While the notion of gift has received much scholarly attention in recent philosophical discussion, theology appears as being too strongly dependent on philosophy by being oblivious of its own resources within the rich theological tradition concerning the Trinitarian community of loving gift exchange. After considering the possibility of a transition from a faith-informed phenomenology to phenomenologically inspired theology, the essay examines two early tests cases, Hilary of Poitiers and Augustine of Hippo, where the relationship these authors saw between gift and love within the life of the economic and the immanent Trinity can be archeologically traced.

By examining the evolution of Husserl’s philosophy from 1901 to 1914, this essay reveals that he possessed a more robust philosophy of gestures than has been accounted for. This study is executed in two stages. First, I explore how Husserl analyzed gestures through the lens of his semiotics in the 1901 Logical Investigations. Although he there presents a simple account of gestures as kinds of indicative signs, he does uncover rich insights about the role that gestures play in communication. Second, I examine how Husserl augmented his theory of gestures in his 1914 Revisions to the Sixth Logical Investigation. Husserl describes some gestures as signals, which are experienced as intersubjective communication, as having a temporally diachronic structure, and as possessing an obliging tendency. Husserl also contrasts gestures to language by showing how language habitually leaves traces on us.

What is the role of gestures within the wider problem of corporeity in Maurice Merleau‑Ponty? How do gestures exemplify and complicate the bodily experience? The aim of this article is to investigate the thematic of gesture in Merleau‑Ponty’s production, with particular attention to the Phenomenology of Perception (1945) and the lessons held at the Collège de France about institution, passivity and nature (1954–60), down to the final indirect ontology inThe Visible and the Invisible. Gestures could be understood as forms (Gestalten), i.e. dynamic structures which express individual and collective behaviours, as well as institutions (Stiftungen), underlying the process of sedimentation and reactivation of meanings. In both cases, gestures have a heuristic or generative function: they shape the individual style in the encounter with the world through “typics” or recurring “motifs”. As a conclusion, the paper argues for the key‑role of gesture, in order to re‑think eidetic intuition as the grasping of operative and emotional essences.

This paper analyses Merleau‑Ponty’s gestural theory focusing on the ontological and epistemological role attributed to the expressive movements of the lived body. The first section argues that Merleau‑Ponty’s phenomenology recognises movement as a primordial phenomenon from which language and thought emerge. This theorisation allows us to identify a type of logos that grants a specific content, sense and value to bodily movements, here conceptualised as a “kin(aesth)etic logos”. The second section of the paper offers a categorisation of different gestures—perceptive, reflexive, habitual and verbal gestures—which show how the kin(aesth)etic logos is actualised in a myriad of daily activities.

This paper seeks to develop the connection in Merleau‑Ponty’s later ontology between the gesture and language. There is a concerted effort in Merleau‑Ponty’s “middle period” to illustrate that a linguistic system of signs is internally constellated by the body and its movement. This effort seems to give way to an ontology of flesh in the later period. On closer consideration, however, this ontology and the linguistic system of signs—both “diacritical”—are mutually imbricated. This highlights the crucial importance of separation, deviation, and difference in Merleau‑Ponty’s ontology. A question remains, however: how can the body, and in particular the gesture, be the very site of separation rather than of an initiation or identification? I argue that, for Merleau‑Ponty, every gesture contains something internally antagonistic to it, something that cannot be grasped or moved. In this sense, the gesture is an “implex,” both internally resistant to and productive of signification. It is, in short, the site of a symbolization. In light of this, in the conclusion I reconsider the final passages from “Cézanne’s Doubt” where Merleau‑Ponty discusses Freud’s “hermeneutical musings” on Leonardo, and the passages from “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence” and the nature lectures where he discusses the painter’s brushwork.

In this paper, relying on both phenomenology and psychoanalysis, I introduce the concept of transbodily intentionality with the aim of exploring the significance of bodily expression for subjective constitution. The role of the body for the constitution of subjective experience becomes increasingly important in phenomenological analysis. This faces us with the challenge of understanding the intersubjective relevance of bodily processes together with the genetic turn of phenomenology. On this background, the revaluation of the concept of gesture comes into light. The meaning of the gesture cannot be framed in an exclusively subjective context, but rather requires a communicative and intersubjective horizon.

Section I details Husserl’s insight into style and how a person’s individual style is played out in affect and action and in the two‑fold articulation of perception and “the kinestheses,” both of which are integral to gestural communication. Section II details how the evolutionary perspectives of Darwin and linguistic scholars complement Husserl’s insights into the animate realities of gesture and bring to light further dimensions of human and nonhuman gestural practices and possibilities through extensive experiential accounts that document the essential role of movement and thinking in movement in animate lives. Section III focuses on critical oversights by prominent phenomenologists who, rather than basing their studies in the rigors of phenomenological methodology, write of “what it is like” with respect to experience or give preferred opinions as in “consciousness of my gesture [...] can tell us nothing about movement.”

In this article, we propose to reconceptualize phenomenology in a relational way. Instead of taking subjective consciousness as the starting point for the constitution of meaning, we consider meaning (as well as subjects and subjectivities) as something that is produced in social relations, or more precisely, in communicative actions. In order to explore how this works we empirically study mutual gaze as a critical case. At first sight, the reciprocity that arises when two subjects look into each other’s eyes and perceive how they look and are being looked at reciprocally seems to be “pure,” i.e. free of any mediation by language, gestures or other objectivations. It turns out, however, that mutual gaze unfolds, albeit highly ambivalently and fluidly, as an “object in time”. In contrast to non‑subjectivist approaches, we argue that we need some sort of subjectivity to understand phenomena such as mutual gaze. However, we also need to understand its embeddedness in cultures as well as in social relations. This is what Relational Phenomenology means.

This article aims to discuss the gestural character of Chopin’s pianistic writing. We will focus on the set of Etudes pour piano. We expect to show how the notion of musical expression in Romanticism is dependent of a notion of expressive body always in the limit of decomposition. This could show us how musical expression is a privileged space for a better understanding of the dialectical relationship between form and formless.

This article casts light on Marc Richir’s remarkable and yet poorly known interpretation of the analyses of animality that Martin Heidegger develops in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude and Solitude. It shows that this interpretation unfolds as a two‑step critical revision of Heidegger’s analyses within the framework of Richir’s neo‑phenomenological project. On the one hand, Richir aims to offer the “right” interpretation of the cybernetic and grammatological history of life told by Jacques Derrida, by measuring it against Heidegger’s theory of the organism. On the other hand, Richir rewrites the limits of Heidegger’s conception of animality in light of the overview of contemporary ethological research provided by Konrad Lorenz.

Current dialogues in neuroscience are limited to phenomenological psychology plus neuroscience, or neurophenomenology. Within these dialogues, transcendental phenomenology is largely expelled. This article proposes a transcendental phenomenology of and through neuroscience. The “phenomenology‑of ” neuroscience is a philosophy that refuses to view the Experience‑Body Relation and Life‑Non‑Life Ambiguity as if they were predetermined, unintelligible, metaphysical gaps. Instead, it attempts to understand them through a correlative intentional experience involving activities of neuro‑scientific investigation and their pre‑theoretical prerequisites. This establishes the indispensability of self‑report and highlights the failings of two naturalistic interpretations of intentionality (representationalism and enactivism). A “phenomenology‑through” neuroscience is thus justifiable and necessary, as illustrated by the example of memory consolidation during sleep. The article finds that as phenomenology‑plus, neurophenomenology can solve its problems only through a mutually constraining “phenomenology‑of ” and “‑through”.

In this paper, I offer an analysis of the thought experiment “Two worlds for one ego” in which Husserl imagines an ego that lives two alternated lives. The thought experiment is designed to question the apodicticity of the world’s singularity. If the ego of the thought experiment is a fully concrete social subject, then the world’s singularity proves to be apodictic. If we were to, conversely, conduct the same experiment with an abstract ego, then the counter‑scenario of a doubling of the world would be tenable if and only if this subject was the sole subject of both worlds. This means, in turn, that a more concrete phenomenological conduction of the experiment demonstrates the limits of methodological solipsism. The paper is tripartite. Firstly, I set out the experiment’s terminological terrain and discuss the systematic questions addressed as well as the phenomenological methods involved. In a second step, I analyse Husserl’s conduction of the thought experiment. Finally, I discuss some of the experiment’s possible applications to anthropology.

Starting from Patočka’s understanding of history as a reflective confrontation with the “shaken present”, I will examine his understanding of human responsibility. For Patočka, human responsibility is impossible to think if the basis of our investigation is couched in the formalised scientific explanation. To think about human responsibility is to recognise that our lives are not something in the world, unchanging and open to investigation by formalised knowledge as a tree or rocks are. We must be responsible for the way we live. In that sense, science is incapable to account for the meaning of life. However, this does not mean that to speak of the meaning of life is meaningless. The life one leads is an achievement. What kind of an achievement it is depends on the way we understand the world and our place in it, who we want to be.

This essay examines Patočka’s reflections on the ideological battles in the middle of the 20th century and the nature of ideology as such. Drawing on Patočka’s texts from around the time of the Second World War and the Communist takeover in Czechoslovakia, the essay describes Patočka’s analysis of the main philosophical schools of the age, how they conceive of Man, and how they seek to use Man for their own purposes. The essay shows how this external materialization of Man dehumanizes and thus abuses. Only an idea respecting human freedom will do justice to the human experience. Lastly the author reflects on whether Patočka’s analysis of the human situation 60 years ago under various types of totalitarianism is still relevant today.

In his appraisal of the English translation of the Beiträge by Emad and Maly, Kisiel has not addressed some key issues concerning the translation of this seminal work of being-historical thinking. Emad and Maly have in their “Translators’ Foreword” highlighted a number of hermeneutic issues and challenges which had to be addressed while translating this work. If Kisiel were to be really reviewing the quality of this translation, he would have had to address first the question whether those issues highlighted by the translators are real issues that are to be considered by any translator. If they are real issues and if Kisiel is unhappy with the way the translators have dealt with them, he should have proposed better alternatives, instead of summarily and contemptuously dismissing the “Translator’s Foreword” itself. Literary criticism is surely an invitation to present another point of view, but never a means for expressing contempt.

This paper investigates the relation in Patočka’s thought between the concepts of the “front” and the “solidarity of the shaken”, which we find in the Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History, particularly the sixth essay, “Wars of the Twentieth Century and The Twentieth Century as War”, and the phenomenological analysis of corporeity that we find in Patočka’s work from the late sixties, namely, “The Natural World and Phenomenology” (1967). We argue for a reading of the “front” and the “solidarity of the shaken” that emphasizes the importance of the body and intercorporeity. Based on this we argue for an interpretation of Patočka’s “absolute” as life’s transcendence of itself.

By his critical reflections on the crisis of modern civilization, Jan Patočka, phenomenologist of the Other Europe, incarnates the critical consciousness of the phenomenological movement. He was in fact one of the first European philosophers to have emphasized the necessity of abandoning the hitherto Eurocentric propositions of solution to the crisis when he explicitly raised the problems of a “Post-European humanity”. In advocating an understanding of the history of European humanity different from those of Husserl and Heidegger, Patočka directs his philosophical reflections back to sketch a more profound phenomenology of the natural world insufficiently thematized in Husserl and absent in Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit. By virtue of its emphasis on the structural characteristics of movement, of praxis, and of the disclosure of the abyssal nature of human existence and of the original nothingness as the (non-)foundation of the phenomenal world, Patočka’s phenomenology of the natural world constitutes an opening towards the reception of Others and other cultures, in particular that of Chinese Taoist philosophy.

Jan Patočka and Maurice Merleau-Ponty attempted to get beyond Husserl by focusing on manifestation or visibility as such. Yet, the results these philosophers come to are very different — particularly with regard to the a priori of the visible. Are there, as Patočka believed, aspects of being that can be grasped in their entirety, the aspects, namely, that involve its “self-showing”? Or must we say, with Merleau-Ponty, that being can only show itself in finite perspectives that can never be summed to a whole? At stake in their attempts to speak of appearing as appearing is, I propose to show, nothing less than the question of the finitude of being.