Aesthetics is fundamentally a theory of sensible experience. Its scope has expanded greatly from an initial centering on the arts and scenic nature to the full range of appreciative experience. Expanding the range of aesthetics raises challenging questions about the experience of appreciation. Traditional accounts are inadequate in their attempt to identify and illuminate the perceptual experiences that these new applications evoke. Considering the range of environmental and everyday occasions aesthetically changes aesthetics into a descriptive and not necessarily celebratory study of sensible experience, for it must now accommodate a complete range of negative as well as positive values. Th is paper develops an analysis of the multiple dimensions of environmental sensibility.

In a Working Note to The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty uses the fine phraseology of an “architectonic past” and a “mythical time” to describe Proust’s remembrances of things past. This paper first considers how this architectonic past sheds light on Merleau-Ponty’s ontology, and second how this results in a mythical time, which is an originary encounter with this past. Paying also attention to Merleau-Ponty’s final, completed reflections on “Swann’s Way,” Volume One of Remembrances of Things Past, I suggest that by exposing the inner-connection between the two senses of time, Proust is highly significant for Merleau-Ponty’s thesis of “reversibility”. Proustian remembrances are used by Merleau-Ponty not to expose an inwardness, but something that is withdrawn and behind the sensible. The way in which these remembrances operate in myth time bespeaks of a memorial dimension of the past of being itself.

The purpose of the present text is to show the importance of the system of relevances in respect of the analysis of the literary texts. This concept, developed by Alfred Schutz, helps not only to understand the relation between text and empirical reality as such, but it simultaneously questions the relation between reader, writer, and text. The questions raised by the status of the system of relevances help the phenomenological analysis of the literary text to achieve a better understanding of the act of signification (particularly that defined in the realm of literature) and of the status of reference. It helps also to understand how the configuration of experience as such can be modified according to the specific interaction accomplished within the act of reading.

Following a hint from Edmund Husserl, this paper explores the proximity of the phenomenological and aesthetic gazes. It does so with one particular poem in mind: “September Song” by Geoffrey Hill. The paper examines the ways in which the poem responds to a given situation, the death of a child in the Shoah, and responds to the ethical status of its own aesthetic gaze. Phenomenological perspectives by Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, Derrida, and Marion, are brought to bear on the questions considered, and comparisons are made between Hill’s poem and similar poems by Dylan Thomas, Paul Celan, and W. S. Merwin.

Relations between literature and phenomenology vary greatly from proximity to distance depending on whether writers or philosophers give the definition. Writers in favour of the mission of phenomenology and phenomenologist relying on the visional power of literary examples can equally have a high regard for the other discipline thereby, nonetheless, preserving the demarcation. In the following, I will try to investigate these connections by debating the viewpoints of authors showing visible signs of appreciation on both sides. My examples are meant to be emblematic in as much as they are to represent a general trend in their field and serve as spokespersons of important stances in relation to the other genre.

In this essay, I examine some aspects of Husserl’s ontology, in particular their nature, the understanding intuition which mixex a correct interpretation of these objects and the relationship between their historicity and their ideality. Especially, I critically evaluate way the incidence of the exemplarity of the literary object upon its design of the cultural objects.

Despite Heidegger’s critique of ethics, his use of ethically-inflected language intimates an interpretive ethics of encounter involving self-interpreting agents in their hermeneutical context and the formal indication of factical life as a situated dwelling open to possibilities enacted through practices of care, interpretation, and individuation. Existence is constituted practically in Dasein’s addressing, encountering, and responding to itself, others, and its world. Unlike rule-based or virtue ethics, this ethos of responsive encounter and individuating confrontation challenges any grounding in a determinate or exemplary model of reason, human nature, the virtues, or tradition.

My analysis in the following paper will focus on a subtle develop­ment in Heidegger’s interpretation of the theme of memory, from the period of his early Freiburg lectures to Being and Time and then in the works of the late 1920s. There is in this period an apparent shift in Heidegger’s understanding of this theme, which comes to light above all in his way of examining memory in the 1921 Freiburg course lectures Augustine and Neo-Platonism, then in Being and Time (1927) and finally in the 1928 lectures on the metaphysical foundations of logic (Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Logik im Ausgang von Leibniz) and Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (1929). This shift is of interest, as I will argue, not only in indicating an internal development of Heidegger’s thinking, but above all in regard to the problem of the finitude of memory which Heidegger brings into focus and which I will interpret in my concluding remarks.

The aim of this paper is to examine Heidegger’s critique of Hegel and to determine whether it is justified. Heidegger claims that Hegel tries to reduce everything to a single absolute entity, to the absolute knowing subject. The result is the identification of being and nothing, as Hegel formulates it at the beginning of his Logic. Hegel identifies being with nothing because being has no references, no predicates, no properties. Heidegger agrees with Hegel that being and nothing are the same, but in completely different respects. They are the same because only entity actually exists, i.e. as an existent being. But Being itself does not exist, and should be conceived in an utterly different way from entity. And since Being cannot “be” it is a non-entity and therefore nothing.

Gertrude Stein may be regarded as one of the most innovative and obscure modernist writers. At the core of Tender Buttons (1914), her most experimental work, lies a dialectical tension between meaning and non-meaning, order and disorder, the opacity of which some of the earliest critical studies of Stein described as both “an eloquent mistake” and “the ravings of a lunatic,” resisting interpretation. In this paper, I show that phenomenology offers an appropriate tool for opening up the much-discussed dialectic of this work. By “bracketing” the hard facts of our object-world, Stein enacts an epoché of sorts, allowing us to “see fine substances strangely” before the conventional structures of objectivity and factuality take over.

In this essay, I argue that the scope of Heidegger’s dialog with Hölderlin in Contributions to Philosophy is wider than has often been acknowledged. Traditionally, accounts of this relation have focused solely on tracing Heidegger’s appropriation of Hölderlin’s “flight and arrival of the gods.” In addition to this theme, the relation between Heidegger’s Hölderlin and the project of Contributions should also be framed in light of the specific understanding of attunement which Heidegger developed in his 1934-35 Hölderlin lecture courses. From the perspective opened by this reading, I bring into question and offer an alternative to a widely accepted interpretation of Contributions’ structural composition.

This article aims to establish that literature is an ideal laboratory for undertaking some phenomenological experimentations, even when not explicitly intended by the author. By considering three works (Der Zauberberg by Thomas Mann, Il deserto dei Tartari by Dino Buzzati and Le rivage des Syrtes by Julien Gracq) that all tell the story of one man gone far away from his country and isolated in a mysterious, fascinating and closed place, we propose to study the complex relations that weave between space and time and between landscape and consciousness, and to deduce from it their phenomenological impact. We attempt to show that space localization and organisation influence and even modify the behaviour and the personality of humans, and induce a new relation to temporality: the mountain arouses boredom, the desert prepares the expectation and the shore brings the facing of one’s fate.

Aron Gurwitsch wants to introduce a theory of organization developed by Gestalt psychology into Husserlian phenomenology. The problem is to show how it is possible to introduce a theory developed within a positive science into philosophical phenomenology. His solution is to show that aspects of this theory already are or can be phenomenological through what he calls an incipient phenomenological reduction. Specifically, it is the dismissal of the constancy hypothesis in which he identifies the possibility moving from an explanatory science to a descriptive one. If the temptation can be resisted of returning to an explanatory approach and description can be radicalized, Gurwitsch believes that this reduction can become phenomenological and even attain transcendental levels. This possibility of reduction makes it possible for scientists, especially psychologists, to have a firsthand understanding of phenomenology, perhaps to convince them of this approach and realize the continuity of philosophy and the sciences and the need to maintain cooperation via phenomenology.

Edmund Husserl’s critique of using the natural scientific method to investigate meaningful human experience remains relevant to recent debates in psychology. Discursive Psychology (DP) claims to draw upon phenomenological insights to critique quantitative psychology for studying theoretical concepts rather than the actual practices of the lived social world. In this paper, I will argue that DP overlooks the important distinction that can be made between the theoretical attitude and the natural scientific attitude in Husserlian Phenomenology and hence, once again, loses sight of the meaningfully constituted life-world. In doing so, I will demonstrate the continued relevance of Husserl’s critique of natural science to the discipline of psychology.

This paper has two closely related objectives. (a) Relying on the most recent studies devoted to the question of Heidegger and translation, this paper takes a closer look at this question by examining the comments Heidegger made on the issue of translation in the course of a seminar he gave in 1951 at Cérisy-la-Salle. (b) Drawing upon the concept of a productive translation that Heidegger puts forth in that seminar, and distinguishing a being-historical (seinsgeschichtliche) work from a historical presentation (historische Darstellung) the paper at the end attempts a critical assessment of the English translation of Heidegger’s Nietzsche.

The article analyses the psychological aspects of “phantasy presentation” in Brentano’s lecture Ausgewählte Fragen aus Psychologie und Ästhetik dated 1885/1886. It focuses primarily on two major aspects of Brentano’s work: (1) the traditional understanding of phantasy presentation as intuitive presentation, and as fundamentally related to the perceptual presentation; (2) Brentano’s conception according to which phantasy presentations are “concepts with intuitive nucleus”. In this context, the text focuses on the following topics: the relation between the inauthentic presentations of the phantasy and perceptual presentations; the relation between presentations with attributive unity and surrogate presentations in logic; and the relation between the intuitive and conceptual element in the constitution of phantasy presentations. The study argues that, despite the title of the lecture—Ausgewählte Fragen aus Psychologie und Ästhetik—Brentano’s analysis of phantasy presentation does not refer to the aesthetic function, but to the psychological function of this presentation. Furthermore, it argues that the psychological aspect of phantasy presentation represents one of the main aspects of Brentano’s work, subsequently used by Husserl in his studies to underline the differences between the perceptual and phantasy presentation.