In order to develop a hermeneutic-phenomenological analysis of testimony, this essay will first argue that testimony is “said in many ways” without being homonymous and that contemporary epistemological approaches to testimony are not capable of accounting for all paradigmatic forms of testimony. Second, it is argued, following and extending the work of Paul Ricoeur, that by emphasizing the sense of engagement or Bezogenheit as a basic characteristic of testimony, we may find another approach to testimony that offers a phenomenological alternative to the observational model of witnessing and the accompanying conception of testimony as report. Third, this approach is further developed and analyzed in terms of the four elements of testimony, namely, subject matter, witness, act of testifying, and addressee.

In this paper, I argue that Husserl offers an important, although almost completely neglected so far, contribution to the reductionist/antireductionist debate about testimony. Through a phenomenological analysis, Husserl shows that testimony works through the constitution of an intentional intersubjective bond between the speaker and the hearer. In this paper I focus on the Logical Investigations, a 1914 manuscript now published as text 2 in Husserliana 20.2, and a 1931 manuscript now published as Appendix 12 in Husserliana 15. I argue that, in those texts, Husserl highlights three essential phenomenological features of testimony: a) testimony is personal, meaning that it only takes place among persons, b) testimony is social, meaning that it requires the joint effort of multiple cognitive agents, c) testimony is community-building, meaning that it generates a long-lasting social bond among the parts involved.

This paper explores the contemporary phenomenological and psychoanalytical analyses of testimonies regarding traumatic historical events, with special attention to how such testimonies pose new challenges for the historiography of historical events in which witnesses participated. By exploring discussions on the memory of the Holocaust as well as the Spanish Civil War and Francoist repression, this paper addresses the extent to which the tensions and temporalities underlying the process of bearing witness to and giving testimony about traumatic historical events might reshape how their history is being told, written, and remembered.

Phenomenological literary criticism has long taken the one-on-one exchange with an other as the model for thinking about the reader-to-text relationship. However, new novels portraying genocides and civil wars are more likely to position readers as witnesses. Drawing on Jean-Luc Marion’s description of the subject as witness as well as works by Kelly Oliver and Jacques Derrida, this article offers a phenomenological description of the reader as witness. As witness, the reader is situated both by the literary text and also by his or her particular embodied and intersubjective relations to the world. Constituted and no longer constituting, the reader/subject as witness finds herself a site in which other’s decisions have already been made, and her responsibility arises from the decisions she makes possible for others in the future.

I compare Plato’s and Husserl’s accounts of (i) the non-original appearance (termed phantasma in Plato and phantasm in Husserl) and (ii) the original with a focus on their methodologies for distinguishing between them and the phenomenological—i.e., the answer to the question of the what and how of their appearance—criteria that drive their respective methodologies. I argue that Plato’s dialectical method is phenomenologically superior to Husserl’s reflective method in the case of phantasmata that function as apparitions (the false phantasma/phantasm that is not recognized as such). Plato’s method has the capacity to discern the apparition on the basis of criteria that appeal solely to its appearance, whereas Husserl’s method presupposes a non-apparent primitive distinction between the original qua primal impression and the phantasm as its reproductive modification. On the basis of Plato’s methodological superiority in this regard, I sketch a reformulation of the Husserlian approach to appearances guided by the original interrogative context of Plato’s dialectical account of the distinction between true and false appearances, eikones and phantasmata.

This article discusses the role of Gulag literature in connection to testimony, literature and historical documentation. Drawing on the thoughts of Jacques Derrida and Hannah Arendt, the article examines the difficulty of witnesses being believed in the absence of evidence. In particular, the article focuses on the vulnerability of the Gulag authors, due to the ongoing Soviet repression at the time of their writing. It examines the interplay between the repression and the literature that exposed it. The article contends that the fictionalization of Gulag literature enabled the authors to go further in challenging Soviet repression. Focusing on the fictional accounts written by Varlam Shalamov and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, it argues that the fictionalized Gulag literature makes the experience of the camp universe possible to imagine for those outside, allowing readers to believe in an experience that otherwise seems incredible.

The paper is divided into two parts. In the first one, I set forth a hypothesis to explain the failure of Husserl’s project presented in the Philosophie der Arithmetik based on the principle that the entire mathematical science is grounded in the concept of cardinal number. It is argued that Husserl’s analysis of the nature of the symbols used in the decadal system forces the rejection of this principle. In the second part, I take into account Husserl’s explanation of why, albeit independent of natural numbers, the system is nonetheless correct. It is shown that its justification involves, on the one hand, a new conception of symbols and symbolic thinking, and on the other, the recognition of the question of “the formal” and formalization as pivotal to understand “the mathematical” overall.

The peculiar legacy of Husserl’s mereology, chiefly studied by analytic philosophers interested in ontology, has led to a partial understanding of the III. LU, which is too often reduced to a chapter of “formal ontology”. Yet, the power of this Investigation goes far beyond: it enabled Husserl to deal, in the framework of a unified theory, with a vast range of particular problems. The paper focuses on one of these issues, namely abstraction, so as to expose how Husserl instrumentalizes his formal tools in order to tackle material issues. The existence of an up and down pattern is uncovered: Husserl first reinterprets the psychological problem of abstraction in ontological terms (“bottom-up”), before coming back to the original problem with new insights (“top-down”). The second, correlative aim of the paper is to emphasize the key role played by Friedrich Schumann, a forgotten yet crucial character for Husserl’s conception of abstraction.

Płotka and Eldridge’s book is an important addition to the literature on phenomenology and phenomenological history, showing that phenomenology had a lively efflorescence in Eastern Europe during its first four decades. Historians have recently shown phenomenology’s intellectual, cultural, and social importance in postwar Eastern Europe, but this volume demonstrates that phenomenology’s independent East European trajectory began long before World War II—indeed from the earliest years of the movement. The review essay also raises the question of phenomenology’s social and political influence beyond academic circles.

In Max Scheler’s non-formal ethics of value, “good” is a value but by no means a “non-moral value”; rather, it is a second-order “moral value,” always appearing in the realization of first-order non-moral values. According to the relevant notion of the a priori of phenomenology, whilst all the non-moral values are given in “value cognition,” the moral value of good is self-given in “moral cognition”. The reflections and answers offered by Scheler’s non-formal ethics of value on “What is good?” constitute the foundation of a phenomenological “meta-ethics”.

This survey seeks to define the present situation and climate for translating Heidegger into English after the disastrous translation (1999) of the Beiträge, Heidegger’s second magnum opus after Sein und Zeit. The 12 translations that have appeared since then tend to handle Heidegger’s neologisms in less ludicrous ways and continue to find ways to bend the highly restrictive rules imposed on translations by Heidegger’s literary executor. There are still errors of omission and commission in the German originals that carry over into the translations. A few of the English translators add to the errors of omission and commission but most tend to be competent and conscientious, producing excellent results. Yet even the best translators slack off in their production of the permitted glossaries, which are indispensable for demarcating Heidegger’s terminology in the time period involved and provide the reader a starting basis for an index, which is prohibited.

I have spent 20 years preparing for the translation of Heidegger’s Being and Time. In these 20 years, I spent 10 years in Germany writing the master and doctoral thesis on Heidegger in order to understand Heidegger’s thoughts properly. Later on I spent other 10 years teaching Heidegger’s philosophy at university while translating Being and Time into Korean. At that time, there were already 4 different translations of Being and Time in Korean. But because these translations were based on Japanese translations, many concepts and terms were ungraspable by ordinary Korean people. Impressed with Heidegger’s use of the ordinary words as important philosophical concepts, I also did my best to translate Being and Time using ordinary Korean words.

The article tells the detailed story of the first translation of Sein und Zeit in English, i.e. the way a Scottish pastor and an American scholar joined their efforts to find a suitable path of breaking the “myth of untranslatability” which surrounded at the time Sein und Zeit. The story also covers their method of translation, the obstacles they encountered, while covering in depth the different types of “linguistic oddities” of the Heideggerian idiom which often puzzles the translators: new or compound words, etymologies, grouping words in “constellations” which stem from the same root.