This essays deals with Heidegger’s concept of “Thing”, as sketched in the 1950 lecture Das Ding.In Being and Time, Heidegger had worked out a concept of “tool”, Zeug, which vanished in later works. The Heideggerian “thing” is undeniably more than a “tool”. The author argues than beings viz. phenomena are actually given to us which oppose the logic of “thinghood” while transcending the logic of “toolhood”: Flemish painting is used as an example of phenomena which overcome the affective reality of being-in-the-world without respecting the mode of appearing proper to things. Another witness is summoned, sacramental experience: a phenomenological description of what is given to see and feel during the Eucharistic liturgy aims at showing that being-in-the-world and “being in the Fourfold” can be put into brackets in such an event, and that it must be the case for such an event to be understood.

The discourse on truth rarely takes into account the claim made by a few minds of being themselves not only in truth, or expressing the truth, but of being also truth itself. We seek first to demonstrate the phenomenological significance of this proposition. We then examine the divergent meanings this claim undertakes in three prominent figures: Jesus, Çankara and Hallâj. At this occasion, an investigation is conducted on the meaning of the copula in the formula: I am the truth, in dogmatic, philosophical and mystical realms.

Augustine is one of the favorite ancient thinkers of philosophical modernity. This statement proves itself to be true especially in the phenomenological field where two main thinkers seem to have developed a specific interest in Augustine: Heidegger and Jean-Louis Chrétien. The question will be asked what characterizes each phenomenological reception of the Bishop of Hippo. Our thesis will be that those receptions both are in the same time interpretations which are built on a very specific process of metaphorization. This process — in its various forms — will be the object of a dissection in order to understand what the Augustinian message undergoes and why it does it in such or such way.

This paper intends to identify the functions of the French particle “comme” (“like” in opposition to “as”) and “comme si” (“as if”) in the work of French contemporary philosopher Jean-Luc Marion, especially in L’idole et la distance (American translation: The Idol and Distance), Dieu sans l’être (American translation: God without Being), Étant donné (American translation: Being given) and De surcroît (American translation: In excess). The author of this paper focuses on the relation between phenomenology and theology in order to demonstrate its complexity by an analysis of linguistic phenomenology. At the end of this analysis, the “saturated phenomenon”, as proposed by Jean-Luc Marion, becomes an important notion to understand the boundaries of both disciplines, phenomenology and theology.

At the beginning of his philosophical career (between 1918 and 1921), the young Heidegger analyzed various texts belonging to the field of the religious tradition: the Pauline Epistles, Augustinian writings and texts of the medieval mystics. Through these analyses, Heidegger formalized certain phenomena that we can find, a few years later, in Being and Time, illustrating the “warm” line of the existential analytic, the pathetic level of the ontology of Dasein: anxiety, death, consciousness, and guilt. My paper focuses on this process of ontologization of phenomena belonging to religious life, namely on the awaiting of Parousia which is used to elaborate the futural structure of being towards death. I finally argue that the keyword for the understanding of the phenomenological transfer from the religious life to the ontology of Dasein is the methodological idea of “formal indication”, whose meaning and role must be clarified.

The religious terminologies in Levinas’ philosophy are not used in frivolous way but transformed into his own philosophical notions. His concept of “paganism” is the one of the example of these reformulations. “Being pagan” is firstly a key concept for his critique of National Socialism in 1930’s, secondly for his phenomenological argument on the fundamental mode of being of human existence. In a philosophically subtle relationship with his master Heidegger, what we call “the mode of being pagan” functions as an important moment in Levinas’ thought before Otherwise than Being. In this paper, the seemingly peculiar notion of paganism and its role will be clarified in relation to a general character of his philosophy, from theological, historical and phenomenological point of view.

In this article, I consider the gesture confronted with its own impossibility, in situations that open the gesture to a dimension of transcendence. Focusing first on the event of beauty, as it is discussed by Jean‑Louis Chrétien, and on the encountering of the face, as it is considered by Emmanuel Lévinas, this paper envisions a “below” and a “beyond” of the gesture, in exceptional situations where the gesture is faced with an excess, acquiring a dimension of a theopathy. Subsequently, I emphasize that the transcendence that takes gesture beyond itself can inhabit and nourish the daily gestures, and this can be an occasion of pain and difficulties. In this perspective, Simone Weil shows how the repeated gestures of manual labour can become the mirror of supernatural beauty.

In this article, I aim to analyse the way in which Jan Patočka explores the being of the dead in his text “Phenomenology of life after death.” I wish to show that this seminal text offers the solution to three main difficulties regarding the being of the dead: those difficulties concern their form of being, their possibility to transform themselves and their ability to act. Following this analysis, I propose a three‑folded thesis: firstly, the being of the dead can be grasped not only through privation but also through more positive forms; secondly, the dead persons can continue to transform themselves when being construed by the living; and thirdly, their action can be prolonged even though they cannot act.

This paper examines the influence that Husserl’s drive/instinct theory has on Merleau‑Ponty’s late philosophy. Husserl’s interest in the passive realm of life develops into a study of a more profound level which even precedes the emergence of subjectivity. We analyze how it leads Merleau‑Ponty, in his philosophy of flesh, to furnish an ontological explanation regarding the problem of the relationship with others. In this regard, we investigate firstly Husserl’s theory of originary affection and its limits, before scrutinizing the notion of empathy; thereby we show how Merleau‑Ponty develops the Husserlian intentional relation into a carnal relation based on the idea that others and I belong to the same world. This will reveal that the relationship with the others always lies in the most profound level of our experience, because we share the ontological affinity, namely, the flesh.

In phenomenology, Leiblichkeit articulates the idea of subjectivity and the relationship to the world;Leib attests the phenomenological experience of subjects otherwise captured by the term Leiber. Husserl and Merleau‑Ponty have sought to understand this relationship to the world and to characterize this phenomenological experience. Thus, they thematized a form of relationship to the world which is not only intentional but also, and each in his own way, passive and based on image (bildlich). On his part, Marc Richir sought to overcome this idea by bringing an “active, non‑specular mimesis from within” into play. Proposing an examination of these approaches, I defend the idea that in order to be able to think of the openness to the world—which is made possible by corporeality—it is of great necessity here to articulate the dimension ofsense.

In this essay, Domenico Jervolino summarizes twenty years of Ricoeur’s reading of Patočka’s work, up to the Neapolitan conference of 1997. Nowhere is Ricoeur closer to Patočka’s a-subjective phenomenology. Both thinkers belong, together with authors like Merleau-Ponty and Levinas, to a third phase of the phenomenological movement, marked by the search for a new approach to the relation between human beings and world, beyond Husserl and Heidegger. In the search for this approach, Patočka strongly underlines the relation between body, temporality and sociality. Central to this new encounter of Patočka and Ricoeur is the discovery of an idea of inter-human community based on a a-subjective conception of existence.

We reproduce here the text of a lecture held by Paul Ricoeur at Naples in 1997. Ricoeur sees in Patočka’s work an elliptical movement with two foci: the phenomenology of the natural world and the question of the meaning of history. Ricoeur evidences the new features of Patočka’s a-subjective phenomenology compared to Husserl’s transcendental idealism and Heidegger’s existential analytics. The transition from the phenomenology of the natural world to the problematic of history suggests in any case a substantial dialectical thread that starts from the phenomenology of the movement of life, weaves through the problematic and tragic character of history and ends in the idea of the solidarity of the shaken.

This article explores some indications in the texts of Patočka that point towards a concept of language which no longer takes it to be a derived layer of an original perceptive basis: he disassociates intuition from origin, and establishes a co-origin of language and perception. It is this co-origin whose meaning and limits this article seeks to determine.

In this paper I would like to reconstruct Patočka’s effort to give a faithful account of the phenomena, without betraying these phenomena with an objectivistic theory of perception. Only by remaining close to the things themselves will we be able to understand them as an appeal, as a call, while understanding ourselves as a response to this call. On the basis of this “ontological rehabilitation of the sensible”, which reveals Patočka’s affinity with Merleau-Ponty as much as his departure from Husserl, I will criticize the idealism of Husserlian phenomenology and reconsider the a priori of correlation in a different fashion. World and subject will then find a different articulation, grounded in the ontological couple of movement and feeling. The analysis will consist of three parts: in the first part I will introduce the problematic of the opposition between phenomenological and physical space; the second part will deal with the notion of movement; the third part will concentrate on Patočka’s new account of subjectivity, the a-subjective cogito, arising precisely from the fundamental coupling of κίνησις and πάθος. Embodiment, qua original phenomenon, will be constantly present in the background of this analysis.

“The Continuous War: note on the sense of the world and the thought of death” is a free commentary on the last chapter of Heretical Essays, “Wars of the Twentieth Century”. It takes as a guiding thread a reflection on the reasons for which, as Patočka suggests, “even in peace, war continues”. It finds these reasons both in the way in which we are bound to the fear of death, and in the sense of the world determined by that bind. It poses the question as to the extent to whichthis calls for another meaning of the world.

Patočka has never developed the political and historical concept of dissidence. But trying to sketch its phenomenological foundation in the writings of the Czech philosopher, who experienced human liberty as an act of dissidence, could be an original way in qualifying his alternative idea of the modern subjectivity in phenomenology: between finitude and autonomy. The first part of the article presents the radical criticism aimed by Patočka to the transcendental subjectivism of Husserl, and thinks the requirement of a split between autofoundation and autonomy. Then, it is analysed the articulation between the movement of life and the movement of existence, in which lies the very idea of dissidence. In a third and final part, one shows to what extent the dissident subjectivity fully reveals itself in the political life.

This paper is dedicated to the analysis of some important points of Patočka’s Heretical Essays on the Philosophy of History in order to question his major thesis of the common origin of philosophy, politics and history shared by Hannah Arendt and based on Husserl’s and Heidegger’s phenomenological conception of the Greek beginning. It tries to show the complexity of Patočka’s conception of Europe, which on one side can be understood as falling into Eurocentrism, but on the other side brings to light the dark face of modern European nihilism and planetary domination and tries to find a remedy for it by appealing to a philosophical conversion leading to the recognition of the diversity of human culture.

The essay “On the Two Conceptions of the Meaning of Philosophy”, published in 1936, links up with other early writings such as “Remarks on the Wordly and Other-Wordly Stance of Philosophy” (1934) reflecting Patočka’s initial approach to the question of philosophers’ moral commitment. He distinguishes here an “autocentric” (Aristotle, Descartes, Hegel) and a “hetero-” or “sociocentric” (Plato, Enlightenment philosophers, Comte, Nietzsche) conception of the meaning of philosophy, characterizes its possible influence on human life as either “apperceptive” or “magical” and concludes on a vision of “autonomous life” as “the divinity struggling with its intrinsic peril” which heralds later writings on freedom and sacrifice.

Rolf KÜHN, Innere Gewißheit und lebendiges Selbst. Grundzüge der Lebens-phänomenologie (Gabrielle Dufour-Kowalska); John Wrae STANLEY, Die gebrochene Tradition. Zur Genese der philosophischen Hermeneutik Hans-Georg Gadamers (Radegundis Stolze); Gisbert HOFFMANN, Heideggers Phänomenologie. Bewusstsein — Reflexion — Selbst (Ich) und Zeit im Früh werk (Antonio Cimino); Dean KOMEL (Hg.), Kunst und Sein. Beiträge zur Phänomenologischen Ästhetik und Aletheiologie (Mãdãlina Diaconu)

In his conference “The Age of the World Picture” (1938), Heidegger displays a strong criticism of the concept of image (Bild). More precisely, the German philosopher rejects any consideration of the image, as he correlates the image with the process of subjective representation (Vorstellung). At first glance, that position does not seem to change in his posthumous works written from 1930 to 1940, where Heidegger develops his Ereignis-thinking. However, a more thorough study of the writings (from the Beiträge zur Philosophie to Das Ereignis and the Black Notebooks) allows us to reconsider the scope of that common idea. In this paper, I analyze the project of a thinking without images (bildloses Denken) and of imagination (Phantasie) elaborated throughout the private writings. My aim is to re-examine the extent of Heidegger’s refusal of images, in order to prove that, in the end, his essay of a thinking without images cannot escape their ontological weight.