Introduction

This volume of essays brings together some of the highlights from the fifty-first annual meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP). The Rochester Institute of Technology and Nazareth College hosted our conference on November 1-3, 2012. Although Hurricane Sandy disrupted the travel plans of some of our presenters and forced us to reschedule some sessions, the conference went on as planned. Our local host, Brian Schroeder of the Rochester Institute of Technology, SPEP secretary-treasurer Shannon Mussett, and graduate assistant Christopher Paone worked tirelessly to deal with the disruptions caused by the storm and to keep members and conference participants updated through the SPEP Web site.

Our keynote speakers for the 2012 meeting were Adriana Cavarero and László Tengelyi, and we lead off this issue with their essays. Adriana Cavarero's piece, "Recritude: Reflections on Postural Ontology," offers a provocative analysis of the relationship between philosophy and metaphors of verticality. Focusing on Immanuel Kant and Elias Canetti, as representatives of early and late modernity, respectively, Cavarero deconstructs the vertical subject that inhabits their individualist ontologies and considers how a different geometry of the subject, one that envisions the subject as inclining toward a dependent other, might succeed in overcoming the arrogance of the modern subject. This alternative geometry of the subject is connected to a relational ontology, but Cavarero's relational ontology shifts the plane of relationality from the horizontal to the vertical: the paradigm is a case of asymmetrical dependence, such as the child's dependence on the mother. To move beyond the Philosophus erectus model, Cavarero argues, we should imagine the human according to a different geometry of posture; the archetype of ethical subjectivity in this geometry is not upright subjectivity but, rather, maternal inclination.

László Tengelyi's essay, "Agonistic World Projects: Transcendentalism Versus Naturalism," also engages with a philosophical problem bequeathed to us by Kant. Starting from the paradoxical implication of Kantian transcendental philosophy that philosophy projects an infinite idea on the basis of a finite quantity of experiences, Tengelyi's essay examines a conflict between two contemporary world projects—transcendentalism and naturalism— and argues in favor of the former. After tracing the varieties of transcendentalism in the work of Kant, German idealism, Edmund Husserl, and Martin Heidegger, Tengelyi argues for a metontological transcendentalism— inspired by Heidegger but also by the Husserl of Ideas II—which avoids problems of subjectivism or idealism while still challenging the autarkic view of nature as a self-contained whole held by naturalism. Nevertheless, Tengelyi emphasizes that even those committed to the project of metontological transcendentalism should adopt a stance of agonistic respect toward naturalists and should reflect on the antinomy between these two world projects.

The next section of the issue consists of this year's prizewinning essays by emerging scholars. For 2012, the recipient of the Junior Scholar Prize is Fanny Söderbäck, whose essay, "Being in the Present: Derrida and Irigaray on the Metaphysics of Presence," argues for the similarities between Derrida's and Irigaray's critiques of the metaphysics of presence and for the importance of Irigaray's nonmetaphysical, irreducibly relational account of presence as an alternative to Derridean différance. The 2012 recipient of the Graduate Student Prize is Adam Knowles, whose essay "Toward a Critique of Walten: Heidegger, Derrida, and Henological Difference" analyzes Heidegger's use of the term Walten and draws on Heidegger's relation to the apophantic tradition of Plotinus to illuminate that usage.

The third and final section of this issue consists of essays that were chosen from among the 148 papers that were selected or invited for presentation at the conference. As usual, these essays range across a variety of themes, but each of them in some way stakes out a new direction for Continental philosophy. The overall trajectory of these essays is a movement from ontology through phenomenology to the field of social and political theorizing; hence, the title of this special issue: From Ontology through Phenomenology. The first two essays are located firmly in the phenomenological tradition. Frédéric Seyler analyzes the epistemological and ethical paradoxes of French phenomenologist...