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In this article I argue not only for the value of hermeneutics today but also, and especially, how the crucial gesture of hermeneutics is that of changing the subject for the sake of our today. Surveying briefly the main lines of hermeneutical positions along its history and critiques, and connecting these critiques to the discrepancy between theory and practice, between interpretation and the need to change the world, the article proposes that our reality today, reshaped through globalization and the virtual, is performed as a hermeneutics of history. The challenge for today’s hermeneutics is to work out categories for understanding the present as on-going in a world that tends to capture and distort more and more the meaning of freedom of thought. In the final section, I propose a hermeneutics of the on-going, of gerundive time, partially under the inspiration of Paul Celan, as a response that develops the meaning of the freedom of thought. A defense of nearness and how to think in narrow nearness to the on-going is discussed.

This essay celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of Research in Phenomenology by reimagining or rethinking the speech act (whether explicit or implicit) that would have launched or inaugurated the journal back in 1971. It does this by rereading Derrida’s signature text on speech act theory, “Signature Event Context,” a text first presented by Derrida in the very year of the journal’s founding. The essay takes Derrida’s theses regarding the speech act’s fundamental relationship to writing, absence, death, and testimony in order to reread some of the first issues of Research in Phenomenology, including the memorial essays contained within them. The essay concludes by suggesting that Research in Phenomenology has done as much as any journal over the last half century to live up to the promise of that original speech act.

This essay explores Aristotle’s discovery of touch as the most universal and philosophical of the senses. It analyses his central insight in the De Anima that tactile flesh is a “medium not an organ,” unpacking both its metaphysical and ethical implications. The essay concludes with a discussion of how contemporary phenomenology—from Husserl to Merleau-Ponty and Irigaray—re-describes Aristotle’s seminal intuition regarding the model of “double reversible sensation.”

Over the years, many scholars have focused on the hierarchical and overpowering influence of Martin Heidegger upon Hannah Arendt’s thought. This view follows the stereotype concerning philosophical influence in which an all-knowing teacher affects the thought of the student, particularly if the student is a woman. In this paper, I argue that the story of philosophical influence is more complicated. In this case, the biographical archive establishes how Karl Jaspers, Martin Heidegger, and Hannah Arendt mutually influenced one another throughout their lives and careers. This evidence contests the typical view of philosophical influence which is hierarchical and often gendered and suggests a new model for understanding philosophical influences as dynamic and reciprocal.

In this paper, I use Husserl’s phenomenological analyses of noesis and noema to investigate the connection between experience and place, a relation which I call “geographical experience,” using a term coined by Edward Relph. Following the correlative structure of lived experience, geographical experience is enabled by the lived body as the noetic part and place as the respective noematic part. Both parts belong together necessarily. However, in this experiential field, distortions and an eluding aspect of place appear in the relationship between body and place. These distortions point to an aspect of geographical experience that cannot be fully grasped by the noetic-noematic structure of experience. They indicate that the reality of place is not completely constituted by this correlative structure but nevertheless becomes apparent in and through it.

In this essay I trace the relationship between philosophy and politics in Hannah Arendt’s work, with specific reference to the tension between her Socratic commitments and her appeal to “common sense” or sensus communis. I argue Arendt’s idea of a “common sense of the world” gives rise to a conception of the public realm that has too much shape and integrity to fit the often misty and particulate nature of contemporary reality. This is not the familiar critique of Arendt as a nostalgic Grecophile. Rather, it is a critique aimed at the phenomenological concept of “world” underlying her analysis. This concept—derived, but notably different, from Husserl’s and Heidegger’s respective conceptions—relies on background practices and understandings that are thick enough to sustain both a common public culture and a shared “sense of the world.” I suggest that Arendt’s appeal to a sensus communis runs aground of the moral and value pluralism that both Weber and Berlin have suggested are constitutive features of modernity. I conclude with some remarks on the relationship between Arendt’s critique of modernity and Socratic philosophical critique (on the one hand) and Frankfurt School Critical Theory (on the other).

The doctrine of the pregivenness of the world features prominently in Husserl’s numerous phenomenological analyses and descriptions of the role the world plays in our experience. Properly evaluating its function within the overall system of transcendental phenomenology is, however, by no means a straightforward task, as evidenced by many manuscripts from the 1930s. These detail various epistemological and metaphysical difficulties and potential paradoxes encumbering the notion of the pre-given world. This paper contends that some of these difficulties can be alleviated by revisiting Husserl’s late concept of the earth and, more specifically, disclosing its transcendental function in the constitution of pregivenness. To test this claim, I turn to Husserl’s 1931 manuscript describing the paradox of “the originary acquisition of the world.” I argue that the paradox is dissolved by introducing the transcendental-phenomenological concept of the earth.

This article analyzes the complex relation of phenomenology and literature in the work of Husserl and Derrida. In the first part, I show that the limited ideality of the literary object necessarily situates it in a derivative region of phenomenology. In the second part, however, I problematize the regional status of literature by elaborating a brief but important footnote in which Husserl broadens the concept of literature to embrace all cultural products whatsoever. Yet, because even this broadened concept of literature ultimately remains secondary for the phenomenologist, it only redoubles and ratifies the submission of literature to the more ideal objectivities of mathematical disciplines like geometry. The third part, finally, mobilizes Derrida’s notion of “dissemination,” prepared in and unintelligible apart from his early engagement with Husserlian phenomenology, in order to broach a notion of literature that the phenomenologist can neither circumscribe nor describe.

This essay is about “knowing limits,” both in the sense of acknowledging the inevitable perspectival limits of our knowledge, and in the sense in which the act of knowing delimits the parameters of that which is known. Moreover, it aims to cultivate a versatile perspectivism that is ethically oriented by a capacity for ecstatic empathy rather than an egocentric will to power. The essay begins with an examination of the mind/body problem as a paradigmatic case of perspectival ambiguity, making reference to a wide range of authors. The focus of the central sections of the essay is on Nietzsche and Heidegger, while the final sections are devoted to developing a phenomenological reading of Zhuangzi and Zen. At issue throughout is the articulation of a versatile perspectivism responsive to both the demarcative and disclosive senses of knowing limits.

Heidegger’s “Evening Conversation: In a Prisoner of War Camp in Russia, between a Younger and an Older Man” (1945), one of three dialogues composed by Heidegger after the defeat of National Socialist Germany published in Country Path Conversations (Feldweg-Gespräche) explores the being-historical situation and fate of the German people by turning to the early Daoist text of the Zhuangzi. My article traces how Heidegger interprets fundamental concepts from the Zhuangzi, mediated by way of Richard Wilhelm’s translation Das wahre Buch vom südlichen Blütenland (1912), such as naturalness, letting/releasement (Gelassenheit/wuwei), the unnecessary (wuyong zhi wei yong) and the useless (wuyong zhi yong) in the context of his hermeneutical and political situation. I consider to what extent this dialogue, along with his other discussions of the Zhuangzi and intensive engagement with the Daodejing from 1943 to 1950, constitute a “Daoist turn” in Heidegger’s thinking that helped shape his Postwar thought.

The success of the early music movement raises questions about performing historical works: Should musicians perform on period instruments and try to reconstruct the original style? If a historically “authentic” performance is impossible or undesirable, what should be the goal of the early music movement? I turn to Gadamer to answer these questions by constructing the outlines of a hermeneutics of early music performance. In the first half of the paper, I examine Gadamer’s critique of historical reconstruction and argue that this critique sheds light on mistaken tendencies and misunderstandings within the early music movement, but it does not discredit the movement as such. In the second half of the paper, I attempt to show how Gadamer’s dialogical account of historical consciousness provides a framework for understanding what historically informed performance is seeking to accomplish, as well as its advantage over a Nietzschean approach.

This article focuses on two Platonic concepts, δύναµις and χώρα, and Heidegger’s interpretation of them in his lecture courses on Greek philosophy. I try to demonstrate that these two concepts offer us insights into the dynamic movement of Being between self-showing and withdrawal. The aim of the article is to show that Being, as one of the greatest kinds in the Sophist, and the elusive χώρα in the Timaeus can open up new perspectives on the Heideggerian question of Being.

In Specters of Marx, Derrida suggests that the most fundamental condition of phenomenality lies in the ambiguous status of the noema, defined as an intentional and non-real component of Erlebnis, neither “in” the world nor “in” consciousness. This “irreality” of the noematic correlate is conceived by Derrida as the origin of sense and experience. Already in his Of Grammatology, Derrida maintained that the difference between the appearing and the appearance, between the world and the lived experience, is the condition of all other differences. Unfortunately, Derrida limits himself to a few self-evident remarks, without further elaborating. The aim of this paper is twofold: on the one hand, to contextualize Derrida’s interpretation of the noema from a theoretical and historical perspective; on the other hand, to show its effects on the early moments of Derrida’s philosophy. The result will shed light on a neglected issue in the relationship between deconstruction and phenomenology.

Hyppolite stresses his proximity to Merleau-Ponty, but the received interpretation of his “anti-humanist” reading of Hegel suggests a greater distance between their projects. This paper focuses on an under-explored dimension of their philosophical relationship. I argue that Merleau-Ponty and Hyppolite are both committed to formulating a mode of philosophical expression that can avoid the pitfalls of purely formal or literal and purely aesthetic or creative modes of expression. Merleau-Ponty’s attempt to navigate this dichotomy, I suggest, closely resembles Hyppolite’s interpretation of Hegel’s “speculative” mode of expression. In particular, his emphasis on the “mediating” character of philosophical language, which moves between descriptive and creative expression, suggests a debt to Hyppolite. This reading provides more evidence to think that Hyppolite cannot be straightforwardly understood as an anti-humanist or post-phenomenological thinker, and paves the way for a rapprochement between his work and the broader phenomenological tradition.

This paper aims to explicate what Heidegger means by das Ungeschehene (the un-happened), revealing the significance of this concept in providing us with a novel way of understanding and relating to the historical past. Taking recourse to ga 38, it will show that this concept has to be understood in connection with Heidegger’s very specific way of understanding what was (das Gewesene) not as that which has simply elapsed and passed away (das Vergangene) but as that which continues to abide and bear upon the present. It will clarify that the un-happened is neither the same as that which did happen nor the same as that which did not happen. Through a concrete discussion of a specific period in India’s colonial history, it will establish how the un-happened occupies a unique place between what happened and what did not happen, making it very different from a counterfactual.

The aim of this article is to address the question of the anthropological difference by focusing on the intersubjective relation between the human and the animal in the context of a phenomenological analysis of violence. Following some Levinasian and Derridian insights, my goal is to analyze the structural differences between interspecific and intraspecific violence by asking how the generic phenomenon of violence is modalized across various levels: from human to human, from human to animal, from animal to human, from animal to animal. I will address questions of incarnated vulnerability and altered states of affectivity, and I will relate the various forms of violence emerging in the context of the anthropological difference to the question of territoriality, arguing that violence is structurally modified in relation to particular articulations of our worldly spatiality.

Masks are devices and symbols. In the first instance, they are artifacts that allow opposite poles to take each other’s place. They split the world into appearance and reality, manifest and repressed, sacred and profane. In this sense, they are dualistic. But by so doing they invert these terms. In this sense, they are dialectical. In the second instance, they exemplify doubt about people’s identities and the veracity of their words; they denote duplicity, inauthenticity, and hypocrisy. The conjunction of these two senses resides in the fact that masks are at the threshold between reality and fiction. Such a threshold makes possible the emergence of a space of play which asserts that the world does not express a determinate and final order but is infinitely open to the emergence of new, yet transient, forms of self-organization and open new spatiotemporal worlds.

Taxonomy is our response to the proliferating variety of the natural world on the one hand, and the principle of unrelieved universality on the other. From Aristotle, through Porphyry to Linneaus, Kant and others, thinkers have struggled to develop taxonomies that could order what we know and also what we do not yet know, and this essay is a reflection on the existential desire that propels this effort. Porphyry’s tree of logic is an exhaustive account of the things we can say about the sort of beings we are; Linneaus’s system of nature reaches completion in the classification of humans; Kant discovers a way to have natural and logical forms coincide in the thought of natural purpose and purposiveness. The stakes are high. When we order the world, we order ourselves: when we enter the taxonomy, it enters us and confronts us with our judgments of kind, race and kin.

This article provides a detailed analysis of the function of the notion of Volk in Martin Heidegger’s philosophy. At first glance, this term is an appeal to the revolutionary masses of the National Socialist revolution in a way that demarcates a distinction between the rootedness of the German People (capital “P”) and the rootlessness of the modern rabble (or people). But this distinction is not a sufficient explanation of Heidegger’s position, because Heidegger simultaneously seems to hold that even the Germans are characterized by a lack of identity. What is required is a further appropriation of the proper. My suggestion is that this logic of the Volk is not only useful for understanding Heidegger’s thought during the war, but also an indication of what happened after he lost faith in the National Socialist movement and thus had to make the lack of the People the basis of his thought.

Interpretations of the so-called Black Notebooks have emphasized the interaction between Heidegger’s philosophy, particularly his notion of a “history of being” (Seinsgeschichte), on the one hand, and his affiliation with National Socialism and his anti-Semitic views on the other. The paper proposes to understand this interaction as in part determined by the inherent logic of Heidegger’s ontological reasoning: Heidegger takes power (Macht), violence (Gewalt) and brutality (Brutalität) as the key for understanding his present day and turns to these phenomena as confirmation of the ontology he envisages at the time. But the notes published so far, ranging from 1931 to 1948 (Gesamtausgabe vols. 94–97), document Heidegger’s incapacity to assign to the events of these years a plausible position in his ontology. This failure deepens a trauma both personal and philosophical. Rather than reject the notion of a history of being altogether, I propose an alternative understanding of its logic motivated by Heidegger’s failure to bring his ontological project to the anticipated completion.

The paper tackles Patočka’s ideas on the world crisis and on the possibility that it may be overcome. The key flaw in Patočka’s approach, one which also underpins his Eurocentrism, is identified as his drawing a firm line between a free, truly historical way of life, and unfree, earthbound living. In order to sketch a usable conception, the paper reinterprets Patočka’s notion of the three movements of existence, thereby connecting his historical and political reflections with his ontological thought and also with Arendt’s concept of action. The dichotomy between earthiness and freedom, corresponding to the contrast between the first two movements and the third, is refuted by emphasizing not only the inseparability of all the movements of existence but also the historicity of each of them. On the basis of such a reinterpretation, Patočka’s concept can provide a phenomenological framework not only for a non-Eurocentric analysis of human being in the world but also of the world crisis.

Hermeneutics is widely celebrated as a call for “conversation”—that is, a manner of inquiry characterized by humility and openness to the other that eschews the pretenses of calculative rationality and resists all finality of conclusions. In this, conversation takes shape in efforts to understand and interpret that always unfold in the transmission of meaning historically in language. Yet, the celebration of hermeneutics for humility and openness appears, at least, to risk embarrassment in light of claims found in Heidegger and Gadamer that conversation is always contingent on “prior accord.” Critics of hermeneutics have, for some decades, interpreted this claim of prior accord to refer to a common tradition, so that the understanding achieved in conversation is restricted to those who belong to the same heritage. In this essay, the author argues that although Heidegger and Gadamer often suggest this prior accord is a matter of common tradition, crucial threads of Gadamer’s thought, in particular, recommend a different view. Gadamer, in these threads, offers that “prior accord” concerns not a common tradition, but, on the contrary, the call to participate in hermeneutic transmission as such, even—and no doubt especially—when those in conversation are not familiar with the tradition or language of the other. With this, we are called to converse not first by what the other says, but by the fact that we do not yet understand, that we have already misunderstood, and that we perhaps cannot understand.

In 1976, in “Society Must be Defended,” Foucault did more than offer an alternative genealogy of his own genealogical perspective to the one he is sometimes taken to have provided in “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” He also, by implication, located Nietzsche within that genealogy, one result of which is that he gave what amounts to a new perspective on how Nietzsche might be placed within the history of racisms.

The question of Hölderlin’s influence on Heidegger’s thinking has long preoccupied philosophers. In this essay I attempt to situate the Hölderlin-reception in Germany during the 1930s and show how (despite all the strong political currents running through Heidegger’s Hölderlin lectures) he comes to offer his own reflections on poetic dwelling that open an ethical relation within his work. There are deeply ethical moments that emerge in Heidegger’s reading of Hölderlin, moments marked by polarities between an assertion of the German Volk’s exceptionalist singularity and an awareness of the need to authentically encounter the “other,” the “alien,” the “foreign,” and the “stranger.” The Hölderlin lectures take place in this space of contention, strife, and upheaval. In and through his conversation with Hölderlin, Heidegger begins to think an originary ethics of dwelling attuned to the poietic power of beyng. It is in this ethos of poetic dwelling, one that comes to language in Hölderlin’s late hymns, that Heidegger rethinks Dasein as Aufenthalt, abode, and ἦθος.

This article takes up Heidegger’s commentary on Rimbaud’s Lettres du voyant as the starting point for an exploration of the question of rhythm in Heidegger’s thought, and an attempt to situate it within his understanding of technics and Being. Besides pursuing a historical study of the concept of rhythm in Heidegger’s work, this article proposes to understand rhythm through the concept of individuation. It responds to the French philosopher Jacques Garelli’s critique of Heidegger that the latter ignores the question of individuation and always starts with beings that are already individuated. On the contrary, this article attempts to sketch a theory of individuation of rhythm in Heidegger’s proper thinking through a re-interpretation of the Fug—a word he used to translate the Greek word δίκη and words derived from it: joint (Fuge), structure (Gefüge), submission (sich fugen), etc.

The aim of this paper is to demonstrate the importance of Henri Bergson to the philosophical development of Jean-Paul Sartre’s thought. Despite Sartre’s early enthusiasm for Bergson’s description of consciousness, and the frequent references to Bergson in Sartre’s early work, there has been virtually no analysis of the influence of Bergson’s thought on Sartre’s development. This paper addresses this deficit. The first part of the paper explores Sartre’s analysis of the function of the imagination in his two early works on the subject, The Imagination, and The Imaginary. I argue that many of Sartre’s central criticisms of what he calls “the illusion of immanence” can be traced back to Bergson, and that, despite Sartre’s rejection of Bergson’s account of consciousness, Sartre’s account of the imagination is still heavily indebted to Bergson’s logic of multiplicities. The second part argues that Sartre’s analysis of the imagination leads, in Being and Nothingness, to an account of freedom that still bears traces of his early Bergsonism, even if it reverses the direction of Bergson’s own analysis of freedom.

This essay addresses time’s dissemination both in the sense of an undoing or fracturing of unifying conceptions of time, as well as in the sense of ‘scattering seeds’ by conceiving of manifold temporalizing configurations of living beings, things, and events without an overarching sense of time. After a consideration of traditional conceptions of time, this essay explores the notion of duration in Bergson in order to make it fruitful for thinking duration without centering it in human consciousness. The author suggests that we can begin to think the temporal happening of things and events in terms of different temporal configurations of various degrees and qualities of complexity that may be occasioned by chance, whereby chance is understood as the freeing of time-spaces of indeterminacy in which temporal configurations take shape or manifest themselves.1

The following paper addresses itself to the question of ontology in the work of Jean-Luc Nancy. In so doing it attempts to read Nancy’s ontological project as a project of the deconstruction of structural forms of political violence. To this end, Nancy’s notion of “inoperative community” is brought into dialogue with Benjamin in order to show how, in Nancy’s work, ontology operates not as the refusal of critique, but as its very condition.

In its engagement with Derrida’s unheimlich responsibility elaborated in The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume One, this essay is about death, words, silence, and lives of people and animals. It is also about experiences that to varying degrees bring lives to words and words to lives. Its guiding hypotheses are that death, words, silence, and lives in their happenings exceed the laws that function to identify them and that none of their happenings is sovereign in relation to the others. The essay culminates with Derrida’s engagement with ungrounded time when completion and beginning are simultaneous. That simultaneity constitutes a threshold in which people must respond. For Derrida the threshold is shadowed by his own approaching death.

Gadamer is prominent on the list of counter-enlightenment philosophers of the20th century. He is on this list for good reasons, reasons that I will briefly explore here. Gadamer borrows much from Heidegger’s critique of modernity and he adds to it. As we all know, Gadamer’s critique of the Enlightenment and modernity serves as an opening for a reappropriation of the Greeks, especially Plato and Aristotle. Gadamer is often taken, again with good reason, to be one of the leading voices revivifying the battle of ancients and moderns and urging, at least in some regards, the superiority of the ancients. Kant is without question the leading figure of the Enlightenment—at least within the German tradition, if not for the European Enlightenment in general. As such we should expect Gadamer to be strongly critical of Kant. And yet we find Gadamer’s relation to Kant displaying a deep ambivalence. It is this ambivalence that this paper examines.

The article’s aim is to measure the potential of Derrida’s work for a philosophy of technique. It shows why Derrida does not present a positive philosophy of technology but rather describes technique as a quasi-technique, as if a technique. The article inquires into the potential of such a quasi-technique for a contemporary philosophy of technology: it is suggested that it can function as a salutary “deconstruction” of mainstream philosophy of technology (that “knows” the “essence of technology”) because it shows how to think technique in the absence of essence and as the absence of essence. The article begins with a survey of the machines that figure in Derrida’s texts. It then examines three propositions concerning technology in Derrida’s work: Derrida thinks technology as a metaphor of writing and not the other way round. Derrida thinks technique as prosthesis, firstly of memory, then more generally of life. Derrida’s quasi-technique relies on his peculiar conception of the incorporal materiality of technique.

According to a very specific and widespread line of interpretation, the mode of working of intentionality (hence the notions themselves of noema and noematic sense) could be understood by analogy with the linguistic paradigm set forth by Gottlob Frege in his famous essay “Über Sinn und Bedeutung.” The goal of the present paper is to dismiss such an interpretation by also analyzing the manner in which Husserl relates, and thereby traces back, the constitution of the logical sphere to the so-called pre-categorial.

This paper suggests interpreting Husserl’s thesis of the “fictional destruction of the world” (gedankliche Destruktion der Welt) in the light of the eidetic method of variation. After having reconstructed Husserl’s argument and shown how it relies on the methodologically regimented joint venture of free fantasy and bounded concepts, the author concludes that (1) the a priori of a world, namely its empirical (more or less rational) style, is tantamount to the a priori of a world that can be possibly experienced by some conceivable form of consciousness. (2) If consciousness is a priori bound to transcendence, such transcendence is not necessarily supposed to be the transcendence of a world, for a non-world would be enough to entertain the intentional directedness. This twofold claim allows for a novel interpretation of Husserl’s principle of the asymmetry between world and consciousness.

In this paper I argue that in Husserl’sIdeas I(1913) there is a seeming contradiction between the characterization of pure consciousness as theresidueof the performance of the phenomenological reduction and the claim that in the natural attitude consciousness is taken to be an entity is the world. This creates a puzzle regarding the positional status of consciousness in the natural attitude. After reviewing some possible options to solve this puzzle in the existing literature, I claim that the positional status of conscious experiences in the natural attitude is best characterized asunsettled. The act thatsettlesthe positional status of conscious experiences (i.e. our manifoldErlebnisse) is reflection. In reflection, experiences are posited as beings, either in a psychological or in a phenomenological key. I conclude by arguing that the problem of positing is of paramount importance to understand correctly Husserl’s claim that phenomenology isvoraussetzungslos.

In 1962–62, Derrida presented two series of lectures at the Sorbonne, the first of which was entitled “Method and Metaphysics,” and the second “Phenomenology, Theology and Teleology in Husserl.” The author was present as a student at these lectures, and presents below a summary of their contents.

This paper spells out Husserl’s account of the exercise of rationality and shows how it is tied to the capacity for critical reflection. I first discuss Husserl’s views on what rationally constrains our intentionality (section 1). Then I localize the exercise of rationality in the positing that characterizes attentive forms of intentionality and argue that, on Husserl’s account, when we are attentive to something we are also pre-reflectively aware of what speaks for and against our taking something to be a certain way (section 2). After discussing the conditions under which this pre-reflective awareness gives way to reflective deliberation (section 3), I contrast this account to a compelling Kantian-inspired account of the activity of reason that has recently been developed by Matthew Boyle (section 4). In particular, I argue that Husserl delimits the scope of the exercise of rationality differently than Boyle, and I show how this implies different accounts of the self.

In the following paper we will seek to understand what Edmund Husserl, in his second Logical Investigation, refers to as “idealism”, against the backdrop of Rudolf Hermann Lotze’s interpretation of Plato’s doctrine of Ideas in the third book of his Logic. This will raise not only the question of Husserl’s indebtedness to Lotze with respect to the Ideenhlehre in terms of Geltung, but first and foremost that of the “Platonism” of the idealism defended in his first masterpiece.

I investigate the phenomenological significance of Husserl’s appeal to the “numerical identity” of irreality as it appears in recollected manifolds of lived-experience in his mature account of the transcendental constitution of transcendence and find it wanting. I show that what is at stake for Husserl in this appeal is the descriptive mark that exhibits the distinction between a unit of meaning as it is constituted in psychologically determined lived-experience and as it is constituted in lived-experience that is determined transcendentally. In other words, I show that numerical identity functions for Husserl as the criterion that signals transcendental psychologism has been overcome. I then present the argument that it has not been overcome in Husserl’s investigations, because the collective unity characteristic of numerical unity is presupposed by those investigations rather than made evidentially manifest and articulated.

The paper addresses Ricoeur’s critique of Sartre in light of Ricoeur’s unpublished Lectures on Imagination. I argue that Ricoeur’s critique is twofold: hermeneutical and phenomenological. The hermeneutical critique relies on two central claims, namely, that Sartre fails to distinguish productive and reproductive imagination and that this distinction is language-based. I argue that neither claim is justified. The phenomenological critique casts doubts on Sartre’s sharp distinction between the real and the imaginary. It relies on Ricoeur’s phenomenology of painting, which offers an alternative way to distinguish productive and reproductive imagination. In place of a conclusion, I inquire into the reasons why Ricoeur, who considers imagination a theme of central philosophical importance, never wrote a separate book on imagination. I maintain that the reasons are methodological: the phenomenological and hermeneutical approaches to imagination are irreconcilable since the first one relies on the primacy of pre-predicative experience, while the second one is based on the primacy of language.

This essay attends to both the critical and poetic work of David Pollard. In so doing, it not only engages the works themselves, but also allows the contours of such an engagement to manifest themselves, both with regards to the works at hand and more broadly. What does reading and thinking with Pollard give us to experience about reading and thinking as such?

In this essay, I reconstruct Merleau-Ponty’s implicit critique of Husserl in his lectures on Husserl’s concept of the earth as Boden or ground. Against Husserl, Merleau-Ponty regards the earth seen as pure Boden as an idealization. He emphasizes the ontological necessity for the earth as Boden to always hypostasize itself into the Copernican concept of earth as object. In turn, Merleau-Ponty builds this necessity into an essential feature of being, allowing himself to retrieve ontology itself from its status as external to being, and to make room for it within the structure of being: ontology is one of the ways in which experiences (such as that of the earth as Boden) become objectified, thereby allowing being to achieve its essential movement of hypostatization.