The problem of the action’s meaning for the agent that executes it constitutes a complicated matter in terms of a phenomenology of action. Our task in this paper is to analyze the acts of consciousness that contribute to the constitution of this meaning, underlying two shortcomings with which Alfred Schütz struggled: the teleocratic character of the action’s project and, respectively, the “radical or vulgar” pragmatism, which represents the ordinary frame of reference for a pragmatic theory of action. The solutions proposed by Schütz—the “praxial” aspect of the ongoing deed, the importance of imposed relevances and a different understanding of pragmatism—will be scrutinized using a short case study occasioned by some interesting remarks of the film director Wong Kar-wai regarding his way of making films without a proper project.

Michel Henry’s Philosophy and Phenomenology of the Body shows some primal and the most important resolutions which are the parting points for his thought and phenomenology. Philosophy and Phenomenology of the Body was written from 1948 to 1949 as a chapter for The Essence of Manifestation, focusing on the ego and the subjectivity. In these works, Maine de Biran is Henry’s traveling companion. Henry tries to respond to an intuition about the problem of the knowledge through the body and the subjectivity shared with Maine de Biran. Henry’s interpretation of Maine de Biran in Philosophy and Phenomenology of the Body mainly affirms that the achievement of Maine de Biran is to locate phenomenology as the foundation of ontology. It is clear that Henry tries to revise an ontological base supported by phenomenology of the body which has been showed by Maine de Biran. Henry aims to exclude himself and Maine de Biran from dualism, monism, idealism and empiricism. In this sense Henry improves two theses, and these are the base of his phenomenology: the ontological unity manifests itself and is anticipated by the subjectivity, and the originary passivity shows the basis of ontology. By improving these two points, it is possible to see a clue to phenomenology of the body which indicates the basis of ontology. This article deals with the passivity in Philosophy and Phenomenology of the Body concerning its relation with the category (faculty) of substance. It indicates one possible substantialization of the body and that of the world.

Bridging the gap between phenomenology, namely, husserlian’s phenomenology, and concrete and everyday issues such as the mind/body problem comes now to light as the chief driving force in this paper. Showing that this called for connection was to be written within, and not beyond, the field of transcendental phenomenology, worked for us as the guideline that shaped all further steps and decisions. To accomplish this, we attended to some of the mains thesis developed by Edmund Husserl in the second book of his Ideen, in an attempt to trace the signs that bears witness to a plan where not only phenomenology has the required expertise for dealing the problem, but a plan which is also responsible for the production of this new and distinctive evaluation which, by it self, should put together a better version of a less puzzling problem.

In this paper I intend to understand from a phenomenological point of view the relationship between figurative consciousness and other non-original presentations, such as expectations, remembrances or fantasies. My analysis is focused on the difference between figurative consciousness, on the one hand, and a modality of fantasy that I call “reverie” (or daydream consciousness), on the other hand. I stress that figurative consciousness implies a pure observational ego, whereas reverie is a free construction of the ego’s own personal story. The freedom of reverie has, nevertheless, some important constraints. I emphasize the constraints that come from the passive and affective life of the ego. Finally, I propose new criteria for the phenomenological differentiation between several kinds of acts of non-original presentations (Vergegenwärtigungen).

The paper suggests that architectural-making, a process of research in practice, and itself bridging between the space of experience and the horizon of expectations, corresponds to phenomenology as a method of inquiry. This includes architectural phases parallel to epoché, phenomenological reduction, free variations, transcendental intuition of the essence, and description. The paper describes the in-between, its two edges, experience and expectations, and their mutual influences through the process of architectural making. Examples from the design studio and professional literature illustrate the argumentation. The in-between is presented as structured, notably having a depth—the ineffable origin of creativity. In conclusion, the paper suggests that the edges and the in-between are temporary configurations in a flux, wherein the architect makes use of his / her most inner resources, as a contribution to the meta mor phosis and revitalization of his / her culture.

Even if life is, above all, a reality which feels itself and therefore does not need to exteriorize itself, it cannot explain itself otherwise than by objectifying itself. Understanding itself is radically different from affecting itself. And when life cannot reside in exteriority, it is ectopical (outside its place) through the image. In the Middle Age, imagining meant “giving form to a matter”. It is natural that to the psychic matter correspond a psychic form, which in the end builds a mental image. When we think an image whose matter alone is psychic (the form being enclosed in the extension), the result will be an exoplasma—that is to be found in fantastic literature.

The present article deals with the problem of the universality of hermeneutics as it is addressed in Hans-Georg Gadamer’s work. After a brief genealogical discussion of the notion of universality, this paper will attempt to identify, by analyzing the « figure » of temporal distance (which is, according to Gadamer, a transcendental structure of the hermeneutical experience) a new and profound meaning of universality related to temporality. By considering it as « universalisation », the question of the universality of hermeneutics will be put not only in terms of a finitude constitutive for the human comprehension, but also associating it with time’s capacity to separate between understanding and misunderstanding, and thus to reveal « the thing itself ».

Michel Henry’s philosophical, literary, theological, and aesthetical proposal is a rare event which clearly marks the difficult time from the late 20th century to the early 21st century. It may be said that he went against the tide with all his efforts, to the point of death to remember the tradition which he really valued. It is obvious from the title of his apocalyptic story about the end of the world written in 1976, La Barbarie. I totally agree with the essential part of Henry’s thesis which evoked the reality and truth of many things in me from the start. However, it lacks something decisive to follow his teaching without any doubt. There are many things to learn from the discussion of Henry’s thought. Therefore, in this article I would like to discuss my identifying points and my disagreements with him. It seems to be contrary to the usual method, but, instead of starting with his first work, I prefer to take up his last one, Paroles du Christ. This is an exceptional book in terms of its rare beauty and extraordinary depth.

Ethnomethodological studies of science proved to be a particular stage in the development of ethnomethodology. In the same vein, hermeneutics of scientific research belongs to the scope of contemporary hermeneutic phenomenology. The present paper tries to reveal deficiencies in the ethnomethodological description of everyday practices taking place in the “life-worlds” of scientific communities. On the author’s main claim, these deficiencies can be overcome by both revising and supplementing the ethnomethodological description. The outcome of this revision/supplementation is a sort of “double hermeneutics”—interpretative studies of science’s interpretative practices.

The encounter with Freud stands at the core of Ricoeur’s philosophical itinerary. This paper intends to bring about what is at stake in this encounter not only through a second reading of the famous essay on Freud from 1965, but also by taking into account the Ricoeur’s work. Special attention is paid to his continuous effort to build an ethics of life as a free gift, to which we have to answer with gratitude and generosity, always being aware of the fact that the human being implies both activity and passivity and that any human capacity is accompanied and menaced by a form of incapacity. The key to the existence is then finitude, vulnerability, and unaccomplishment. The work of mourning, as taught by Freud, has to liberate us from the illusions of omnipotence and bring us back to the authentic awareness of the human condition. However, this final wisdom does not lead to an ascetic Stoical conception of living. On the contrary, it is the premise for attending joy, against both the enigma and the challenge of evil, by persevering in the fight against the evil spread throughout the world. It is a fight against what is painful or degrading to the humane character of humankind.

In this paper I try to understand the relationship between nature and subjectivity from a phenomenological (mainly Husserlian) perspective and to bring into focus the consequences of this relationship to the problem of human freedom. Husserl did not deeply explore the concept of freedom in almost any of his works and manuscripts, i.e. he never really gave a definition and a thorough analysis of freedom. Nevertheless it is quite clear that freedom plays a peculiar role in many strategic points of his philosophy. We can say even more: the entire phenomenological enterprise is funded on freedom, since the so called “phenomenological reduction” is, according to Husserl himself, the result of an absolutely free act. But if freedom is necessary in order to have a genuine philosophical and phenomenological enquiry, shouldn’t this “condition of possibility” be queried and eventually elucidated? Or is freedom something which remains outside the boundaries of phenomenological investigation? I think that by following Husserl’s inquiries into the different levels of constitution of subjectivity it is possible to produce evidence in support of the claim that freedom is an apodictic fact, but a fact which, if correctly understood, has conditions as well as consequences which should not be neglected if we don’t want to miss freedom itself in our “human existence”.

My paper focuses on the main categories that phenomenology has employed to describe physical pain. I try to show that the early assumption of Stumpf`s concept of “affective sensations” (Gefühlempfindungen) faced strong descriptive difficulties, that seem to point to a sort of noematic character of pain: pain in its bodily location is the pole of a central attention, or at least of a conscious co-attention. But at the same time it is impossible to avoid the evidence that pain consciousness is not a perceptive grasp of one’s body, but a feeling of instantaneous or continuous hurting. The provisional thesis may be that the three main categories of Husserlian analysis of intentionality: hyletic layer, noetic intention, and noematic kern are needed in the basic description of pain experience, but they are required without any internal division—and this is the very core of the problem.

The Noema has enjoyed a tremendous debate in the history of phenomenology from the time of the 1960s to the present. The poles of this debate generally are Aron Gurwitsch and his “perceptual noema,” on the one side, and Dagfinn Follesdal’s noema as a sense, on the other. While Gurwitsch and Follesdal never directly debated, named, or impugned one another, these activities were eagerly taken care of by many others taking one side or another. First, I explore this debate and then in the end show that Gurwitsch’s position has been rendered into a kind of straw man. I then show how Gurwitsch’s understanding of the noema meets several of Follesdal’s challenging theses. Thus, I make a defense of Gurwitsch by show ing that his noema is very robust because not only is the perceptual noema amenable to gestalt organization, but that it is also conceptualizable. I finish by exploring these dimensions and describing the manner and importance of the conceptualization of the perceptual noema.

Without developing Husserl’s notion of intentionality, this paper tries to explain Jacques Lacan’s analysis of anguish (Séminaire X, L’angoisse, 1962-63) and regard (Séminaire, XI, Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse, 1964), which is based on his notion of a peculiar object (object-cause of desire, object small a), that lies always outside the field of representation. We find it is interesting for phenomenology to pay attention to a different possible approach to consciousness, even if psychoanalysis follows a slightly different orientation.

View History as the Existing Situation from the Being of Thing. The question of “What is a thing?” is closely related to that of Being. Heidegger had dealt with the research of thing repeatedly since 1919. The following article will show that, regardless of his inspiring thinking about “ready-to-hand” of thing in Being and Time, his research was more extensively developed in his later years at the end of 1940s. By exploring the possibilities of viewing a thing, Heidegger continuously attempted to reveal the serious limitation of Platonic tradition in the western philosophy. This article will analyze in detail the crucial role of History of Being in Heidegger’s understanding of thing through an example of jug. Heidegger in his piece not only suggests a change of attitude to view a thing, but also “viewing a thing” as not simply a passive activity. It is rather a kind of “step backward” of thinking, which means how to let the representative, analytical and interpretative art of thinking return to its pre-reflective, pre-conceptual and intuitive state of existence.

McDowell’s Mind and World bears unique importance in terms of re-focusing the contemporary empiricist problematics on a Kantian style inquiry: how can unconceptualized sense data, thus inhabiting the space of causes, become a resident of the space of reasons? By abandoning a common presupposition underlying the two dichotomous yet oscillating positions (the Myth of Given vs. a Davidsonian coherentism), the conceptual content becomes boundless. This “boundless” implies that nature is not beyond or alien to human conceptuality or rationality, or that our experiential engagement with natural objects is permeated with normative spontaneity, the same faculty for our presumed freedom. That is a main aspect of re-enchanting nature in McDowell.Merleau-Ponty opposes the disenchanting, reductive empiricism in his well-known Phenomenology of Perception. Perception never occurs in the vacuum of pre-existing meanings. Human beings are “condemned to meaning”: we have no choice but to acknowledge the genetic dependency of our full-fledged rational accomplishments on a pre-rational or pre-objective realm. This realm is not content-bleak or rationally empty but rather has its own lived-through “logic,” which is displayable to the appropriate perceptual stance.In this paper I’ll try to put McDowell and Merleau-Ponty in comparative focus so that weakness or limitation in each, while attempting to re-enchant nature from the vantage point of perception, can be seen in a more illuminative way. An evolutionary dimension, as well as a retrospective perspective, of the implicit meaning in human/animal perception will be revealed in my critical comparison. One upshot of my critique is the following positive thesis: the intentionality of man is the epistemologically legislative condition for nature to be possessed of rational relations (Darwinian reasons), while Mother Nature is the ontologically enabling condition for man to become intentional interpreter (meaning-endower). This deep-seated interdependence between man and nature with regard to reason relations, when well cashed out, will be the ultimate ground for justifying what I call the retrospective enchantment of nature.

This paper will address the concept of sensation in Husserl’s Logical Investigations and Ideas I. In Husserl’s early static phenomenology, sensation was suggested as non-intentional experience, thereby, it has the status of real moment in consciousness, and it plays a role of material for the constitution of object, and also it functions as the representative content of the intentional object. These determinations of sensation converge on the apprehension-content scheme. Especially, this paper will try to reveal the essential structure of the objectifying act in Husserl’s static phenomenology, by systematically clarifying the relation between the scheme in Fifth Logical Investigations (LI5) and the representation through fullness in Sixth Logical Investigations (LI6). This paper will examine this problem with regard to two aspects. One is about what status the sensation occupies within consciousness, and the other is about what role the sensation plays in the constitution of object. In conclusion, the fullness in LI6 is none other than the hyle in LI5. What matters in LI5 is the structure of constitution, in which the apprehension has animating effects on the sensation. On the other hand, what is concerned in LI6 is the structure of fulfillment, by which consciousness achieves to obtain the recognition of an object in such a way that the intended object is represented actually by the act of intuition with sensation. After all, in Husserl’s static phenomenology, sensation is not only the material or hyle for the constitution, but also the content of representation.

In order to show a different understanding of what it means to be human, in this paper, I will present Jan Patočka’s discussion of human existence. For Patočka, human existence is essentially historical and situational. His reflections proceed from Martin Heidegger’s explanation of the structure of human existence in Sein und Zeit, which Heidegger calls Da-Sein. According to Patočka, Heidegger’s exposition is predicated on a negative human relation to the world; we are originally inauthentic. Yet he forgets to take into account that Da-Sein is a doublet: animal rationale. Patočka appropriates Arendt’s phenomenological account of the human condition in order to critique Heidegger’s account of Da-sein in Being and Time to develop his own understanding of human existence.