Charles E. SCOTT, Susan M. SCHOENBOHM, Daniela VALLEGA-NEU, Alejandro VALLEGA (eds.), Companion to Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy, IndianaUniversity Press, Bloomington & Indianapolis, 2001 (Cristina Ionescu); Gernot BÖHME, Aisthetik. Vorlesungen über Ästhetik als allgemeine Wahrnehmungslehre, Wilhelm Fink Verlag, München, 2001 (Mădălina Diaconu); Dean KOMEL, Osnutja k Filozofski in Kulturni Hermenevtiki [Outlines to Philosophical and Cultural Hermeneutics], Nova revija, Ljubljana, 2001 (Janko Lozar); Marc RICHIR, L’institution de l’idéalité. Des schématismes phénoménologiques, Association pour la promotion de la Phénoménologie, Paris, 2002 (Victor Popescu); Fred EVANS & Leonard LAWLOR (eds.), Chiasms. Merleau-Ponty's Notion of Flesh, State University of New York Press, 2000 (Viorel Niţă); Udo TIETZ, Ontologie und Dialektik. Heidegger und Adorno über das Sein, das Nichtidentische, die Synthesis und die Kopula, Passagen Verlag, Wien, 2003 (Ştefan Nicolae); Etienne FERON, Phénoménologie de la mort. Sur les traces de Levinas, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, Boston, London, 1999 (Cristian Ciocan)

In attempting to address the heideggerian Seinsfrage, by way of situating it between the platonic conception of ̉όν in the Sophist and of χώρα in the Timaeus, this paper investigates the ontological possibilities that are opened up in terms of rethinking space. Asserting the intrinsic connection between the question of being and that of space, we argue that the maturation of ontology as phenomenology would not unfold in its furthermost potential unless the being of space gets clarified. This state of affairs confronts us with the exacting ontological task to found a theory of space that contributes to an explication of the question of being beyond its associated temporocentric determinations. Consequently, our line of inquiry endeavors herein to constitute a prologmenon to the elucidation of the question of the being of space as “ontokhorology.”

The aim of this paper is to show how the concept of “possible world”, that Husserl inherits from his study of logics, is capital for the understanding of his phenomenology. This concept is a fine tool that provides him a possibility to articulate the question of the physical and the cultural dimensions of some objects. A cultural object as a book or a painting has in fact two dimensions: a “material” one and a “spiritual” one. The author examines which are the relationships between those two dimensions. This question leads him to an interrogation on the genesis of the ideality of the cultural world. Is there not a contradiction between the ideality of the meaning and his historical genesis? In order to provide an answer to this question, the author suggests that one may use the notion of a “linked ideality”, i.e. ideal but linked up to the earth.

A phenomenological reading of Pierre Maine de Brian (1766-1824) offers a valuable understanding of one's own body in relation to the ego's apperceptive effort. As an organic mass, the body follows the double movement of this effort, manifested by an inner and an outer resistance. This movement allows the „constitution” of the world as correlative to the deployment of a force, identified with the apperception of the ego itself. This practical radicalization of the cogito can be viewed as the first outstanding achievement of phenomenology itself, even prior to its historical foundation by Husserl.

According to Brentano, logic, ethics and aesthetics are practical normative sciences, and they correspond to the three classes of psychic phenomena. But if a judgment or a love may be correct or incorrect, it seems more difficult to speak of a correct representation as this class of phenomena ignores a polarity such as right / wrong or good / bad. Brentano speaks nevertheless from the aesthetical “value” of representations. Aesthetics could in this way be considered as part of a general theory of value; but compared to ethics the specificity of this science tends to vanish. Another way to consider the question is to remember that the distinction among the three classes of psychic phenomena is only formal. It means that one has to question more precisely the very nature of representation and especially its relation to feeling.

In his interpretations of Aristotle (1921-27), Heidegger argues that the ontological model of poiēsis (Herstellung, production, understood as bringing something into being by way of craftsmanship or art) played an essential part in the development of all major concepts of Greek metaphysics. The being of man and nature were understood in the light of the being of the produced things (erga), which Heidegger calls Vorhandensein (ousia). We will show here how Heidegger interprets three central words of Aristotle’s philosophy: technē (the knowledge which guides all steps of production), eidos (the aspect of the thing to be produced) and logos (the uncovering and bringing-together of all the characters which constitute the aspect).

It is well known that Heidegger described his Nietzsche lecture courses as confrontations with National Socialism. Traditionally, this sense of resistance was seen firstly in the fact that Heidegger read Nietzsche at the level of metaphysics and explicitly rejected those ideological appropriations which attempted to reduce Nietzsche’s philosophy to the level of biologism or mere Weltanschauung. This essay argues that the way in which Heidegger framed his interpretation of will to power in his first and second Nietzsche lecture courses can be seen to contain a more explicit critique of the contemporaneous “official” Nietzschebild than has customarily been said.

The author argues that in Sein und Zeit Heidegger speaks about knowledge only in negative terms (as Ent-weltlichung) and thus he is missing the possibility of a synthesis between our being-in-the-world and our knowledge of objects. Consequently, the discussion of all instruments, ready-to-hand for knowing something, does not take place. All measuring instruments represent exactly the link between the pragmatic and the theoretical level of human existence. The essay comes to the conclusion, that the lack of any positive description concerning the ontological possibility of the synthesis between existential and categorical analyssis is the reason for the gap between Heidegger’s philosophy and the world of quantifying sciences.

The three books recently published by C. Romano reconsider the phenomenological senses of world and time starting from the event as original phenomena. This review-article explores the new method that he propose, called “evenimential hermeneutics”, as applied to the relation to ourselves, to the world and to the general sense of being. These analyses lean upon an original way of thinking time, as born in each “sudden” moment. The paper also draws comparisons with Heidegger, Husserl and Lévinas, while proposing a critical point of view on Romano’s thesis, concerning the relationship between the novelty of the event and the past, and its relation with desire and otherness.

Bringing back reflection to the mobility of the existence, a systematic re-appropriation of the Aristotelian concept of movement underlines the Heideggerian re-foundation of philosophy. Hence deconstructed and elaborated through “mobility”, the notion of movement constitutes the foundation stone that allows to play Aristotle against Aristotle and to contribute, via his hermeneutical reinvestment, to the “destruction” of the substantialist tradition.

François RAFFOUL, A chaque fois mien. Heidegger et la question du sujet (Servanne Jollivet); Jean GRONDIN, Le tournant herméneutique de la phenomenologie (Paul Marinescu); Alexander SCHNELL, La genèse de l'apparaître (Denisa Butnaru); James R. MENSCH, Ethics and Selfhood. Alterity and the Phenomenology of Obligation (Horaţiu Crişan)

The problem of accounting for the cognitively relevant relation between experience and thought is among the defining problems of modern philosophy. I suggest that addressing this problem provides an important motive for the “genealogy of logic” that Husserl outlines in his posthumously published Experience and Judgment. Arguing that the notions of “interest” and “pregivenness” are crucial to this approach, I seek to assess it through a detailed analysis of the use to which these notions are put in its most decisive part, the account of the origin of “simple predication”. I conclude that there is reason to think that the notions cannot play the roles that Husserl assigns to them, and hence that his approach fails.

My contribution tries to outline some of the motives that lead Husserl to genetic phenomenology. The starting point are the analyses he wrote to include in Ideas I and Ideas II, which are dedicated to the founding of human sciences during the period 1910–1916. Here we find an intertwinement of investigations concerned with an understanding of others (on lowest and higher levels) and their contribution to the constitution of objectivity, and new research of the genesis of the way in which individual experience shapes our access to the world. My main interest is to point out systematic connections between these two directions of research which are general characteristics of genetic phenomenology.

Affection in perception does not exhaust itself in a single subjective act of turning-towards (Zuwendung) an object. Husserl’s analyses of the propagation of affection in perception (in Hua XI), which have not been systematically or thoroughly thematized up until now, offer a much more complex picture of affection, which this article brings to the fore. The affective power distributes itself irregularly in perception. The differentiation of perceptual field into foreground and background (first section) prepares the field for the investigation of the distribution of affections (second section). This investigation leads from lower to higher levels of constitution, from simple to complex relations, and from sensations of the lived body to egological factors. In the third section, three directions of propagation of affection and, collectively, six modes of affective awakening are thoroughly analyzed. I end with a discussion of a recent critique of Husserl’s “abstract” approach to affection, which seeks to offer an insight into how a complete theory of affection would look like.