This paper aims to show how Husserl’s concept of intentionality detaches itself from the background of a thorough and recurrent argument that Husserl makes against psychologism. Noting that the concept of intentionality was first recovered by Brentano’s psychology, it seemed to us important to show how Husserl’s intentionality, as it is conceived in the Logical Investigations, distinguishes itself from the “intentional inexistence” that Brentano describes in his Psychology from an Empirical Stand­point. Showing which parts of Brentano’s psychology were rejected and which were maintained in Husserl’s theory is indeed the first concern of those who intend to study the phenomenological concept of intentionality.

This article focuses on the analysis of the highly problematic relationship between Psychology and Phenomenology in Husserl’s Crisis of European Sciences, in order to show that this last writing allows us to reconsider the criticisms addressed to descriptive psychology since the first breakthrough of phenomenology. Husserl not only tries to bring psychology back into phenomenological field by describing it as a privileged “way to reduction”, but he more fundamentally shows that the closest examination of the crisis-structure of psychology is essential to the understanding of subjectivity. The psychological dimension of subjectivity is neither a mere difficulty of transcendental philosophy, nor an accident in the history of subjectivity, but it discloses the problem upon which lays the transcendental meaning of subjectivity. According to this point of view, Psychology has to deliver its fullness of content and its empirical richness to subjectivity, and so to give phenomenology back its descriptive dimension.

The aim of this article is to examine the scope of the commentary made by Jacques Lacan in his Séminaire on the concept of phenomenological intentionality. By re-writing the object of the drive in a topological space / curve, Lacan intended to give full value to a certain number of defining traits of Freudian drive against its interpretation into any kind of non-critical intentionalism. This specifically required that the French psychoanalyst emphasize the vicariousness of the drive in relation to any defined object / goal which induces the irreducible “perverse polymorphic” nature of any drive. Our article also seeks to demonstrate that Lacan did not agree with the repudiation of the concept of “intention” which he had inherited from phenomenology and which he had reworked under Freud’s patronage, but had subverted its scope in the passage from intentionality to pulsionality by which he expected to achieve disidentification of the desired objective / goal from the pulsional satisfaction goal. Through this complication, we seek to re-open the issue of limits that the concept of intentionality encounters when it meets post-Freudian metapsychology.

Hans Lipps’s originality lies in a tension between his hermeneutical and existential philosophy on the one hand, and his analysis of themes belonging to classical logic, on the other. To understand this tension, it must be examined at its point of origin – when Lipps discusses Husserl’s philosophy. The purpose of this text is to explain the opposition between Lipps and his first Master. Lipps’s critique of Husserl concerns transcendental idealism, the transcendental reduction, and the concept of intentionality, which appear to Lipps as an escape from the realm of facticity. Husserlian idealism is then similar to Kant’s critical philosophy. Pursuing his inquiry from the perspective of facticity, Lipps refutes Kant’s and Husserl’s transcendentalism and their focus on the realm of representation. He tries nevertheless to analyse the classic problems of phenomenology and Kantian logic from the point of view of facticity.

This article examines the points of similarity and the differences between the Patočkian concept of interpellation (oslovéni, questioning) and Merleau-Ponty’s concept of chiasmus. These two modes of relating-to-being through language and body, perception and space share the same character of reversibility and openness to the other. However, the “co-respondance” between the subject and the world is not approached by the two phenomenological philosophers from the same perspective. Being-questioned is the inter-psychical event specific to one’s experience of others and of the world; the chiasmatic structure is the bedrock of the ontological relationship and the intercorporeity of beings. Close, but distinct one from the other, interpellation and chiasm(us) partially reveal the common preoccupations of two philosophers whose dialogue History never allowed to occur.

In these 1910 summer semester lectures, Adolf Reinach uses the concept of arché as a guiding thread to sketch out a history of Platonic philosophy and to trace it back to the Presocratics. More precisely, by means of this philosophical attempt to offer a historical account, Reinach intends to flesh out what he thinks is the main contribution of Plato to philosophy, and which, at the same time, turns out to be the roots of his own philosophy, namely: to consider ideal objects as the arché of philosophy; to use the phenomenological method; and, last but not least, to devote his research to the study of the things themselves, rather than (like Socrates) to the elucidation of the main subjective opinions of his time. Thus, this is Reinach’s Plato that we finally see emerging from a reading of his lectures—a Plato who, in spite of being “non-historical,” “non-true,” appears as the figure who nonetheless motivated him to follow his own philosophical path.

Just hearing the names of Brentano and Plato put together is enough to highlight the queerness of a matching which finds almost no evidence in critical literature. The study of the texts in which Brentano explicitly deals with Plato, in particular in his lectures on the history of Greek philosophy, does not change much of the negative impression that emerges from a general overview: the place of Plato in the history of philosophy depends, for Brentano, on Aristotle or, better, on the accomplishment of Greek philosophy occurs in Aristotle’s work. We shall turn our attention towards the of certain relevant problems in order to open up, if possible, a less negative prospect for the relationship of Brentano to Plato: not so much directly by examining Platonic philosophy from a Brentanian point of view as by considering the concrete solution that Brentano provides to some Aristotelian questions. To put it differently, we shall take into account not so much what Brentano says of Plato, as what Brentano does with Aristotle, by tracking the Platonizing traces that can be found in the Brentanian commentary to Aristotle’s categories, the philosophical consequences of which seem to be reflected in Brentano’s overall philosophical project.

The question of Paideia analysed in Jaeger’s pioneering study may be linked to Husserl’s question of the formation of the monadic self, intersubjectivity and the foundation of the community of human beings. Husserl’s phenomenological education manifests itself in the formation of an ego and a phenomenological community. In addition, Fink, having close intellectual links with Husserl, undertakes an in-depth analysis of the question of educa­tion as a sublime model of the Greek city. In this paper we propose a comparative analysis about Paideia between Husserl’s late writings since his Cartesian Meditations, and Fink’s relevant works.

In this article, I wish to present and discuss some Heideggerian theses concerning the notions of “being,” “presence” and “truth” in Plato’s dialogues, taking as a point of departure Heidegger’s course on Plato’s Sophist given in Marburg in 1924–1925. My aim is to show that the fundamental philosophical link that unites them makes it possible to better understand seemingly obscure aspects of the Platonic conception of being and knowledge as it is presented in particular in the concluding pages of Republic V (476e–479e), to which this article is therefore essentially devoted.

The paper deals with a series of writings on Plato and Platonism issued by Jan Patočka (1907–1977) in the immediate post-war period. In Eternity and Historicity (1947), he contrasts Platonism as metaphysics of being with Socratism as questioning the meaning of human existence, and criticizes modern forms of Platonism of ethical values interpreted as objectively valid norms. In lectures on Plato (1947–1948), he explains Plato’s theory of Forms in terms of Husserl’s theory of horizontal intentionality and Heidegger’s theory of ontological difference. Similarly, in Negative Platonism (1952) he interprets Plato’s theory of Forms in terms of a distinction he makes between between the eidetic contents (the intelligible Form) and the transcendental character (chōrismos) of the Platonic Idea. The latter is the necessary condition of the former but it does not constitute an intelligible object of its own. Patočka suggests retaining the Platonic notion of transcendence while dissociating it from the metaphysics of intelligible Forms. The paper puts these post-war writings on Plato and Platonism into the context of Patočka’s search for his own position as a phenomenologist.

The aim of this paper is to offer a Henrian interpretation of the debate between Sartre and Merleau-Ponty concerning the place of the imaginary in the perceptive life. The hypothesis is that in Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and Henry, the role of the imaginary in the original affective experience which the perceptive life has of its own intrinsic vulnerability can be investigated on three levels: the articulation between the absolute dimension and the egological dimension of consciousness in Sartre, the genesis of perception in the body in Merleau-Ponty, and the immanent adherence of the perceptive act to the radical suffering of its own force in Henry. From each of these three levels, the paper shows that without an imaginary in charge of bringing it back constantly to the experience of its own original vulnerability, the perceptive life is bound to lose the aff ective density of its relation to the perceived, and therefore is bound to become disincarnate.

This article shows how, starting from Schelling and Henry, one can build a radical critique of objectification and subjectification within humanities. This critique opens the way for the construction of a point of view of immanence, which is characterized by the experimentation of a constitution of affects in a process from which proceeds the subjectivity. This point of view of immanence questions the accepted attitudes in the production of social relationships and the norms that govern them, so as to increase the attention to the vulnerability of these processes and their power to transform the affects.

The question of action or praxis has not been treated in particular by Michel Henry in his works. However, this subject is present at each step of his reflexion. This article makes a synthesis on this matter, taking into account all of his works, especially the last books on Christianity (which, in our view, fulfill the phenomenology of life). Having determined the immanent dialectic of action (from the gift of the power in the generation and the in-carnation of the First Living), we can understand, following Michel Henry, the ethics of Life as the Commandment of Love. From such a perspective, the sin and the salvation can be reconnected to the native relation of the living with the Life.