Although Levinas’ “il y a” does not directly correspond to Heidegger’s conception of being, his criticism of Heidegger’s temporal ontology is nevertheless justified. With the reduction of every meaning (and being) to its temporal constitution, Heidegger excludes any possibility of transcendence beyond time. The problem of overcoming the radical finitude and historicity of meaning, which is ethically motivated, brings Levinas to the age-old question of metaphysics. However, taking Heidegger’s thought seriously, Levinas is forced to look for an entirely new understanding of the metaphysical quest.

Based on the distinction between the intra- and interlingual translation, this paper identifies the keywords of Beiträge as the result of Heidegger’s intralingual translation. With his intralingual translation of words such as Ereignis and Ab-grund, Heidegger gives these words entirely new meanings. On this basis, the paper criticizes the existing renditions of the keywords of Beiträge. This criticism is based on the insight that an absolute transfer of the keywords into English is unobtainable. To meet the hermeneutic responsibility of translating Beiträge, we must obtain an approximate translation. The paper concludes by addressing the question whether an approximate translation of the keywords of Beiträge can be faithful to the original German.

This paper attempts to show that the diachronic temporality introduced in the second major work of Levinas is profoundly influenced by the genetic dimension of the Husserlian account of time. It is argued that the different phenomena of this genetic-diachronic temporality, like the past which was never present, the originary retention, and the unpredictable present, are sustaining not just the central idea of Otherwise than being, that of an originary ethical subject, but alsothe description of the relation with the other, and the phenomenology of language present in this work.

In Levinas’ hands, the problematic of transcendence challenges phenomenological description by positing, as primary, that which is outside intentionality. How, then, to think about this transcendence outside intentionality? This essay explores the possibilities of a description of transcendence through Levinas’ and Marion’s readings of the Cartesian idea of the Infinite. What emerges from these readings of Descartes’ idea of the Infinite is a sense of indication that is fundamentally elliptical, pointing beyond what it can render to presence, but pointing nonetheless. Thinking through this problem of elliptical indication, I argue, is central to generating a phenomenological account of transcendence.

The paper the author considers Bachelard’s approaches to the question of space in his specific phenomenological manner. After a preliminary reflection on Bachelard’s polemics with a Bergsonian underestimation of space in favor of time as duration, the paper discusses on the phenomenological attitude to the constitution of space. The next chapter explains Bachelard’s dynamical model of valorization in which positive and negative values oscillate in relation to our inner and personal experiences. The last chapter concerns the specific phenomenology of hostile spaces in contrast to intimate ones. In agreement with Bachelard, the author claims that intimacy needs experience of the dangerous and of openness, so it is not easy to determine when a specific place is or is not experienced as secure. Majestic, light and spacious buildings may not be experienced as more secure for us than small cabins with an intimate shadow of humanity.

The paper analyses Patočka’s phenomenological treatment of the concept of space and of personal spatiality. Patočka’s solution (the pronominal proto-structure of interpellation) is used to assess Heidegger’s approach to the concept of space. Patočka’s phenomenological advancements in regards to histeacher’s developments are considered first through a comparison of their respective concepts of “Earth”, and second, through an evaluation of the reasonsof the impossibility of the Heideggerian attempt, in Sein und Zeit, to reduce spatiality to temporality.

Most accounts of Heidegger’s relation to Nietzsche have traditionally focused on his famous Nietzsche lecture courses or upon his brief yet highly significant references to Nietzsche in Being and Time. However, with recent English translations of key lecture courses from Heidegger’s early Freiburg period it has become clear that during this time another distinct phase of Heidegger’s long and complex relation to Nietzsche can be identified. In this essay, I first chronicle Heidegger’s earliest references to Nietzsche in the period from 1909–1916. I then turn to Heidegger’s early Freiburg lecture courses and demonstrate that the proximity between Nietzsche and Heidegger’s understanding of phenomenology in this period was much greater than has traditionally been said. In conclusion, I argue that one of the most important examples of Heidegger’s appropriation of Nietzsche in this period can be seen in the concept of destruction which played a central role in Heidegger’s account of phenomenological methodology.

The ordinary space is continuously cluttered with bodies and constantly, when we move, we must maneuver, push and shove, walk around, make space. The awareness of having to operate in a limited space, where the places are always already occupied, is sustained by a special mode of appearing of ordinary space: the occupancy field. A phenomenological analysis of the occupancy field demonstrates that: (i) the format in which space presents itself in ordinary perception is marked by our awareness of occupying space with our body and having to squeeze it somewhere each time we move; (ii) bodies and space are co-dependent on an intentional level: ordinary space has, by a sense of vacuum, a mode of appearing which is indissociable from the phenomenological structure of bodies; (iii) the presentation of space is dependent on an anticipation of possibilities: it is because the situation is considered from the opportunities and constraints on the possible set up by our body that a space presents itself to us. We could not experience space if our perceptual apparatus took a mere snapshot of the current states of aff airs, if through it we had only access to the state in which the environment is at time t. To experience space means fundamentally to be ahead of one’s time, consider the present not from the future, but from the possible.

What is the relationship between phenomenology and material reality? What would be the place of phenomenology in a discourse about material reality? This paper tries to clarify the relationship between a type of knowledge and an ontological domain which at first sight seems foreign to it. It also contains the outline of a program for future research. We will show that the relationship between phenomenology and material reality is in some sense double. Hints to this duality may already be found in Husserl’s Ideen II. Finally we will question a phenomenology that its author explicitly qualified as material: the philosophy of Michel Henry. We will investigate the possibility of a material phenomenology beyond Henry’s work in relation to material reality.

This article presents itself as an attempt to explain Proust’s expression, “The matter of experience”, from Husserl’s concept of Materie in the Logical Investigations. This Husserlian concept will enable us to rethink the “matter” of experience, as being both intrinsically determined and intrinsically “relational”. Husserl uses this concept of Materie in two main senses. In the fifth Logical Investigation, it is used in order to define the “content” (Inhalt) of the act and this concept will be explained in its own equivocation, as it both means the direction of the act (Sinn) and the ideal “signification” which prescribes this very determination (Bedeutung). The concept of Materie is also used in the third Logical Investigation to designate the “content” (Gehalt) of the object, and will also be explained in its own equivocation, as it both means the individual determination of the object and its essential determination. In the last part of this study, a few of the difficulties which are brought by this double equivocation of Husserl’s concept of Materie will be exposed, and a few programmatic solutions for its redefinition as the unique “matter” of our experience, will be proposed. This investigation might eventually imply a definition of phenomenology itself, as the very experience of this matter.

The purpose of this paper is to show that the notion of landscape is a phenomenological typical object and a perfect meeting point of different fields of study, and, in particular, a distinctive topic for a dialogue between phenomenology and human sciences. Starting from an analysis of a text of Erwin Straus, we attemptto support the view that into all kinds of landscape—sensory, perceptual, geographical, pictorial or built—we can read various ways of living, dwelling or being in the world, or in other words we can read into them some forms of the original experience. This means that within all landscapes, as embedded in these forms of experience, we can read various ways of living, dwelling or being in the world. So we believe it is possible to constitute and to think a unitary sense of landscape from a phenomenological interpretation of space and human behaviour.

Because the status of nature is ambiguous in Being and Time, we explore an ecological perspective on Heidegger’s early main work in this article. Our hypothesis is that the affordance theory of James Gibson enables us to a) to understand being-in-the-world as being-in-nature, b) reconnect man and nature and c) understand the twofold sense of nature in Being and Time. After exploring Heidegger’s concept of being-in-the-world and Gibson’s concept of being-in-nature, we confront Heidegger’s and Gibson’s conception of being-in-the-world and being-in-nature. It will become clear that Gibson’s affordance theory enables an ecological reading of Being and Time, in which the relational character of being-in-the-world is stressed and the exceptional position of human being-in-the-world has to be rejected. Moreover, it becomes clear that an ecological reading of Being and Time enables us to reconnect being-in-the world with being-in-nature (unconcealment), which is rooted in “primordial” nature as its infinite origin (concealment).

Almost simultaneous emergence of Existentialism and Marxism at end of the Little Ice Age had coincided with rapid urbanization and prevalence of mood disorder in northern Europe. This historic configuration is cast against Relph’s notion of place in his critique of urban planning. During the LIA street walking had mitigated mood disorder triggered by sunlight deprivation of indoor spaces while, at the same time, it had also buoyed a place. It was the unplanned place in the open air—a dilapidated street corner in St. Petersburg or Romanesque streetscape of Old Copenhagen—that offered authenticity, cerebral restitution, and for ardent minds also discernment and acumen. Relph’s critique continues to be of pressing relevance to winter-cities designed for automotive access, and also for the interpretation it offers on the thought and events of the late LIA and following it.

This article discusses the complex space of the city as an urban milieu of vitality. On the skin of the city, a permanent change of its physical and physiognomicappearance takes place. The alternation of urban “faces” is constituted situationally in the structures and wrinkles of the skin. However, characteristic features of urban quarters do not only appear visually; they become bodily felt and are perceptible as holistic impressions, emanating from atmospheric “vital qualities” (Dürckheim). Therefore, lively urban districts are discussed as “body islands” (Schmitz) in urban space. Seen from this vitalistic perspective, the cityis not only a world of rational actors—as it is common ground in the social sciences—but also an unpredictable space of performativity.

Through an atmospherological approach, primarily inspired by the Aisthetik (Böhme) and the New Phenomenology (Schmitz), the paper investigates the relationship between atmosphere and lived space, defines what kind of perception the atmospheric one is and examines the space we experience in the lifeworld and to which plane geometry turns out to be completely blind. Sketching briefly the (philosophical) history of lived space (from Heidegger to Schmitz), we assume that atmospheres function as (transmodal) affordances that permeate the lived space, i.e. as ecological invites or meanings that are ontologically rooted in things and quasi-things.

Japanese architecture emphasizes transitional spaces between rooms rather than the rooms themselves. If these transitional spaces can be successfullyrealized, then everything in the room will naturally fall into place with anything else. This also applies to the relation between a building and other buildings stretching out through the whole city, and ultimately to the relation of the city to the natural environment. “En” is the Japanese word for such transitional spaces. It means both “edge” and “connection.” It also means destiny. When two people fall in love at fi rst sight or understand each other without having to speak, they are said to have “en.” This article provides a phenomenological description and constitutional analysis of two Japanese bridging structures: (1) the engawa at the side or back of a house or temple which functions as a veranda for viewing the garden and a hallway to connect the rooms, and (2) the hashigakari bridgeway of the Noh theater by which the principal actor gets from the green room to the stage.

A radical thinking of space remains for phenomenology a difficulty, which Heidegger has been concerned with. He developed an existential conception of the spatiality of Dasein in Being and Time, which he abandoned in his later philosophy; according to its “turn,” this philosophy proposes a notion of emptiness to describe spatial experience. The paper endorses the view that this notion makes possible a thinking of space in its essence. Pursuing further the reflection concerning the empty space, Maldiney advocates the influence of the East Asian tradition on this issue. However, given that none of these authors considers dance as an art susceptible to disclose space in its essential vacuity, this paper aims to argue that there is a true choreographic empty space.

Husserl’s legacy of research manuscripts has been revered as a resource containing the deepest insights of his later work and criticized because such manuscripts present work in progress rather than completed “results.” I suggest that these materials are far more than fragments calling for careful interpretation; instead, they belong to a different genre and should be taken up in an attitude of research directed toward working out unsolved problems rather than in an attitude focused on interpreting pregiven texts. After sketching some elements of the research practice this entails, I review some of the ways in which Husserl’s research results have been appropriated and emphasize the need for further phenomenological investigation in the spirit of the “rigorous science” Husserl envisioned.

The concept of atmosphere may be defined as tuned space, i.e. space with a mood. This concept opens a lot of new perspectives for Aesthetics. The very paradigm of it is stage design. Stage designers install a certain climate on the stage. But in our days almost everything is staged. Thus the theory of atmospherefinds applications in Commodity Aesthetics, Design, Architecture, but also the staging of politics as well as the staging of a person through a certain life-style is a field of application. Finally the Aesthetics of Atmosphere helps to understand art, in particular performative art and music.