In this article I will consider, both theoretically and experientially, an improvisational style of comportment by means of which one can enter into a potentially meaningful exchange or Ineinander with animal others. In such moments of communicative comportment, it would be appropriate to say that one is utilizing empathy as an investigatory posture—as a way of “feeling into” the gesticulating body of the other, and possibly even “seeing into” the other’s world. As a reference point for reflection, I will draw upon my encounters over the course of a decade with bonobos held in captivity at the Fort Worth Zoo.

This article uses two seminal 20th-century houses—Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater and Alvar Aalto’s Villa Mairea—to examine the natural symbol of inside and outside which for phenomenological philosopher Karsten Harries (1988, 1993, 1997) is one crucial lived relationship sustaining successful architecture and place.

“Frontier” signifies not only a line between areas but also the area beyond one’s home area. The early giants in phenomenological philosophy were often concerned with other disciplines. Husserl knew much about the psychology as well as the mathematics of his time. Heidegger had an involvement with Greek philology that others have continued. Gurwitsch and then Merleau-Ponty gained much from the psychiatry of Kurt Goldstein and they plus Sartre took Gestalt psychology very seriously. And Schutz founded the phenomenological theory of the cultural sciences. This pattern of interest in and benefi t from disciplines beyond philosophy continues in Klaus Held, Thomas Seebohm, and Bernhard Waldenfels, but is becoming increasingly atypical because of, among other reasons, the non-German model for the preparation of philosophers. The present essay is an attempt to remind phenomenological philosophers of this component of their deeper tradition and then to explore how it can be revived.

Bodily relationality is such a rich field for phenomenological research that a preliminary survey is required in order to distinguish its multifarious modes. This essay sketches some possible themes and approaches, eventually arriving at a provisional description of some basic structures of interkinaesthetic relationality before following the lead of the Romanian phenomenologist Alexandru Dragomir in turning to an even more fundamental structure—namely, our embodied engagement with the here and now. After suggesting some ways in which to cultivate a more open, flexible style of bodily relationality, the essay concludes with a ten-point summary of key findings regarding bodily relationality.

Like Alfred Schutz, Eric Voegelin opposed positivistic approaches to the social sciences through the method of locating the object of social science in life-world relationships. However, Voegelin’s metaphysical critique of modern political theory led him to emphasize sub-rational, metaphysical factors and to suspect epistemological/ methodological approaches, like phenomenology, that proceed independently of them. However, due to this strategy, Voegelin appears less self-reflective about the methodology underpinning his claims, in contrast to Schutz, who relied more heavily on phenomenological methods. Nevertheless, Voegelin discovers the attitude of committed participation exceeding the stance of phenomenology that must be used to describe it.

Th e neurophilosophical project, as envisioned by Churchland, involves intertheoretic reduction, moving from (or eliminating) theories formulated in terms of common sense and folk psychology, to theories that have stood the test of scientific experiment. In her view, folk psychology, as well as introspective phenomenology, will be eliminated in favor of neuroscience. Neurophenomenology holds that phenomenology (as a practice)is not only possible, but is in fact a useful tool for science; and that phenomenology is ineliminable if the project is to pursue a neurobiology of consciousness. Clarification of these issues rests on an understanding of how phenomenology can be an alternative source of testable theory, and can play a direct role in scientific experiment. Rather than talking in the abstract about the role of theory formation in science, I consider two specific issues to show the difference between a neurophilosophical approach and a neurophenomenlogical approach, namely, the issues of self and intersubjectivity. Neurophilosophy (which starts with theory that is continuous with common sense) and neurophenomenology (which generates theory in methodically controlled practices) lead to very different philosophical views on these issues.

Philosophers have traditionally aimed to die in life. From Socrates who argued that death was nothing to Spinoza who claimed “to think of death least of all things,” the “life” of the mind was an escape from the death of the body. In a sharp break from this tradition, Martin Heidegger in the groundbreaking phenomenological-ontology of Being and Time (1927), and thereafter, made death—as a person’s anxious ”being-toward-death”— the basic revelatory structure, the very self-understanding of the human person. As such, it is for Heidegger the privileged access to being’s historical revelation of itself to itself. Emmanuel Levinas, in independent and, as this essay shows, deeper phenomenological studies, fundamentally criticizes and rejects Heidegger’s vision. This is because without turning back to an escape into the eternal he discovers in human mortality and suffering a completely different meaning: the moral primacy of caring for the mortality of the other person before my own mortality, up to the point of “dying for” the other person and, even beyond this personal extremity, to the point of caring for the justice of the world “beyond my own death.” These meanings—whose exigency transcends a purely phenomenological science yet remain bound to human sociality—re irreducibly ethical. As such, as imperatives of greater and higher bearing than the call to ontological thinking, they impose the demands of ethics as “first philosophy.”

This article deals with interactivity in French TV programs. Actually, with the apparition of real-TV on our screens TV viewers have experienced a new way of watching television with the possibility to intervene in their favorite programs. How did that happen? Was it predictable? Is Interactivity present in every kind of programs? Th is article focuses on a brief history of TV programs, on the tools TV viewers can use to create their TV and on a panorama of French TV programs in which we can find Interactivity.

What is the problem of givenness in Husserl’s phenomenology? This essay seeks to answer this question by developing the problem in terms of both static and genetic phenomenological analysis. Together, both dimensions of analysis lead to the importance of the question of time and temporality for phenomenology: the problem of givenness is the problem of time. It is suggested that Husserl’s approach to these questions is both rich and subtle enough to meet the objections of those who would argue that his phenomenology is unable to handle problems of being, intersubjectivity, and individuation.

In this essay, I explain how Sartre’s phenomenological ontology forms the ground for his elaboration of an ethics of freedom. I demonstrate that the ethics of absolute freedom is the logical outcome of Sartre’s views concerning the notion of consciousness as intentional. This ethics, despite the fact that it gives “no recipes,” entrusts the human being with full ethical responsibility and allows him to flourish as the creator of the world, of values and of meaning.

In much the same way that psychology mimics the goals and methods of natural science for purposes of studying the inner life of the mind instead of outer life, non-profit advertising mimics the methods of commercial advertising for social goods instead of profits. Using a few public service advertisements, particularly an anti-rape campaign poster, this essay lays out the parallel between psychology and non-profit advertising, and further, it explores how the failure of psychology to overcome the problem of naturalism is at the root of the growth of all forms of advertising and the attempt to manipulate citizen consumers.

I respond to Peter Spader’s critique of my dissent from Scheler’s theory that ‘good’ is invariably a moral value generated as a by-product of realizing non-moral value. I review the development of my dissent in earlier articles, argue that the distinction between moral values (as values of ‘persons’) and, e.g., aesthetic values (as values of ‘objects’) is too facile, that some values are essentially moral, while others become moral through a transactional nexus, that the concept of non-moral good is indispensable, and that moral experience calls for more nuanced phenomenological description than the Schelerian conceptualization seems capable of providing.

This work is part of a wider research project on the contributions that the analysis of the antinomy between social ontology and historicity in Edmund Husserl’s thought can bring to epistemological reflection in the social sciences. In Les sciences de l’homme et la phénoménologie, Merleau-Ponty takes as starting point Husserl’s diagnosis of the critical situation in which both philosophy and the human sciences are submerged since the beginnings of the 20th century. This is the crisis of rationality as basis of every possibility of knowledge, due, among other factors, to the developments of Lebensphilosophie and the dyad historicismsociologism. The urgent situation produced by the breakdown of the basis of reason locks epistemological thought in a difficulty of deciding whether a) to succumb to absolute relativism of historicism, or b) to take refuge in a non-historical rationalism, without paying attention to its critics. In the same way Merleau-Ponty affirms the currency of Husserl’s diagnosis in the France of his time, we reaffirm its actuality for the epistemological reflection on social sciences, in view of the advance of the so-called Post-metaphysical era, which could be seen as a re-edition of a sociologist-historicism. According to Husserl, empirical sciences must be based on eidetical sciences. This is to say, on researches that could discover the essence of the studied object—by means of the Wesensschau—founding regional ontologies. In the case of sociology, empirical research should be supported by a social ontology—which states clearly the essential social categories for all times and places that researchers use without any thoroughness. This ontology should ask itself, for example, about the essence of religion or art. However, how is the Wesensschau possible, if reason is nothing else than a mere historic-contingent product? Social sciences face, still nowadays, the paradox of being forced to base their rigor on the same Lebenswelt that they expect to know. The aim of this article is to present Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of the course of this antinomy in Husserl. Our hypothesis is the following: according to the French phenomenologist, Husserl’s thought on the relation between essences and historicity develops this way. a) The first Husserl, who still thinks as a Cartesian, conceives the sphere of essences as absolutely divorced from the contingency of history. b) The Husserl “of the later years”—as Merleau-Ponty refers to him—, that is, the Husserl from the Cartesian Meditations to the Crisis, faces the hard task of basing the essences on the Lebenswelt, and conceives an intrinsic bond between both spheres.

As for Brentano, also for Husserl and Scheler love has a main ethical role, but with a wider reach, since the ethical meaning that phenomenologists see in love is founded in its ontological meaning. With the purpose of contributing some leads to the ontological sense of love, this paper approaches Scheler’s determination of the essential structure of love. Thereupon, it shows how it is possible to identify those features in Husserl’s reflection on the implications of loving. This will enable the author to show in which sense Husserl and Scheler coincide in the ethical meaning of love.

The goal of this article is to describe and discuss the concepts of Mania according to a phenomenological-structural approach. The mainstream of psychiatry defines mania on the basis of signs and symptoms, most of them merely behaviors. The phenomenological-structural thinking attempts to illuminate the structure which defines the pathology and determines the phenomena. The manifestation of mania will be divided in fundamental phenomenological categories such as Time, Space, and Interpersonal Contact in a dialogue with postulations of classical authors. The possibility of a similar structure for mania and melancholia is suggested in the last part of the article.

This paper attempts to present an introduction to Phenomenology and Mathematics. Phenomenology was created and developed by Edmund Husserl. He left an amazing production concerning one of the questions that haunted him throughout his life: “what is the nature of the objectivity of Mathematics”. The following items are here dealt with: the meaning ground of Husserl’s phenomenological conceptions; the meaning of mathematical idealities; and formalization and categorization as constitutive aspects of the Science of Mathematics.

This paper proposes a reflection upon philosophy’s role in discussing contemporaneity. By questioning if it is the philosopher’s vocation to think our actuality, the author discusses the character and temporality of philosophical discourse itself. She argues, in a provocative manner, that it is only possible to philosophise about today. Recognizing philosophical discourse’s distinctive character as its possibility of understanding the today beyond today’s facts, she refers to an essential temporal dimension of the contemporary, the same that the temporality of philosophical discourse refers to. Concerning philosophical discourse, the author shows that its reference to the essential dimension of today not only is a signature of distinction from a mere historical-anthropological approach, but precisely that it is what determines its very mode of being. This interpretation is founded on the analysis of two distinct philosophical approaches to contemporaneity. First, it establishes a close dialogue with Martin Heidegger’s thinking of his own contemporaneity, making explicit how he thinks his actuality and how he had an insight into what it is [Einblick in das was ist] as a way of revealing the today in its phenomenological sense. !e second illustration, or the counterpoint, is made by an analysis of the lecture of Giorgio Agamben’s “What is the contemporary?” [Che cos’è il contemporaneo?], which portrays the predominant character of contemporary philosophical discourse about contemporaneity. Such a character is based on a conception of temporality that cannot grasp the essential dimension of the today and, as a result, thinking remains enclosed in the perspective of human agency. Heidegger’s approach to contemporaneity remains in the realm of philosophical discourse by grasping the essential temporality of the today. In general, philosophical discourses in our contemporaneity about contemporary issues remain attached to an interpretation of events in time that reinforces the agency of the human. In short, the author considers relevant the contrast between both discourses in order to claim that philosophical discourse should be always an insight into and beyond the today. The awareness of this essential temporality is what defines its philosophical status and most importantly gives philosophy the task of questioning contemporaneity—of truly thinking the world of today.