Hannah Arendt’s notion of public space is one of her most fruitful, yet frustrating concepts. Having employed it to analyze political freedom, she claims that such space has largely disappeared in the modern world. In what follows, I am going to argue that this pessimistic assessment follows from Arendt’s exclusion of labor and work from the public realm. Against Arendt’s claim that such activities are essentially private, I shall argue that they, like action, manifest our embodied being-in-the-world. When we think of public space in terms of our embodied presence, it becomes a concept applicable to modern democratic politics.

The article presents the transcendental reduction as a type of questioning, and by so doing formulates the problem of the structure and motivation of reduction. Transcendental questioning is presented as a permanent formulation and reformulation of questions, which, it is argued, make it possible to overcome the naïveté of the natural attitude. However, the phenomenologist does not overcome naïveté in the sense of excluding it; instead, he is conscious of it. It is argued that one should understand transcendental questioning as a practical activity that makes the phenomenologist responsible for knowledge by leading toward the essence, which seems to be “unquestionable.”

Ortega y Gasset’s old lament that no one had so far attempted a rigorous phenomenology of pain no longer holds since the appearance of Christian Grüny’s recent monograph Zerstörte Erfahrung. Eine Phänomenologie des Schmerzes. Grüny argues for the use of phenomenological categories from Merleau-Ponty in order to understand physical pain as a “blocked escape-movement” (“blockierte Fluchtbewegung”), concluding that corporeal suffering makes impossible both a clean distinction and a pure identification between the lived body and the physical body that I am. In my paper, I would like to suggest some improvements to Grüny’s approach through the utilization of the category of self-affection, as the material phenomenology of Michel Henry has developed it. In addition to the radical immanence in which hyle, noesis, and noema are unified into a “carnal cogito,” however, I argue that it is necessary to describe the painful self-affection not only in terms of any sensitive excess whatever (überhaupt), as Grüny posits, but also in terms of a mutation of the sensitive excess into the intra-tactile sphere of sensibility. Thus I endorse the Husserlian insight that makes tactility the primordial structure of sensibility.

This paper attempts to elucidate the exceptional stance Heidegger takes in Beiträge toward Hölderlin’s “poetizing.” On the one hand, Beiträge provides no specific guideline for understanding this exceptional stance. On the other hand, the text of a “Dialogue” Heidegger wrote almost a decade after Beiträge, providesthe hermeneutic guideline needed for understanding Heidegger’s exceptional position on this poet. This hermeneutic guideline is none other than what Heidegger calls the “Will.” Following this guideline, the paper proceeds to highlight the hermeneutic thesis according to which another appearing of being (Sein)—one not referentially dependent upon the “Will”—is sheltered and preserved in Hölderlin’s “poetizing.” Elucidating this thesis the paper concludes that Hölderlin’s“poetizing” unfolds from within the Other Onset (der andere Anfang) of thinking.

To compare Merleau-Ponty’s and Deleuze’s phenomenal bodies, I first examine how for Merleau-Ponty phenomena appear on the basis of three levels of integration: 1) between the parts of the world, 2) between the parts of the body, and 3) between the body and its world. I contest that Deleuze’s attacks on phenomenology can be seen as constructive critiques rather than as being expressions of an anti-phenomenological position. By building from Deleuze’s definition of the phenomenon and from his more phenomenologically relevant writings, we find that phenomena for him are given to the body under exactly the opposite conditions as for Merleau-Ponty, namely that 1) the world’s differences 2) appear to a disordered body that 3) comes into shocking affective contact with its surroundings. I argue that a Deleuzian theory of bodily-given phenomena is better suited than Merleau-Ponty’s model in the task of accounting for the intensity of phenomenal appearings.

French phenomenology focused on “the body” to avoid the supposed transcendental idealism of Husserl’s phenomenology, and to provide an “existential” or “empirical” account of the origin of meaning, as Ricoeur put it. In practice, however, this has implicitly presupposed a Cartesian problematic of the relation between body and mind or “subject.” This is the source of the ultimate frustration of this effort, as well as the persistence of a “mystery” of meaning (to cite Merleau-Ponty and Henry). This essay offers an alternative, considering the embodiment of any meaningful experience, suggesting finally that embodiment must be accounted for in terms of subjection.

One of the controversial issues in the development of Heidegger’s thought is the problem of the will. The communis opinio is that Heidegger embraced the concept of the will in a non-critical manner at the beginning of the thirties and , in particular, he employed it in his political speeches of 1933–1934. Jacques Derrida for instance speaks about a “massive voluntarism” in relation to Heidegger’s thought in this period. Also Brett Davis discerns a period of “existential voluntarism” in 1930–1934, in which Heidegger takes over a notion of the will in a non-critical manner. In this article, this interpretation is challenged and a stronger interpretation of Heidegger’s concern with the will is developed. Our hypothesis is that Heidegger’s concern with the will at the onset of the thirties is brought about by his confrontation (Auseinandersetzung) with the concept of the will. Based on his lecture courses from 1930 and 1936/37 and his Rectoral Address from 1933, enables us to discern three main characteristics of Heidegger’s destructed concept of the will in the early thirties.

The legacy of Husserlian phenomenology in France, as Paul Ricœur observes, has inspired a series of “Husserlian heresies.” This paper seeks to shedlight on the Husserl heretics through a study of two influential thinkers who introduced Husserl’s to French readers: Levinas and Ricoeur. Their introductionsgave rise to the “standard picture” of Husserl as an Idealist. Their criticism of Husserl’s Idealism then provides the springboard into their own originalthought. What ultimately emerges from this, however, are two different visions of how phenomenology should relate to its own limits.

Most scholars point out that Ricœur’s itinerary ends with a “phenomenology of the capable human being”. In this paper, I will try to propose a different hypothesis and explain why Ricœur’s last writings can be considered the starting point of a second Copernican revolution within phenomenology. A revolution of both method (from the analytic to the a-logical) and contents (from the theme of intersubjectivity to the theme of “giving” and loving), which, already in the Preface of Le volontaire et l’involontaire, Ricœur wished could follow after the first revolution of the reflexive phenomenology: a hermeneutic poetic phenomenology that develops the project that the early Ricœur had drafted, but not completed in the 1950s. This is the project of a Poetics of the Gift, in which is hidden, in my opinion, the fecundity of Ricœurian philosophy and the possibility for it to become paradigmatic for the philosophy to come.

In several texts, Paul Ricœur has elaborated different concepts of horizon: the horizon of tradition that shapes our perspectives, the horizon as a careful set of determinations of the future, the horizon as a divine call that comes from the future towards us. However, the connection of these three views on the horizon, together with the explicitly Christian interpretation of the third horizon are problematic elements in Ricœur’s thoughts on this topic. In this article his views are confronted with the criticism of Jacques Derrida, who uses a quite different notion of horizon: an enclosing limit that dominates the understanding of what seems to fit in its circle. Finally, the notions of horizon and history as formulated by Jan Patočka provide valuable alternatives to Ricœur’s problematic versions of the horizons of expectation, while leaving the underlying thread of his understanding of horizon intact.

This paper begins by arguing that Jean-Luc Marion’s desire to maintain the philosophical rigor of his analysis of revelation has led him to mischaracterizerevelation as a purely formal phenomenon devoid of any determinate content. The majority of the paper is devoted to showing that the approach to revelation off ered by Paul Ricœur—whose treatment of the phenomenon assumes all of the risks of a thinking exposed to its own historicity—represents an important and all-too-often ignored counterpoint to the prevailing methodological orientation among those associated with the so-called theological turn in phenomenology. The paper contrasts the prevailing methods concerned with uncovering fundamental or “originary” structures with a “hermeneutical” approach to revelation, concerned with the productive imagination and the effective nature of texts.

Descriptive foundations and a concern with origins are integral to both Husserlian phenomenology and Darwinian evolutionary biology. These complementary aspects are rooted in the lifeworld as it is experienced. Detailed specifications of the complementary aspects testify to a mutual relevance of phenomenology to evolutionary biology and of evolutionary biology to phenomenology. Exemplifications of the mutual relevance are given in terms of both human and nonhuman agentive abilities. The experiential exemplifications show that agentive abilities are rooted in the kinetic sequence: I move, I do, I can. The kinetic sequence in turn testifies to an ability to think in movement, a thinking that engenders corporeal concepts. It also, however, attests to the need for a veritable phenomenology of learning on the one hand and for a veritable recognition of mindful bodies on the other, mindful bodies that are a driving force both in the evolution of animate forms of life and in the evolution of repertoires of I cans.

Martin Heidegger distinguishes the human—as a world-forming, historical being that is capable of language—from the animal, which, according to him, is poor in world, ahistorical and incapable of language. This clear-cut distinction, which is connected to Heidegger’s anti-biologism, has frequently been criticised. By discussing the criticism of Matthew Calcaro, Giorgio Agamben and Jacques Derrida, the present paper aims to show that in Heidegger (1) the human-animal difference is not a biologically determined distinction, (2) human language is not (primarily) understood as an instrument of expression and communication, and (3) humans are not distinguished from animals on the basis of their supposed access to an “objective” reality. While all three points imply corrections to the reception of Heidegger in animal philosophy, (3) is particularly crucial since it refutes Derrida’s interpretation of the as-structure, which has had a large influence on readings of Heidegger, also far beyond the topic of animality. Taking into account these clarifications, a specific historical response-ability of the human becomes intelligible that is relevant in particular in regard to ethical aspirations in animal philosophy.

By setting up a dialogue with contemporary animal research the essay attempts, on the one hand, to expose the limits of Martin Heidegger’s concept of animality in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, and, on the other hand, to propose some new ways of thinking the being of those animals that most distinctly show themselves as being other than Heidegger’s claims. I suggest, with reference to Heidegger’s thesis of the animal as “poor in world,” that the being of the cognitively most complex animals is better understood in terms of otherworldly worlds within the world of human world forming. With this concept I aim to develop and continue, rather than criticize, Heidegger’s way of thinking the being of animals and deepen the productive relationship between science and philosophy that Heidegger proposed in this work.

The attempt to appropriate Heidegger’s thinking in order to found environmental ethics continues to pose challenges both for understanding the premise of an ethic, and, conversely, for unfolding the importance of his thought in the effort to displace the anthropocentric focus of modern philosophy. These challenges must be taken up on a methodological as well as a thematic level, in order to show how a claim of being can implicate a reciprocal guidance pertaining to our treatment of the earth, nature, and animals. An appeal to the ethos of situated dwelling is not sufficient to ground a transhuman ethic; rather, a precursory step must be taken to uncover a common space of embodiment, thereby marking a jointure whereby habitats fostering the potential for animals to “flourish” can be cultivated in concert with our own capacity to dwell. When viewed through this prism of our “incarnality,” the stewardship that we practice in dwelling on the earth can also “formally indicate” a sense of proportionality, e.g., a “measure,” counter balancing the interests of animals with humans. Conversely, the search for a trans-human ethic calls for a further transformation of phenomenology through its interface with hermeneutics.

In this article, I investigate how phenomenologists have analysed the relation between man and animal with respect to death. The common tendency of most phenomenologists is to grant man a specific mode of being and to attribute a parallel but deficient mode to the animal. In this way, phenomenology fails to accomplish a positive phenomenological description of the animal’s mode of being or of animality as such. I turn to Heidegger’s decisive analysis of human/animal death since Heidegger would constantly hold on to the idea that the animal, in contrast to man, has no explicit relation to death and is therefore not capable of death as death. This leads to his very provocative claim that only man “dies” whereas the animal just “perishes.” Hence, the problem of the man/animal-relation becomes a very distinct problem in relation to death since death concerns the very way in which a certain form of being relates to the world. I aim to shed light on the genesis of the problem in order to put the question of the animal’s death in a proper perspective. I argue that it is precisely death where phenomenology loses its firm grip on the differentiation between man and animal and hence it is this distinction that has to be put back into question.

Even a quick look at the history of religions leaves one impressed with how often the animal has been taken as a manifestation of the sacred. Another feature, frequently found, is the emphasis on the transcendence of the divine. Its radical alterity is such that we cannot directly encounter it. What is the alterity, the transcendence that conjoins these features? In this article, I argue that this alterity is that of the unconscious. Two types of impulses spring from it: impulses that we symbolically project as the Eros rooted in our animal, embodied existence and impulses that we project as springing from the divine. The only way that we can form a stable representation of ourselves is through the intertwining of both of them. Such an intertwining can be accounted for by means of Merleau-Ponty’s model of reversibility and mutual disclosure.

The question of whether animals have technologies is studied in this article in three genealogical steps according to the development of human technologies: tools, machines and digital technologies. In the age of tools, animals were regarded as lacking technologies. In the age of machines, observations in animals show tool usage. However, Marx attributes both machines and tools only to humans in order to avoid a break between premodern humanity that had only tools, to modern humanity that invented and used machines. In the age of digital technologies, animals have been observed using and inventing tools as well as complex technics like language and agriculture. These genealogical steps conform to Calarco’s mapping of animality into identity, difference and indifference, which allow us to think not only of the identity between humans’ and animals’ technologies but also of the differences.