We publish here the letters between Gadamer and Ricoeur, as they are found in the Archives of the two philosophers (Gadamer-Archiv in Marbach and Fonds Ricoeur in Paris). Starting from February 1964 and ending on October 2000, the thirty-five letters reproduced here cannot give a complete picture of their much richer correspondence and relations, because it seems that neither Ricoeur, nor Gadamer kept all the letters they received from one another. But altogether, they document their common concerns, their mutual respect, even their intellectual solidarity and finally the particular context that brought them to write to one another, i.e. Ricoeur’s intention to publish a translation of Gadamer’s book, Truth and Method, in a new series he edited for the Seuil Publisher. This publishing and translation project will mark their entire correspondence.

Paul Ricœur held the conference on attention at Rennes, on the 2nd of March 1939, before the Philosophical Circle of the West. At the time, Ricœur, aged 26, was a teacher of philosophy at Lorient, in the south of Brittany. The text published here, which is available in the Paris Archives, is Ricœur’s extended version of this conference. His careful analysis of attention is impressive in its phenomenological emphasis: from the first lines, he draws relations between attention and perception, considering their intentional character, and continues by distinguishing attention from anticipation, preperception and waiting. A particular concern is given to the relation between attention and temporal duration – a question that will be reworked later in his philosophy of the will. After questioning how attention implies the notion of truth (not without reminding the contributions of Descartes, Thomas, Malebranche and Berkeley), he concludes by meditating upon the relation between attention and liberty.

Animality is a central issue in phenomenology. If the core of the phenomenological approach is the investigation into the correlation between subject and object, what are we talking about when we talk about animal subjectivity? Is it possible to include the notion of animal being in the category of subject? What kind of intentionality does it possess? Our article will analyse the pathic dimension in order to track down some indications about animal subjectivity. Particular emphasis shall be placed on Weizsacker and Merleau-Ponty’s perspectives. Both call into question the definition of subjectivity as an absolute and neutral gaze, exclusively attributed to human being. By contrast, by analysing sensitivity as the common background between animal and human beings, it will be possible to introduce the subject into biology, as explicitly stated by Weizsacker. Subjectivity lies at the intersection between passivity and activity, between perception and movement, between passion and revolution.

The goal of this article is to demonstrate that, following Derrida, in order to develop a theory of animality it is necessary to renounce to the implicit use of concepts related to subjectivity (such as “ego,” “ipse,” or “Dasein”). The deconstruction of subjectivity is thus the only way to establish an ethical requirement concerning animals, a requirement which is no longer conceived from the point of view of our “humanity.” In the first part of the paper, I attempt to locate Derridean ethics within phenomenology in a way which situates ethics in relation to the experience of aporia. In the second part, I focus on what Derrida calls the “carnivorous sacrifice” and try to outline a concretization of the ethics of hospitality and of responsibility that reconfigures our relationships with animals.

What does the ostensibly innocuous phrase “das Selbst” (the self ) exactly mean in Heidegger’s fundamental ontology? Does Heidegger really have a “theory of the self ” in the same way as, say, Descartes, Locke or Husserl? This is what has been often concluded by many interpreters of Being and Time, and it is that view that the current paper attempts to challenge. Heidegger not only rejects the supposition of a substantial ego, along the lines of Descartes’ conception, but he also repudiates any “self ” understood as a present-at-hand being, an inner core of Dasein, and he insists on the intrinsic connection between the “egologies,” from Descartes to Husserl, and “traditional ontology”. What seems to be at stake in the fundamental-ontological approach of Sebstheit and Selbstsein, Being-oneself, is rather a complete paradigm-shift, since both concepts refer to “ways of being” or “ways of existing” of Dasein, and no longer at all to a self-identical being of a condition of its self-identity. In trying to investigate the economy of the related existential concepts of Jemeinigkeit, Selbstheit and Man-selbst, this article makes the claim that Heidegger’s break with egology is much deeper that it has been often thought, and that the phenomenologist raises a completely new question, rather than trying to give a new response to older ones.

The aim of this paper is to highlight the main features of Derrida’s interpretation of Heidegger in his 1964–65 lecture series Heidegger: la question de l’Être et l’histoire. Taking the issue of historicity as the main interpretive thread, the paper argues that, in Derrida’s view, Heidegger’s position constitutes a significant progress with regard to mainstream philosophical tradition. For Heidegger, historicity is originary and non-ontic; conceiving of it in this way enables us to overcome the primacy of the present and the subjectivist metaphysical approach which authors such as Hegel and Husserl still display. The paper then reconstructs Derrida’s critique of the chapter on the historicity of Dasein in Being and Time, as well as his approach to the history of Being through the topic of the metaphor. The critical force of this reading will be supported by an analysis of some of Derrida’s later writings, which also enable us to sketch some possible avenues for future research, in particular on the relationships between writing and history and on Heidegger’s concept of Versammlung.

If the idea of a phenomenological aesthetic evidence is far from being obvious, it may yet become necessary in the description of the aesthetic experience. For the way a work of art can imperiously impose on the viewer reveals a kind of power that may suggests that this evidence is more than just a subjective feeling. Although Husserl’s phenomenology doesn’t consider such an evidence, and although this concept may even be regarded as a contradiction—since evidence particularly characterizes the givenness of perceptive objects—we may yet find the conditions of possibility of such an aesthetic evidence in Husserl’s work.

There are three possible ways of access to phenomena of suffered violence: the first is the experience of those who have suffered violence themselves; the second is the experience of eyewitnesses; the third, which is the most frequent one, is an indirect access through the testimony of people belonging to the first two categories. Each way of access has advantages but also serious difficulties, both in terms of the objectivity of the experience and of the possibility to express it in language. No one is free from an affective and a normative dimension; this implies that there is a certain tension with regard to the phenomenological reduction. The paper offers an analysis of these ways of access.

How can phenomenology help address the problem of social violence? Can phenomenology provide an adequate description of its essence? Is the phenomenological method able to deepen and transform its comprehension? The paper is an attempt to answer these questions through an analysis of three different testimonies of social violence entailing elements of phenomenological description. Starting with a minimal definition of the phenomenological description, understood as search for a meaning for a lived experience and substitution with those who suffer, the article discusses several issues raised by a phenomenological description of social violence, such as the danger of justifying it when searching for its meaning, of blaming the victims who suffered from it or of prolonging its traumatizing effects. The paper ends by questioning the ways in which the phenomenological method can offer support for resilience and inspire resistance to social violence.

The aim of this article is to analyze the idea of the event conceived as crisis and conflict in Patočka and Maldiney’s philosophies. The event is what tears the horizon of the meaningful world apart and opens a new world: it represents the opening of a crisis in the human existence and at the same time the condition of any future crisis to come. By reading Maldiney’s texts on the “pathique” and psychosis along with Patočka’s descriptions of historical existence, we shall then discover that human existence is exposed (and responds) to this chaotic and conflictual dimension. In fact, what defines existence—the individual existence (Maldiney) as well as the historical, shared existence (Patočka)—is the exposure to such a conflict and to the critical event, i.e. to the possibility of its own shaking. Furthermore, the event appears as the root of both the krisis and the “koine”, whether in the form of the encounter (Maldiney) or the community cohesion (Patočka).

The aim of the present article is to offer a new interpretation of Heidegger’s account of the unfolding of language by analyzing the notion of Geläut der Stille, “sounding gathering of silence.” Taking as a starting point the experience of silence described by Stefan George in his poem “The Word,” the article presents the opposition between silence and the sounding words, showing that the latter coincide with the language we speak. The passage from silence to the spoken language belongs to the unfolding of language itself, which presents itself as a translation of silence, redefining thus what translation originally is. The latter, understood as violence and harmony, gathers itself under the term of “rift,” overcoming thus the ontological difference and offering us a radically new perspective over the nature of “relation” within Heidegger’s thinking.

Jan Patočka is usually connected with Czech dissidence, a political movement which stood up against the communist government. We want to defend the hypothesis that the notion of dissidence is not originally a political one but, above all, a phenomenological one. Dissidence is a movement of distancing which implies a rootedness, and this movement of distancing is peculiar to human beings. Patočka calls “movement of human existence” this paradoxical rootedness which is an extramundane and mundane position. Thus, we have to review the theory of the three movements of human existence. While it is tempting to separate the third movement, as a movement of transcendence, and to describe it as a political dissidence, we would like to show that the three movements (and not only the third), have to be understood as Dissidence.