced to it.

20/02/2026

Extended Deadline: Studia Phaenomenologica, Volume 27 (2027): “Phenomenological Approaches to Affectivity”. Guest Editors: Claudia Serban & Anthony Steinbock

Whether in the context of clarifying the theory of intentionality, uncovering the background of our facticity, describing the pre-linguistic layer of our being-in-the-world, or understanding the orientation of our intersubjective field as polarized by values, affectivity emerges as a central concern from the earliest stages of the various orientations within phenomenology and phenomenological philosophy. This crucial and inescapable status of affectivity immediately gives rise to far-reaching questions: Can we undertake a phenomenological description of modes of objectivity or of the ontological layers of the lifeworld and the social world without confronting the problem of affectivity—without accounting for the situated, embodied, and affective nature of all experience and every encounter with worldly objects and with others?

Likewise: Can intentionality be understood without attending to its affective character and orientation, or to the modalities of emotional life? In that case, the very structure of phenomenological correlation would demand to be rethought so as to include the affective and emotional dimensions of every intentional relation. How, then, are we to think the articulation between affectivity and the givenness of meaning? More broadly: Can the theory of intentionality be made to coincide with a phenomenology of affectivity—and if not, how do they intersect?

Moreover, given the fundamentally affective and variable tonality of our openness to the world and to alterity, and of our encounters with beings and with others, further questions arise: How can we unify, under the single concept of affectivity, the diversity of affects and emotions? What is the precise link between affectivity, its multiple manifestations, and their corresponding matters? How can we approach affects and emotions starting from their embodiment? Are we not compelled to rethink corporeality in light of its status as the seat of emotional life? What is the impact of affectivity and its fundamental variants on the dynamics of human life—from the overarching orientations of personal existence to the social and political movements that shape collective history on various scales?

This issue invites contributions that explore the role of affectivity in all these structural dimensions of classical or contemporary phenomenological reflection. We also welcome submissions that examine intersections between the phenomenology of affectivity and adjacent fields such as psychology, psychopathology, psychoanalysis, or the neurosciences, as well as history, anthropology, and sociology.

We particularly encourage contributions that offer fresh assessments of classical phenomenological approaches to affectivity (Husserl, Scheler, Kolnai, Heidegger, Bollnow, Levinas, Sartre, Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty, Patočka, Fink, Dufrenne, Henry, Maldiney, Richir, Waldenfels, etc.), alongside newer developments in the field of the phenomenology of affectivity and emotions. These may include: analyses of embodied affectivity and its impact on theories of consciousness or mind (Thompson, Steinbock, Depraz, Fuchs); the role of affectivity in the phenomenological concept of atmosphere (Schmitz, Bégout); contributions to the development of eco-phenomenology (Toadvine); renewed descriptive accounts of emotional life (Heinämaa, Zahavi, Steinbock), such as in the form of a cardio-phenomenology (Depraz); critical emotion theory attentive to the social, political, cultural, and economic constraints that shape affective life (Ahmed, Oksala); and approaches that treat affectivity as a fundamental dimension of openness to the world, thematized under the concept of desire (Barbaras).

We also welcome essays situated at the intersection of phenomenology, psychopathology, and psychoanalysis; contributions addressing the role of affectivity in shaping a theory of action; and studies investigating the relation between the phenomenology of affectivity and the fundamental movements, manifestations, and forms of social and political life.

Extended Deadline: March 15, 2026.

Submission Guidelines: https://zetabooks.com/library/journals/studia-phaenomenologica/

Contact: Papers should be sent to [email protected] (subject line: Studia Phaenomenologica 2027)

Published in collaboration with the Romanian Society for Phenomenology. ISSN 1582-5647 (print) / ISSN 2069-0061 (online) Online Access via Philosophy Documentation Center This subscription-based journal offers a hybrid open access option. If you are interested in this option, please Email Us. For In...