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.

The phenomena of reading and hearing were among the fundamental themes of Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics during the final decades of his life and scientific work. This assertion seems to be strange, especially if we pay attention to the fact that about the same time he worked on transforming his initial project of philosophical hermeneutics into the more ambi­tious hermeneutical philosophy. However, the universality of the phenomena of reading and hearing, which Gadamer defends in his last works, not only confirms but also concretizes the universality of the language dimension of all human experience. This concretization becomes apparent by explaining the structural correlation between hearing, understanding, and seeing. In view of these circumstances emerges the necessity of looking at the history of the “phenomenological movement” through the prism of the phenomenon of reading, which from the very outset was the implicit aim of phenomenological explanations.

Relaying reflections from Les Mouches, Morts sans sépulture, Les mains sales and Huis-clos to some important arguments concerning death in L’Etre et le néant, the author discusses the relation between death and freedom. Criticizing Martin Heidegger’s views on Sein zum Tode, Jean-Paul Sartre argues that one’s relation to death deeply implies relations with the others, the living, but also the dead ones. The experience of death being absurd, the others are those who can make it meaningful, in the same way that I do for their own death. Sartre’s philosophy of freedom defends the original choice of the ones that I will remember and cherish, in a community that is more important than the living one: the community established beyond death.

The books of Pascal Quignard present themselves as a hunt for the invisible. The ambition that lies at their heart seems particularly compatible with a phenomenological approach. Indeed, this literary intuition – this “suspicion” in the words of Quignard – hinges on the nature and value of representation. This article tries to read the entire work of Quignard through the phenomenological lens. The elucidation of phenomenality is accomplished here through the steps of a process that leads to the very condition of vision. Once the essence of representation is established as a “predation”, the literary writing of the author reveals it as related to an absent, invisible prey. Through the successive and ascending figures of idolatry, love, art and contemplation, can then start a route to invisibility, which is a true pedagogy of seeing. This quest, conceivable as a learning process through which literature finds its ultimate aim, finally leads to a renewed understanding of the concept of representation.

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.

The essay is an examination of two models that have been used to think what “meaning” or “sense” is. Husserl offers the first model in which there is an exchange between the sense that is made in experience and the meaning that is articulated at the linguistic or logical level. The second model is offered by Paul Ricoeur in his theory of narratives. A narrative has a link to what took place that Ricoeur calls “représentance” or “lieutenance”: the narrative configures but at the same time does justice to what took place. The fiction involved in the “as” of “such as it was” is necessary for the “such” that guarantees an adequacy between the narrative and the action or event. I expand on these two models and offer a model of meaning that I call “translatability”.

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.

This interview took place on the 8th of April 2010 in München, at Professor Waldenfels’ house. The questions for this interview were meant to touch the most important ideas of Bernhard Waldenfels’ philosophy—the idea of universal order as a sign for a limited and dictatorial thinking, the respondent that replaces the traditional subject, the idea that an ethics according to which a subject is responsible for something to someone overestimates the unity of the subject and does injustice to all the three instances of a happening (subject—for something—to someone). Waldenfels clarifies some of the problematic implications of these ideas.

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.

Lotze’s influence on the development of the XIXth and XXth century philosophy and psychology remains largely neglected still today. In this paper, I examine some Lotzean elements in Husserl’s early conception of intentionality, and more specifically in his rejection of the Brentanian concept of intentionality. I argue that Husserl and Lotze, pace Brentano, share a qualitative conception of experiences, what they both call the Zumutesein of experiences. Furthermore, I discuss other issues upon which Husserl and Lotze share common intuitions: the perception of space, the theory of local signs, the realisations of thinking (Leistungen des Denkens) and phenomenology.

This article inquires into that which articulates the two texts brought together by Heidegger in Identity and Difference. It sets out from the indications provided in the Preface of the work concerning the “harmony” that reigns between what is at stake at the heart of the two texts, namely what Heidegger respectively calls the Ereignis (event of appropriation) and the Austrag (reconciling difference). The understanding of this harmony makes it possible to approach that which unveils itself as the articulation of Being, but in so doing also raises the difficult problem of the very possibility of thinking Being setting out from its essential withdrawal.

Michel Henry’s phenomenology of life or radical phenomenology understands life as immanent and transcendental affectivity. From this point of view, ethics can be characterized as the ethics of affectivity, the central stake of which lies in the recognition of life. However, the question is to what extent a philosophical discourse can be held on a reality that, being immanent, is principally inaccessible for intentionality and how such discourse is in fact possible. As radical phenomenology relies on certainty opposed to evidence, it can be shown that both the possibility and the practical effectiveness of its discourse are ultimately rooted in life’s self-revelation. Henry’s works may then be understood as mediation towards the recognition of life, especially through the concepts of quasi-performativity and translation.

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.

The objective of this article is to reflect on the impact that Ricoeur’s work on psychoanalysis (following his book on Freud) might have on his concept of narrative identity. In these texts, one of the points he draws from psychoanalysis is that resistance mechanisms can hamper the process of self-recognition of the subject through the story that he tells himself about himself. These resistance mechanisms cannot be put to an end simply by understanding them intellectually. These writings teach us that, in order to be brought to an end, these resistance mechanisms require more than the willingness to appropriate one’s own narrative identity. An appropriate technique to handle energies must be put into place. This explains why the production of a narrative identity can sometimes take the form of a real work.

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.

Showing a very early interest in Descartes, after having first considered him as a Christian thinker in the perspective of a deconstruction of religious life, Heidegger soon regards him as the major obstacle to the phenomenological analyses he wants to develop, as part of the first ontological search he gave himself: that of a hermeneutics of facticity. Therefore, the latter immediately takes in his work the shape of a hermeneutics of the I think, therefore I am, its author being blamed for having entirely ignored the sense of being in the I am, focused as he is on the thinking ego, the ins and outs of which he develops. But the criticism also applying to Husserl, it is by laying the blame on his master, that Heidegger intends to radicalize the project of his own master, hence the necessity to throw light on the origin and the foundations of what we can call the Cartesian question in Heidegger.

This contribution discusses the philosophical meaning of Martin Heidegger’s Rectoral address. Firstly, Heidegger’s philosophical basic experience (Grunderfahrung) is sketched as providing the background of his Rectoral address: the being-historical concept of beginning (Anfang). Next, the philosophical question of the Rectoral address is discussed. It is shown that Die Selbstbehauptung der deutschen Universität is inquiring into the identity of human being (Dasein) in connection with the question about das Eigene (the Germans) and das Fremde (the Greeks). This opposition structures the confrontation with the beginning of philosophical thinking in the Rectoral address. When read against the philosophical background sustaining the Rectoral address, words that appear in it, such as “Kampf,” “Macht,” “Volk,” and “Marsch” have nothing in common with the same words as used by the Nazis. It is shown that the Rectoral address is an extremely ambiguous text, because it claims a transformation of human Dasein. Although Heidegger’s view on National Socialism is distinguished from Nazi ideology, it is clear that he made a mistake about Hitler. The article explores how Heidegger later changed his mind and vocabulary, and in what way this kind of mistakes and changes of mind are inherent to philosophical empiricism.

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.