Many riddle subjects in the Exeter Book resist the landmarks of an explicitly human experience. Riddles that treat intimately known creatures (keys, books, ploughs, even oxen) build those creatures out of intimate knowledge: how, when, and why the creature is touched and valued. But riddles that treat more unfamiliar creatures—wild animals, mythological animals, and weather phenomena—build their subjects out of what little can be known, or accessed, by human beings: experience predicated on distance rather than intimacy. And unknown or unknowable concepts like Creation itself, in both Aldhelm’s Creatura and its Old English translation in the Exeter Book, are described through failures of human experience: as beyond the limits of the senses. In encompassing the unknown, the riddles invoke the failure of the senses to move beyond the landmarks of human experience without abandoning them. While the Latinate traditions that underlie many Old English riddles do not always include the social, chronological, and physical landmarks that define the form of relational reiteration, their Old English adaptations move towards, rather than away from, this mode of navigating identity.

Body movement has often been relegated to the margins in the study of emotion, psychopathology, and psychotherapy, being seen as more of a byproduct than a producer of experience and behaviour. By centralising the body movement’s role in the organisation and production of experience, we might better understand how to work from an embodied, phenomenological perspective in psychotherapy. Adapting a theory from animal biology – called the mobility gradient – this chapter posits a structure for the use of conscious movement by various clinicians. This structure complements several areas of inquiry in psychotherapy, most notably attachment theory, trauma studies, and non-verbal communication research. Using the mobility gradient as a phenomenological guide, clinicians can assess, plan, and co-create embodied healing experiences with their clients, ones that can reach and work with their emotional lives in an effective and meaningful way.

This chapter explores the intersection of Aristotle’s virtue ethics and Husserl’s phenomenology within the context of dementia research, emphasising the concept of habits. By introducing curability as the counter-pole to vulnerability, the chapter highlights a shift towards integrating medical and philosophical perspectives. It argues that embodied practices, regarded as meaningful, are key in both preventing and treating dementia. Through Aristotle’s ethics, the chapter examines malign habitualisation in touch with the preventive turn. Here, the vice of intemperance is related to excessive alcohol consumption, alcohol dependence, and Korsakoff’s dementia. Through Husserl’s phenomenology, the chapter examines the power of benign habitualisation, connecting embodiment, narrativity, and affectivity. Drawing on a video of Marta Cinta, a former ballerina with Alzheimer’s, the chapter rethinks influential concepts, such as narrative identity and second nature, through the lens of embodiment. The chapter ultimately demonstrates that embodied habits, when perceived as meaningful, can aid in balancing health, well-being, and eudaimonia. Focusing on the affective sphere, the study contemplates whether we can still feel home in embodied habits despite dementia.

This chapter offers a novel account of trust as a form of opening one’s mind to the autonomy of other persons. Despite a long tradition of philosophical thinking about trust, it remains unclear how (non-instrumental) trust works in close human relationships. While important strands of theorising in sociology and moral psychology recognise that trust involves accepted vulnerability, the autonomy of the trusted person is typically viewed as something to be coped with rather than embraced. By drawing on a central distinction in Husserl’s phenomenology, the chapter proposes shifting the perspective and placing the other’s autonomy at the centre of the trusting attitude in close relationships. A personalistic perspective on trust emphasises shared goals and values with the trusted individual, shaping the affective attitude towards them. To understand the affective dynamics involved in sharing and adjusting one’s goals or values in interpersonal trust, the authors suggest conceptualising attitudinal aspects of trust as a metacognitive feeling that entails a self-explorative dimension. The chapter demonstrates how this self-explorative dimension helps explain the dynamics of disclosing intimate details and adopting another’s perspective in psychotherapeutic relationships, or what is referred to as transformative trust.

This chapter reconceives core symptoms of schizophrenia by shifting the explanatory centre of gravity from putative structural breakdowns of time-consciousness to its affective distortion as rooted in the living, situated body. Drawing on Heidegger’s existential temporality and Merleau-Ponty’s embodied, social and psychopathological temporality, the authors propose ‘schizophrenic vulnerability’ as a world-involving mode of dysregulation in which affective ‘irruptions’ alter saliency and meaning in past–present–future relations without abolishing structure itself. This argument unfolds across six progressive steps: a critical review of clinical phenomenology’s shift from structural to affective accounts of time, exegetical analyses of relevant notions in Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, schizophrenia’s prodromal phase, embodied affective temporality in schizophrenia, intersubjective affective temporality in schizophrenia, and a case study of ‘mission delusions’ in which an affectively charged future mandate reorganises existential time. The chapter concludes by emphasising a perspective that situates schizophrenia at the mind–body–world interface, deepening dialogue between phenomenology and psychiatry.

This chapter offers a phenomenological reconfiguration of vulnerability in borderline personality disorder (BPD). The focus is on the temporal embedding of self-experience. Departing from dominant biological and cognitive models, the chapter examines how temporal fragmentation and affective instability influence the formation of BPD identity. Drawing on the authors’ previous qualitative findings and Roman Ingarden’s stratified model of identity, the analysis uncovers a paradoxical temporal structure. BPD experience is marked by discontinuity between a detached past and an immersive present as well as entanglement marked by the persistence of the wounding past. The resulting tensions produce a dual-layered identity. The static stratum consists of persistent identifications with wounded historicity and rigid self–world interpretations, while the dynamic stratum manifests as frequent, affect-driven self-recreations. The latter overwhelms the integrative function of the static layer, resulting in a cyclical structure of self-experience that inhibits narrative coherence and developmental change. Consequently, BPD temporality undermines the possibility of novelty, agency, and future-oriented self-regulation, resulting in a form of identity that is both unstable and rigidly structured by past harms. Ingarden’s philosophical framework thus provides a scaffold for the temporal disruption being constitutive of felt vulnerability in BPD.

Using Susan Stryker’s references to the ‘suturing’ of the gender binary onto all individuals as a launching point, the chapter begins by investigating the discussions of ‘suturing’ and ‘seamlessness’ in phenomenological analyses of racism in Martín Alcoff, Yancy, and Al-Saji. It then turns to Husserl’s ‘levels of constitution’ as a means to provide further insights into the experiences of emotions and vulnerabilities in racist encounters. Finally, after a critical assessment of Al-Saji’s notion of ‘hesitation’, the chapter reviews Yancy’s ‘ambush’ and ‘tarrying’, as well as Martín Alcoff’s ‘crisis’ and ‘bracketing’ as indicating the important moments of interruption and pause that can begin an anti-racist project.

This chapter explores the intricate relationship between our emotional abilities – that is, our individual skills and capacities to feel, engage in, sustain, or modify emotions – and the experience of vulnerability. It sheds light on three connections between our emotional life and how vulnerability manifests in our experience of self, world, and others. First, it introduces the notion of ‘affective mercy’, referring to the fact that, in shaping our affective experiences, we remain dependent on something that is not fully within our control. Second, proposing a view of emotions as modal experiences of value, it suggests that emotional experience inherently involves a sense of vulnerability. Third, it distinguishes explicit feelings of vulnerability from this more implicit, background sense of vulnerability. To clarify the relevance of emotional abilities for the experience of vulnerability, the interplay of these three connections is discussed via the example of vulnerable narcissism.

As a basic phenomenological constraint, God is hidden to creation in virtue of being the creator. The conclusion identifies implications for the typical atheistic and the theistic responses to the problem of divine hiddenness. Against the atheist who holds than an all-loving God would always want to be in a relation with us, the conclusion argues that if God is in fact the hidden creator, our ultimate source, he would be uniquely the sort of thing we were implicitly always in relation to even if we were unaware of it. Against the theist who wants to explain divine hiddenness in terms of a moral defect of the one seeking, the conclusion argues that such resistance would only be detectable after the fact, in light of faith, and so would be an issue for theological, not philosophical explication.

At the start of the aletheistic tradition, in the Confessions Augustine pioneers a phenomenological approach to fixing the reference to God by means of a novel linguistic act, overheard praise, which mirrors and frames the beautiful forms of created things as themselves overheard linguistic acts; the existential choice of the reader is either to leave the speech as overheard or to enter the speech as addressee. Augustine interprets things as signs of their source, works out the objective order of love, and thematizes the paradox of God’s hidden presence and the creature’s beauty as a sign of the creator.

Phenomenology is necessary if the phenomenon in question is hidden. But, as Schellenberg and Nietzsche before him observe, God is hidden; therefore, a phenomenology of God is necessary. This phenomenology of God is called “aletheism” from the Greek word for truth, which, with its alpha-privative, implies that the condition for the possibility of truth is hiddenness; aletheism explores the way God, just to be the creator, would have to be hidden to creation.