Abstract
This episode [HTA 5] is an interview with Ed Casey for the Radical Philosophy Association's September 2025 Radical Philosophy Hour event.
Extended Abstract
[Holy Terrain Art would like to thank Prof. Casey for devoting his time to this event as well as to thank the Radical Philosophy Association for hosting and allowing secondary publication rights; this interview was originally hosted and published by the Radical Philosophy Association as the September 2025 event for their Radical Philosophy Hour series.]
This is an interview with Ed Casey, age 86, on his method of peri-phenomenology which emphasizes edges; place; mutual permeability; porousness; periphany as a blend of and alternative to endogeny-exogeny (internal-external); propulsion; extraversion; urgency to motion; exigencies to further avenues of living through transformation; differentiation; immanence; and multiplicity as the univocity of being – a ground not in the sense of an essence but at the very least in the sense of our most fundamental relational nature of being-with and being-towards-one-another.
This interview explores, charts, and anchors connections between peri-phenomenology (whose foci and method both reveals and allows for the being of peripheral phenomena) and the Real’s first principle as/of difference. Original metaphysical difference offers a unity-multiplicity where the multiple is not collapsed into a unity and unity is not pulverized into multiplicity, i.e., offers a clinamen weaving (tantra) difference not between transcendents but unfolding from an immanent unity-multiplicity. Peri-phenomenology brings us up to the metaphysical bones of this singular plural Nature of Being’s beings, or of beings’ Being. It thus proves necessary for us to ground flexible definitions of eidetics, which is a grasping of the essence or form of something, e.g., what/how is knowing, how are the different feelings of knowing life. Knowing, absent an infinite regress, must be grounded in a felt conviction and in commitments, understood as thrownness, as givenness, and as a finality to actions-perceptions which cannot be rescinded and thereby qualifies as a form of enactivistic knowing, i.e., Spinozan action as adequate (self)-causation, e.g., what ended up happening proved itself to be the necessary course of action only through its unfolding. Finally, a specific phenomenological method, with or without the reduction proper [which would forego the world-with-being and therefore preclude a variety of otherwise fruitful studies for peri-phenomenology], a peri-phenomenological method which commits to a set of perceptions through description of lived experience — especially of differend experiences and especially with commitments to ever-renewing experimental accesses to peripheral limits, ekstasis (i.e., ecstasy as crossing a threshold), and edge-cases, etc. — would implicitly justify the givenness of its convictions as perception commits to them by phenomenological description. Such enactivistic knowing would justify peri-phenomenological existential eidetics.