Claude Romano seeks to change all that, to describe precisely what sort of phenomenon an event is and to establish how it can be grasped via a phenomenology.

What is the event? How the phenomenology of event is possible if the "event" is not the phenomenon in the classical meaning of this word? French philosopher Claude Romano discusses these questions with his Russian colleague Ruslan Loshakov. The interlocutors consider the concept of event in different contexts, paying special attention to the relationships which connect the phenomenology of event with Husserl, Bergson, Heidegger and Levinas' ideas.

Husserl saw the Cartesian critique of scepticism as one of the eternal merits of Descartes’ philosophy. In doing so, he accepted the legitimacy of the very idea of a universal doubt, and sought to present as an alternative to it a renewed, specifically phenomenological concept of self-evidence, making it possible to obtain an unshakable foundation for the edifice of knowledge. This acceptance of the skeptical problem underlies his entire conceptual framework, both before and after the transcendental turn, and especially the (...) immanence/transcendence distinction, i.e., the very basis of intentionality. In taking as its starting point an analysis of perception, the article puts forth a certain number of phenomenological arguments in order to put into question the validity of the skeptical problem and, therefore, of the Husserlian conceptual framework; it defends, in the first place, a disjunctive conception of perception and, in the second place, a holism of experience. (shrink)

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For fifty years, Willard Van Orman Quine's books and articles have stimulated intense debate in the fields of logic and the philosophy of language. Many scholars in fact, regard Quine as the greatest living English-speaking philosopher; yet his views remain widely misunderstood and misinterpreted. This book provides the first major explication and defense of Quine's systematic philosophy and is ideally suited for use as a required or supplementary text in a wide variety of undergraduate and graduate courses in philosophy and (...) linguistics.The book explores the far-reaching implications of Quine's views on language for contemporary analytic philosophy. It is unique in providing a lucid and rich description and reconstruction of the historical context from which Quine's work grew, focusing in particular on the role that Russell and Wittgenstein played in shaping the problems inherited by Quine. It presents Quine's difficult later views in an accessible fashion, bringing out as no other study has the very radical nature of his position. One of the book's highlights is its careful examination and assessment of Tarski's theory of truth as it relates to the traditions of Russell and Wittgenstein and to Quine's own philosophy.George D. Romanos took his Ph.D. in philosophy under George D. W. Berry and Paul T. Sagal at Boston University. This book grew out of his dissertation with the active criticism and support of Quine himself. (shrink)

Taking the problem of perception and illusion as a leading clue, this article presents a new phenomenological approach to perception and the world: holism of experience. It challenges not only Husserl’s transcendentalism, but also what remains of it in Heidegger’s early thought, on the grounds that it is committed to the skeptical inference: Since we can always doubt any perception, we can always doubt perception as a whole. The rejection of such an implicit inference leads to a relational paradigm of (...) Being-in-the-World that differs from Heidegger’s on many points. (shrink)

From the advent of general purpose, Turing-complete machines, the relation between operators, programmers and users with computers can be observed as interconnected informational organisms (inforgs), henceforth analysed with the method of levels of abstraction (LoAs), risen within the philosophy of information (PI). In this paper, the epistemological levellism proposed by L. Floridi in the PI to deal with LoAs will be formalised in constructive terms using category theory, so that information itself is treated as structure-preserving functions instead of Cartesian products. (...) The milestones in the history of modern computing are then analysed through constructive levellism to show how the growth of system complexity lead to more and more information hiding. (shrink)

Este artículo busca mostrar que en la filosofía de Simone Weil es esencial la reflexión sobre la noción de trabajo. La autora ve con claridad que cuando el trabajo se vuel-ve alienado conduce a la opresión social. Y esto es terrible para el trabajador, ya que le priva de su propia dignidad. El trabajo alienado es consecuencia de la racionalización del trabajo y del maquinismo. De este modo, hace que quienes lo sufren experimenten un sentimiento de esclavitud y pérdida de (...) su dignidad. Es visto como algo que les es impuesto y de lo que no pueden escapar. El verdadero trabajo, por el contrario, es creativo porque no obliga a la persona a dejar de pensar. Más bien garantiza la unidad entre el pensamiento y la acción. (shrink)

This paper tries to explore the legitimacy of applying the phenomenological approach to poems, novels, to all that we classify, too conveniently, under the term “literature.” Such an approach is grounded in one claim: the literary text opens up to a world that is its “thing itself”. The thing of the text is not the text as a thing, in its linguistic and formal properties, no more than the thing of the painting is the canvas coated with pigments. However, what (...) is the status of such a “world”? Is this “opening of a world” only a metaphor? Is the world of the literary work only an imaginary one? In order to answer these questions, it is necessary, first of all, to understand the limits of the structuralist claim that the object of literature is only literature as an object, that is as a linguistic construction and, secondly, to be aware of what is specific to the phenomenological account of the imaginary, in contrast with alternative accounts, such as the one grounded in the theory of speech acts and developed, among others, by Searle. (shrink)

The oncological disease experience is counted as a wound in the body and mind attributable to a traumatic experience that fragments and disorients the person’s biography. The neoplasia leaves marks and scars in both somatic and existential level. The illness experience suggests to patient to look for meaning that cannot be unheard. The literature associating the concept of liminality in oncological disease to understand the process of meaning making. The definition of new horizons of meaning, generated by crossing the limen, (...) opens up a new self-awareness and worldview. The autopoietic dimension present in oncological disease reveals new scenarios of generativity and existential planning in the direction of self-realization in the cipher of the possible. The contribution presents the story of Anastasia, a 41-years-old nurse. A few months after her new marriage and close to a professional promotion, she receives the diagnosis of cholangiocarcinoma: a very aggressive, low-incidence, neoplasia, without specific therapeutic lines and with a negative prognosis. Anastasia’s words, thoughts and emotions, collected in the course of some testimonies in a university classroom, are analyzed and deciphered within the pedagogical paradigm, refering to the perspective of pedagogical problematicism and phenomenological pedagogy. (shrink)

This article describes well quasi orders as a category, focusing on limits and colimits. In particular, while quasi orders with monotone maps form a category which is finitely complete, finitely cocomplete, and with exponentiation, the full subcategory of well quasi orders is finitely complete and cocomplete, but with no exponentiation. It is interesting to notice how finite antichains and finite proper descending chains interact to induce this structure in the category: in fact, the full subcategory of quasi orders with finite (...) antichains has finite colimits but no products, while the full subcategory of well founded quasi orders has finite limits but no coequalisers. Moreover, the article characterises when exponential objects exist in the category of well quasi orders and well founded quasi orders. This completes the systematic description of the fundamental constructions in the categories of quasi orders, well founded quasi orders, quasi orders with finite antichains, and well quasi orders. (shrink)

It is generally argued that if the wave-function in the de Broglie–Bohm theory is a physical field, it must be a field in configuration space. Nevertheless, it is possible to interpret the wave-function as a multi-field in three-dimensional space. This approach hasn’t received the attention yet it really deserves. The aim of this paper is threefold: first, we show that the wave-function is naturally and straightforwardly construed as a multi-field; second, we show why this interpretation is superior to other interpretations (...) discussed in the literature; third, we clarify common misconceptions. (shrink)

The context in which the British Medical Association first considered publishing specific guidelines on decisions about attempting cardiopulmonary resuscitation , in the early 1990s, needs to be remembered. At that time the subject was often seen as far too sensitive to be mentioned to patients. Many hospitals had no formal policy about how CPR decisions should be made, apart from an expectation that these were purely medical matters. Advance decision making about CPR, where it existed, appears to have been generally (...) on an ad hoc basis by doctors. Patients, their relatives and the rest of the health care team were often unaware of it. After several cases in which nurses had been disciplined–unfairly in the eyes of some–for complying with their patients' known wishes about non-resuscitation in cases where no advance medical decision had been recorded, there was a demand for guidance.The BMA was approached by nurses' representatives with a view to publishing some very basic advice. This advice, issued in 1993 jointly with the Royal College of Nursing, and in association with the Resuscitation Council, was under 1000 words. Whether this brevity reflects difficulties in achieving consensus or lower expectations about what was required is a matter for speculation. Throughout the 1990s the guidance was distributed widely and used as a basis for many hospitals' local policies. Recently, however, the demands on the BMA and other professional bodies for ethical advice have changed and grown. Discussion of sensitive decisions about potentially life-prolonging interventions is now …. (shrink)

In The Living God, Fr. Romano Guardini enables you to understand (and finally to experience) God's consoling presence in your soul. When your sins and imperfections weigh you down, turn to the awesome reality of God's love and mercy -- which is just one of the many remarkable themes in Romano Guardini's magnificent book, The Living God.

The aim of this paper is to discuss the phenomenological nature of gratitude. Nevertheless, gratitude would be an affective response triggered by a certain action or object, it has to be considered not properly “intentional” as it seems to be rather a Stimmung. Accordingly, I distinguish two accounts of gratitude and then, I argue that it may be considered a mood only if it is addressed toward the life itself in a way that allows to cover the entire phenomena of (...) someone’s existence. Finally, I argue that Epicureanism is the main philosophical approach that fully recognizes the role of utmost importance played by gratitude toward life, to the extent that it positively accepts its finite nature. (shrink)