This book attempts to open up a path towards a phenomenological theory of values. By drawing on everyday experience, and dissociating the notion of value from that of tradition, it shows how emotional sensibility can be integrated to practical reason. This project was prompted by the persuasion that the fragility of democracy, and the current public irrelevance of the ideal principles which support it, largely depend on the inability of modern philosophy to overcome the well-entrenched skepticism about the power of (...) practical reason. The book begins with a phenomenology of cynical consciousness, continues with a survey of still influential theories of value rooted in 20th century philosophy, and finally offers an outline of a bottom-up axiology that revives the anti-skeptical legacy of phenomenology, without ignoring the standards set by contemporary metaethics. (shrink)

Da un colloquio tra una fenomenologa di chiara fama e un pedagogista emergono iconnotati dell’atteggiamento fenomenologico, inteso come disposizione intellettuale e morale capace di fondare una “conoscenza personale” nel lavoro di cura. Questa attitudine della mente e del cuore può dar forma al “modo di essere” peculiare di chi, per professione e per vocazione, si prende quotidianamente cura delle persone e della loro esistenza.From this conversation between a well-known phenomenologist and a pedagogist thephenomenological attitude arises as both intellectual and existential (...) disposition, wich is the basis of a “personal knowledge” in care professions. This cognitive and emotional attitude can mould the particular “way of being” which characterizes those professionals who, day by day, take care of people and their existence. (shrink)

Each person is perceived by others and by herself as an individual in a very strong sense, namely as a unique individual. Moreover, this supposed uniqueness is commonly thought of as linked with another character that we tend to attribute to persons (as opposed to stones or chairs and even non-human animals): a kind of depth, hidden to sensory perception, yet in some measure accessible to other means of knowledge. I propose a theory of strong or essential individuality. This theory (...) is introduced by way of a critical discussion of Van Inwagen’s and Baker’s ontologies of persons. Composition Theory and Constitution Theory are shown to be complementary, in their opposite strong and weak points. I argue that both theories have unsatisfactory consequences concerning personal identity, a problem which the proposed theory seems to solve more faithfully both to folk intuitions and the phenomenology of personal life. (shrink)

Se lleva a cabo un intento de fundación fenomenológica de una psicología de la persona tomando como base relevantes escritos de Husserl, Scheler, Stein y Von Hildebrand, entre otros. Se discute la contribución original hecha por estos fenomenólogos y se introduce así al lector en una rica fenomenología de la vida emocional, su estructura, el papel que juega en la constitución del ethos de la persona. La fenomenología en esta versión «realista» menos conocida ofrece un poder de análisis no soñado (...) ni siquiera por la filosofía analítica de la mente y de las emociones, al menos en el momento presente. Se bosqueja una introducción del núcleo de la teoría fenomenológica de la identidad personal y se propone una revisión de conjunto de ideas tópicas sobre la fenomenología husserliana y no-husserliana. (shrink)

Lynne Baker’s Constitution Theory seems to be the farthest-reaching and yet the most subtly elaborated antireductive metaphysics available today. Its original theoretical contribution is a nonmereological theory of material constitution, which yet has a place for classical and Lewisian mereology. Constitution Theory hence apparently complies with modern natural science, and yet rescues the concrete everyday world, and ourselvesin it, from ontological vanity or nothingness, and does it by avoiding dualism. Why, then, does it meet so many opponents—or rather, why are (...) its many opponents so stubbornly resisting the very idea of constitution, in Baker’s form? One of the most resisted claims is. Is unity without identity—the feature distinguishing the relation between constituting and constituted things—the only nondualist way to oppose reductionism? What would be the price to pay for unity with identity—without reduction? What I call the Unitarian Tradition, going back to Plato, keeps working out the original Platonic way of constructing acomplex object as a Unity comprising a Collection, as opposed to the Aristotelian suggestion of opposing Collections and Substances. For once you have split things apart ontologically, unifying them again may prove a very hard task. (shrink)

Selon une de ses nombreuses acceptions, “philosophie” signifie traduction d’une expérience de réalité en une expérience de sens. C’est là la démarche distinctive de la phénoménologie. Les dix chapitres qui composent ce livre la précisent d’abord à l’aide d’une mise en question de la philosophie contemporaine de l’esprit et de ses tentations naturalistes, pour ensuite les appliquer aux domaines de l’éthique, de l’esthétique, des fondements de la psychologie et de la psychopathologie. L’ascèse de la pensée qui remonte aux idées et (...) aux valeurs constitutives de chaque domaine d’expérience diffère de la tendance à s’interroger sur les causes des faits, tout comme l’esprit platonicien de la philosophie diffère de son esprit aristotélicien. Ces études proposent autant une phénoménologie sur un mode platonicien que des exercices de philosophie dans cet esprit platonicien. (shrink)

Il pensiero pratico dominante nel Novecento europeo fornisce risposte negative alla questione se sia possibile una fondazione razionale del pensiero pratico, configurando una posizione di scetticismo assiologico e morale ancora oggi maggioritaria. Ma il secolo xx, se da un lato ha rappresentato la bancarotta della ragione pratica, dall'altro ne ha prodotto una vera e propria incarnazione, nelle istituzioni e organizzazioni internazionali, nelle costituzioni rigide degli Stati europei del dopoguerra, nella Dichiarazione Universale dei diritti dell'essere umano del 1948 ecc. Come puň (...) la filosofia pratica portarsi all'altezza della ragione pratica incarnata, invece di minacciarla dall'interno con le sue neo-sofistiche, attraverso relativismi, soggettivismi, nichilismi, politeismi assiologici e simili? (shrink)

Il pensiero pratico dominante nel Novecento europeo fornisce risposte negative alla questione se sia possibile una fondazione razionale del pensiero pratico, configurando una posizione di scetticismo assiologico e morale ancora oggi maggioritaria. Ma il secolo XX, se da un lato ha rappresentato la bancarotta della ragione pratica, dall’altro ne ha prodotto una vera e propria incarnazione, nelle istituzioni e organizzazioni internazionali, nelle costituzioni rigide degli Stati europei del dopoguerra, nella Dichiarazione universaledei diritti dell’essere umano del 1948 ecc. Come può la (...) filosofia pratica portarsi all’altezza della ragione pratica incarnata, invece di minacciarla dall’interno con le sue neo-sofistiche, attraverso relativismi, soggettivismi, nichilismi, politeismi assiologici e simili?Axiologic and moral scepticism has nourishedmainstream European practical philosophy during the XXth century, a time of bankruptcy of practical reason on the Continent. Yet the XXthcentury has also produced a kind of embodiment of practical reason, within the international organizations and institutions, as well as by means of the rigid post-war constitutions of the European States, the Declaration of the Human Rights in 1948 etc. How can practical philosophy grow up to the standards of embodied practical reason, instead of challenging it from a neo-sophistic point of view, through relativism, value polytheism and the like? (shrink)

John Searle reflections on how to derive “Ought” from an “Is’” present a general theory of the sources of normativity within human civilizations. This chapter explores an alternative grounding of normativity on “laws of essence”, a grounding that proceeds by addressing the crucial problem of how to locate essences in a world of facts. To that end, classical phenomenology is shown to be an ontology of concreteness, but this, far from removing it from the dimension of ideals and norms—even practical, (...) ethical, and political ones—instead makes it the philosophy of ideals and relative “oughts” par excellence. (shrink)

This paper compares two basic approaches to “ontology”. One originated within the analytic tradition, and it encompasses two diverging streams, philosophy of language and (contemporary) philosophy of mind which lead to “reduced ontology” and “neo-Aristotelian ontology”, respectively. The other approach is “phenomenological ontology” (more precisely, the Husserlian, not the Heideggerian version).Ontology as a theory of reference (“reduced” ontology, or ontology dependent on semantics) is presented and justified on the basis of some classical thesis of traditional philosophy of language (from Frege (...) to Quine). “Reduced ontology” is shown to be identifiable with one level of the traditional, Aristotelian ontology, which corresponds to one ofthe four “senses of Being” listed in Aristotle’s Metaphysics: “being” as “being true”. This identification is justified on the basis of Brentano’s “rules for translation” of the Aristotelian table of judgements in terms of (positive and negative) existential judgments such as are easily translatable into sentences of first order predicate logic.The second part of the paper is concerned with “neo-Aristotelian ontology”, i.e. with naturalism and physicalism as the main ontological options underlying most of the contemporary discussion in philosophy of mind. The qualification of such options as “neo-Aristotelian” is justified; the relationships between “neo-Aristotelian” and “reduced” ontology are discussed. The third part presents the basic claim of “phenomenological ontology”: the claim that a logical theory of existence and being does capture a sense of “existing” and “being” which, even if not itself the basic one, is grounded in the basic one. An attempt is done at further clarifying this “more basic” sense of “being”. An argument making use of this supposedly “more basic” sense is advanced in favour of “phenomenological ontology”. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe main question addressed in this paper is whether conflict is constitutive of the nature of value commitment, and hence necessarily implied by value pluralism. If this is the case, no resolution of value disagreements, whether on the global level or within modern multicultural societies, is possible via practical reasons, and the only solutions to inner or outer conflicts will be “political”, in the sense of a Realpolitik. Positive and negative answers to the main question are shown to express two (...) intellectual and moral attitudes opposing each other as Gorgias and Socrates, or Rhetoric and Philosophy did in the Ancient World. In post-Nietzschean Modernity, however, most philosophers seem to take sides with Gorgias, against Socrates, as is shown on the basis of Ronald Dworkin’s solitary campaign against the many faces of value scepticism. Drawing on phenomenological axiology, this paper takes sides with Socrates by reconciling value pluralism and universalism. (shrink)

Volume XVI Phenomenology of Emotions, Systematical and Historical Perspectives Aim and Scope: The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy provides an annual international forum for phenomenological research in the spirit of Husserl's groundbreaking work and the extension of this work by such figures as Scheler, Heidegger, Sartre, Levinas, Merleau-Ponty and Gadamer. Contributors: Esteban Marín Ávila, Thiemo Breyer, Jakub Čapek, Mariano Crespo, Roberta De Monticelli, John J. Drummond, Søren Engelsen, Maria Gyemant, Mirja Hartimo, Elisa Magrì, Ronny Miron, Anthony (...) J. Steinbock, Panos Theodorou, Íngrid Vendrell Ferran, Antonio Zirión Quijano, and Nate Zuckerman. Submissions: Manuscripts, prepared for blind review, should be submitted to the Editors electronically via e-mail attachments. (shrink)

In diesem Sammelband werden Aufsätze von renommierten Husserl-Forschern und Nachwuchswissenschaftlern zu systematischen Fragen und Problemen von Husserls Phänomenologie versammelt. Die Texte basieren teilweise auf Vorträgen der Tagung „Die Aktualität Husserls", die 2009 an der LMU München stattgefunden hat. In drei thematischen Blöcken, die sich schwerpunktmäßig auf Probleme der Ontologie, Sprachphilosophie/ Philosophie des Geistes und Handlungstheorie/Ethik konzentrieren, wird die systematische Breite und Komplexität von Husserls Denken deutlich, das sich nahezu nahtlos auf aktuelle Fragestellungen beziehen lässt - wenngleich es sich diesen nicht (...) immer anpasst und in kritischer Distanz insbesondere zur Naturalisierbarkeit des Geistes bleibt. Mit Beiträgen von Emanuele Caminada, Christian Beyer, Christopher Erhard, Sophie Loidolt, Verena Mayer, Uwe Meixner, Roberta De Monticelli, Henning Peucker, Sonja Rinofner-Kreidl, Rochus Sowa und Thomas Vongehr. (shrink)