Phenomenology

Imagine that all of Western philosophy, from Parmenides to Heidegger, had committed the same fundamental gesture: reducing what is different to what is identical, absorbing the strange into the familiar, converting the Other into an object of my knowledge. This is the charge that runs through the work of Emmanuel Lévinas (1906–1995). Against a tradition that made the question of being its supreme concern, Lévinas asserts something apparently simple and radically subversive: prior to ontology there is ethics. Before I understand the world, I am already bound by a face that looks at me and says “thou shalt not kill.” ...

What Is Phenomenology? “Back to the things themselves!” — this methodological principle, associated with Edmund Husserl, summarizes the fundamental motivation of phenomenology: to abandon abstract theoretical constructs, unverified metaphysical hypotheses, and the presuppositions of scientific naturalism, in order to return to a rigorous description of experience as it presents itself to consciousness. The name “phenomenology” literally means the study (logos) of phenomena (phainomena) — of what appears, what manifests. But what appears is not something behind which the “thing-in-itself” lurks hidden: the phenomenon, for Husserl, is precisely what gives itself to consciousness in its appearing, and it is this appearing that phenomenology investigates. ...

The history of Western philosophy can be read, without exaggeration, as the history of the forgetting of being. This is the thesis that runs through the entire work of Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) — arguably the most influential and most controversial philosopher of the twentieth century. Being and Time (1927), his magnum opus, did not propose yet another theory about the world, the mind, or morality: it proposed that philosophy as a whole — from Plato to Nietzsche — had left its most fundamental question unthought: what does it mean to be? ...

Few philosophical gestures are as radical — and as productive — as the deliberate decision to withhold judgment. Epoché (ἐποχή), the suspension of assent, runs through the history of Western philosophy like a thread connecting ancient skepticism to contemporary phenomenology, passing through Cartesian doubt and British empiricism along the way. Born as a practice of life among the Pyrrhonian skeptics, who sought in it the tranquility of the soul, epoché was reclaimed twenty-three centuries later by Edmund Husserl as the founding method of phenomenology — the path to “the things themselves.” ...

What is the structure of reality? What truly exists — and what is illusion, appearance, or a construction of our minds? This is the oldest, most persistent, and most vertiginous question in all of philosophy. From Thales of Miletus, who in the sixth century BC declared that everything is water, to quantum physicists who now debate whether the universe is made of vibrating strings in eleven dimensions, humanity has never stopped asking: what is this thing we call reality? ...

Albert Borgmann was born in Freiburg, Germany, on November 23, 1937, and grew up in the shadow of the gothic cathedral, the Black Forest, and the university where Husserl and Heidegger had taught. Still a student in Freiburg, he attended Heidegger’s lectures in 1957, an experience that would leave a lasting mark on his later reflection on technology. He later moved to the United States, where he earned an MA in German literature from the University of Illinois at Urbana and a PhD in philosophy from the University of Munich, with a dissertation on Cardinal John Henry Newman. He briefly taught German literature at Illinois and philosophy at DePaul University and the University of Hawaii, before settling for decades at the University of Montana in Missoula, where he died on May 7, 2023, at the age of 85. ...

Byung-Chul Han Byung-Chul Han (한병철, b. 1959, Seoul) is a South Korean philosopher based in Germany. He studied metallurgy in Seoul before moving to Germany, where he completed his philosophy studies in Freiburg and Munich with a doctoral dissertation on Heidegger. He was professor at the University of the Arts in Berlin and has become one of the most widely translated voices of contemporary cultural criticism thanks to a series of short, aphoristic, densely phenomenological books. His central thesis is that contemporary society has moved from Foucault’s “disciplinary society” to a Leistungsgesellschaft — an achievement or performance society — in which the subject, dispensed from external coercion, exerts upon itself a violence all the more effective because voluntary. Han draws on Heidegger, Hegel, Hannah Arendt, and East Asian thought (especially Zen Buddhism) to diagnose our age. ...

Edmund Husserl Born in 1859 in Prossnitz, in Moravia (then part of the Austrian Empire), Edmund Husserl trained as a mathematician before turning to philosophy under the influence of Franz Brentano, from whom he inherited the notion of intentionality. Dissatisfied with the psychologism that reduced logic to laws of the mind, he set out to refound philosophy as a rigorous science, capable of describing experience exactly. He was a professor at Göttingen and Freiburg, where he had Heidegger as his assistant and successor. A Jew, he was stripped of his rights by Nazism and died isolated in 1938; his thousands of manuscripts survived only because a Franciscan monk smuggled them into Belgium. ...

Emmanuel Lévinas Lithuanian-French philosopher, one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century. He introduced Husserl and Heidegger to France, but later critically surpassed them. A Holocaust survivor, he developed a philosophy where ethics is first philosophy — prior to ontology. Key Concepts The Face (le visage): the manifestation of the Other that addresses me and demands a response — not a physical face, but an ethical presence that says “thou shalt not kill”; the point from which all moral responsibility emerges Ethics as first philosophy: against Heidegger, for whom ontology (being) is the foundation of everything — for Lévinas, the ethical relation with the Other precedes and grounds all ontology Radical alterity (autrui): the Other cannot be reduced to the same, cannot be fully understood or assimilated — this irreducibility is the fundamental ethical fact Totality and Infinity: Western philosophy tends toward “totalization” — engulfing the different within the same. The Infinite breaks into this totality through the face of the Other, resisting capture Infinite responsibility: I am responsible for the Other asymmetrically and without reciprocity — “I am responsible even for what I did not do”; responsibility precedes freedom Il y a (there is): the experience of anonymous, impersonal, threatening being — the murmur of being before any existent; the night in which being becomes unbearable Saying and Said (le Dire / le Dit): “Saying” is ethical exposure to the Other, the act of address; the “Said” is propositional content — ethics resides in the Saying, which the Said always betrays Influenced by Husserl — phenomenology (was his student and translator) Heidegger — fundamental ontology (later critically surpassed) Bergson — philosophy of duration and life Jewish tradition (Talmud, Rosenzweig, Buber) Influenced Derrida — deconstruction and ethics (debate on violence and metaphysics) Habermas — ethics and recognition of the other Judith Butler — vulnerability and ethical responsibility Contemporary Christian and Jewish theology Postcolonial studies and recognition theory Works Existence and Existents (1947); Totality and Infinity (1961); Otherwise than Being (1974); Ethics and Infinity (1982). ...

Franz Brentano Franz Brentano (1838–1917) was an Austrian-German philosopher whose work marks one of the quiet turning points of modern philosophy. Born at Marienberg am Rhein into a Catholic family of Italian origin — he was a nephew of the Romantic poet Clemens Brentano — he took his doctorate at Tübingen in 1862 with the thesis Von der mannigfachen Bedeutung des Seienden nach Aristoteles (“On the Several Senses of Being in Aristotle”), a study that the young Martin Heidegger read in his adolescence and that would shape an entire twentieth-century lineage of return to Aristotle. Ordained a Catholic priest in 1864, he completed his Habilitation at Würzburg in 1866 and resigned from the priesthood in 1873 amid the crisis opened by the dogma of papal infallibility (Vatican I, 1870). In Vienna, where he taught from 1874 to 1895, he gathered a remarkable constellation of pupils — Husserl, Meinong, Twardowski, Stumpf, Ehrenfels, Marty — out of whom phenomenology, object theory, and the Lvov-Warsaw School would emerge. He lost his chair in 1880 because he married (Austrian law treated former priests as still bound by their vow of celibacy) and was reduced to Privatdozent. He retired in 1895 and lived first in Florence and then in Zurich, where he died, blind, in 1917. ...

Gerd Alberto Bornheim (1929–2002), born in Caxias do Sul, in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, was one of the principal introducers and interpreters of existentialism and phenomenology in Brazil. His intellectual activity spanned a broad field: beyond existentialism, he devoted himself to dialectics, to the study of the Pre-Socratic philosophers, and to the philosophy of art and theatre. A professor at several institutions—among them the USP, the UFRGS, the UERJ and the PUC—he played a decisive role in the philosophical formation of several generations. His writing combines expository clarity with conceptual rigour, which made works such as his introduction to philosophising and his study of Sartre standard reading for philosophy students across the country. ...

Jean-Paul Sartre Philosopher, novelist, and playwright, Jean-Paul Sartre was born in Paris in 1905 and trained at the École Normale Supérieure, where he met Simone de Beauvoir, his lifelong intellectual and romantic companion. A stay in Berlin in the 1930s brought him into direct contact with the phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger, which would become the foundation of his thought. A prisoner of war in 1940–41 and later a central figure of postwar Parisian intellectual life, he made philosophy a public and engaged activity: he founded the review Les Temps Modernes, drew close to Marxism, and, faithful to his refusal of institutional honors, declined the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1964. His death, in 1980, brought tens of thousands into the streets of Paris. ...

Marilena Chaui Marilena de Souza Chaui (born 1941 in São Paulo) is one of Brazil’s most influential living philosophers and professor emerita at the University of São Paulo, where she trained and spent her entire teaching career. Her work brings together a deep command of Spinoza’s philosophy and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology with a critical, politically engaged reflection on Brazilian society. A staunch defender of the public university and a leftist intellectual, Chaui has also become a major public figure without ever relinquishing academic rigour. Her textbook Convite à Filosofia (1994) is among the most widely read introductions to philosophy in Brazil, and her reading of Spinoza, consolidated in A Nervura do Real, is an internationally recognised contribution to scholarship on the Dutch philosopher. ...

Martin Heidegger Martin Heidegger was born in Meßkirch, in southern Germany, in 1889, into a modest Catholic family, and came to philosophy by way of theology. Assistant and later successor to Husserl at Freiburg, he published Being and Time in 1927, the work that established him as one of the most influential — and most controversial — philosophers of the twentieth century. The controversy is inseparable from his biography: in 1933 he assumed the rectorate of Freiburg and joined the Nazi party, a commitment he never publicly renounced and which the Black Notebooks, published decades later, revealed to be shot through with antisemitism. The moral and philosophical weight of this engagement remains an open debate. ...

Maurice Merleau-Ponty Born in 1908 in France, Maurice Merleau-Ponty trained at the École Normale Supérieure alongside Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, with whom he would found the review Les Temps Modernes before a political break. In 1952 he became the youngest holder of the chair of philosophy at the Collège de France. He died suddenly in 1961, leaving his last work unfinished. He is the great phenomenologist of the body. ...

Nishida Kitaro Note on romanisation: Japanese names are given in Hepburn romanisation, with the original characters in parentheses on first occurrence. Macrons (ō, ū) indicate long vowels. In the Japanese convention, the family name (Nishida) precedes the given name (Kitarō); the Japanese order is followed here, in keeping with current editorial practice for modern Japanese philosophers. Nishida Kitarō (西田 幾多郎) is the founder of the Kyoto School and the most influential modern Japanese philosopher of the twentieth century. A Rinzai Zen practitioner from his youth — under the masters Setsumon and Kōshū — he was trained in philosophy at the Imperial University of Tokyo and lectured at Kyoto Imperial University, where he gathered around himself the generation that would give body to the so-called “school.” His project may be described as the attempt, without comparable precedent in modern Japan, to articulate Buddhist meditative experience with the vocabulary and rigour of European (chiefly German) philosophy — without reducing one to the other. ...

Paul Ricoeur French philosopher, one of the greatest hermeneuticians of the 20th century. He synthesized Husserl’s phenomenology with Gadamer’s hermeneutics, Freud’s psychoanalysis, and analytic philosophy of action. His work traverses the conflict of interpretations, the theory of narrative, and the ethics of the self. Key Concepts Hermeneutics of suspicion vs. of trust: two great interpretive traditions — that of suspicion (Marx, Nietzsche, Freud — texts conceal something) and that of trust (the religious and poetic tradition — texts reveal something). Mature hermeneutics oscillates between the two Narrative identity (identité narrative): personal identity is not a fixed substance but is narratively constructed — we are the characters of the stories we tell about ourselves (idem vs. ipse: identity as sameness vs. selfhood) Time and narrative: human time only becomes comprehensible when narrated — narrative (historiography and fiction) configures temporal experience and gives it meaning (mimesis in three phases: prefiguration, configuration, refiguration) Living metaphor: metaphor is not merely a rhetorical ornament — it creates new meanings by bringing distant semantic fields together; it “redescribes reality” Conflict of interpretations: there is no neutral interpretation — every reading involves a position; hermeneutics must assume the conflict between perspectives rather than eliminating it Oneself as another (soi-même comme un autre): selfhood (who I am) is always mediated by the other — alterity constitutes the self; a proposal for an ethics of solicitude and justice Little ethics: “aiming at the good life, with and for others, in just institutions” — articulating the ethical perspective (teleological) with the moral perspective (deontological) Influenced by Husserl and Heidegger — phenomenology Gadamer — philosophical hermeneutics Freud — psychoanalysis and suspicion Marx and Nietzsche — hermeneutics of suspicion Analytic philosophy of action (Austin, Strawson) Influenced Narrative and biblical theology Philosophy of law and legal hermeneutics Historiography and philosophy of history Habermas — ethics and communication Works Philosophy of the Will (1950–60); Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (1965); The Conflict of Interpretations (1969); The Rule of Metaphor (1975); Time and Narrative (3 vols., 1983–85); Oneself as Another (1990); Memory, History, Forgetting (2000). ...

Paulo Freire Born in Recife in 1921, amid the poverty of the Brazilian Northeast, Paulo Freire is the most cited and translated Brazilian thinker in the world, and the Patron of Brazilian Education. His philosophy was born of practice: in 1963, in the pioneering Angicos experiment, he taught rural workers to read in a few weeks with a method that joined the reading of the word to the reading of the world. Seen as a threat, he was imprisoned and exiled after the 1964 coup, passing through Bolivia, Chile, the United States, and Switzerland; he would return to Brazil only in 1980. He brought together phenomenology, Marxism, and existentialism in a theory that is at once a pedagogy and a political philosophy of emancipation. ...

Rodolfo Kusch Born in Buenos Aires in 1922, into a family of German origin, Rodolfo Kusch united philosophy and anthropology in a rare way: instead of thinking America from European books, he traveled through northwestern Argentina and the Bolivian highlands in extensive fieldwork, listening to Quechua and Aymara thought. From this experience arose a radical question: is European ontology really capable of comprehending the greater part of human experience? His answer turns on a distinction that Spanish — and Portuguese — allow with singular clarity: that between being (ser) and dwelling (estar). “Being” expresses the modern Western mode: to be something, to produce, to assert oneself, to project oneself. “Dwelling” expresses another way of inhabiting the world: to be here, rooted in the land, in the community, in the here-and-now — the mode proper to the human being of deep America. For Kusch these are two distinct and irreducible ontologies. ...