Phenomenology and the Idea of Europe

Phenomenology and the Idea of Europe PDF

Author: Francesco Tava

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-10-16

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 1351373862

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The meaning of Europe exceeds its territorial limits, and is not fully ascribable either to the events that characterized its history or to the institutions that regulated the lives of its inhabitants. Europe is all this, and yet it represents much more: a political concept and project, a cultural enterprise, and a system of power whose legitimacy is currently challenged by a series of internal and external crises that jeopardize its survival. There is no single definition that can describe what ‘Europe’ is, as this word evokes unity as much as division, solidarity and conflicts, progress and decadence, and coexistence and colonization. Besides all this, Europe is also a philosophical idea that, especially during the twentieth century, has captured the imaginations of many thinkers. Among these is the father of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl, as well as some of his followers, such as Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, and Patočka. The objective of this book is to investigate how phenomenological philosophy addresses the great complexity of the idea of Europe. This involves tackling key problems that pertain not just to phenomenology and its method, but that reflects the contemporary social and political situation within a European frame: identity and heritage, democratization and integration, end and renewal, and Euroscepticism and Eurocentrism. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology.

Husserl and the Idea of Europe

Husserl and the Idea of Europe PDF

Author: Timo Miettinen

Publisher: Northwestern University Press

Published: 2020-03-15

Total Pages: 354

ISBN-13: 0810141507

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Husserl and the Idea of Europe argues that Edmund Husserl’s late reflections on Europe should not be read either as departures from his early transcendental phenomenology or as simple exercises of cultural criticism but rather as systematic phenomenological reflections on generativity and historicity. Timo Miettinen shows that Husserl’s deliberations on Europe contain his most compelling and radical interpretation of the intersubjective, communal, and historical dimensions of phenomenology. Husserl and his generation worked in the aftermath of World War I, as Europe struggled to redefine itself, and he penned his late writings as the clouds of World War II gathered. Decades later, the fall of the Soviet Union again altered the continent’s identity and its political and economic divisions. Miettinen writes as a European involved in the question of Europe, and many of the recent authors and critics he addresses in this work—such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Giorgio Agamben—likewise deeply engaged with this new problem of European identity. The book illuminates the multifaceted problem of the idea of European rationality, and it defends novel conceptions of universalism and teleology as necessary components of radical philosophical reflection.

Early Phenomenology in Central and Eastern Europe

Early Phenomenology in Central and Eastern Europe PDF

Author: Witold Płotka

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2020-04-05

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 3030396231

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This book presents the origins of Central and Eastern European phenomenology. It features chapters that explore the movement's development, its most important thinkers, and its theoretical and historical context. This collection examines such topics as the realism-idealism controversy, the status of descriptive psychology, the question of the phenomenological method, and the problem of the world. The chapters span the first decades of the development of phenomenology in Czechoslovakia, Poland, Romania, Russia, and Yugoslavia before World War II. The contributors track the Brentanian heritage of the development. They show how this tradition inspired influential thinkers like Celms, Špet, Ingarden, Frank, Twardowski, Patočka, and others. The book also puts forward original investigations. Moreover it elaborates new accounts of the foundations of phenomenology. While the volume begins with the Brentanian heritage, it situates phenomenology in a dialogue with other important schools of thought of that time, including the Prague School and Lvov-Warsaw School of Logic. This collection highlights thinkers whose writings have had only a limited reception outside their home countries due to political and historical circumstances. It will help readers gain a better understanding of how the phenomenological movement developed beyond its start in Germany. Readers will also come to see how the phenomenological method resonated in different countries and led to new philosophical developments in ontology, epistemology, psychology, philosophy of culture, and philosophy of religion.

Europe, Phenomenology, and Politics in Husserl and Patocka

Europe, Phenomenology, and Politics in Husserl and Patocka PDF

Author: Lorenzo Girardi

Publisher: Reframing the Boundaries: Thinking the Political

Published: 2023

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781538179222

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Lorenzo Girardi brings together themes of Europe, phenomenology and politics to reveal the relevance of Edmund Husserl and Jan Patočka's works for contemporary political issues. Addressing the concept of crisis in Europe, this book presents an agonistic conception of liberal democracy based on Patočka's phenomenological concept of problematicity.

Locating Europe

Locating Europe PDF

Author: Rodolphe Gasché

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2021-06-01

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13: 0253054842

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Is the idea of Europe outdated? The concept of European unity, the animating spirit of the European Union, seems increasingly fragile in the face of far-right populist movements. In Locating Europe , Rodolphe Gasché attempts to answer the question of how to think about Europe. Is it a figure, a concept, or an idea? Is there anything still compelling and urgent about the idea of Europe? By looking at phenomenologist and postphenomenological thinkers in the second half of the 20th century, Gasché reveals that Europe is more than just one geographical and cultural entity. The idea of Europe is based on common foundations: a distinctive conception of reason, of self-criticism, of responsibility, freedom, equality, human rights, and democracy, and it is these foundations that are under threat. In Locating Europe: A Figure, a Concept, an Idea? Gasché engages the philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer, Karl Jaspers, Karl Löwith, and others, focuses on the most significant philosophical representations of Europe, and explores the potential, and especially the limits, of the notion of Europe.

The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology

The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology PDF

Author: Edmund Husserl

Publisher: Northwestern University Press

Published: 1970

Total Pages: 452

ISBN-13: 9780810104587

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The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, Husserl's last great work, is important both for its content and for the influence it has had on other philosophers. In this book, which remained unfinished at his death, Husserl attempts to forge a union between phenomenology and existentialism. Husserl provides not only a history of philosophy but a philosophy of history. As he says in Part I, "The genuine spiritual struggles of European humanity as such take the form of struggles between the philosophies, that is, between the skeptical philosophies--or nonphilosophies, which retain the word but not the task--and the actual and still vital philosophies. But the vitality of the latter consists in the fact that they are struggling for their true and genuine meaning and thus for the meaning of a genuine humanity."

Husserl's Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology

Husserl's Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology PDF

Author: Dermot Moran

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2012-08-23

Total Pages: 341

ISBN-13: 1139560360

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The Crisis of the European Sciences is Husserl's last and most influential book, written in Nazi Germany where he was discriminated against as a Jew. It incisively identifies the urgent moral and existential crises of the age and defends the relevance of philosophy at a time of both scientific progress and political barbarism. It is also a response to Heidegger, offering Husserl's own approach to the problems of human finitude, history and culture. The Crisis introduces Husserl's influential notion of the 'life-world' – the pre-given, familiar environment that includes both 'nature' and 'culture' – and offers the best introduction to his phenomenology as both method and philosophy. Dermot Moran's rich and accessible introduction to the Crisis explains its intellectual and political context, its philosophical motivations and the themes that characterize it. His book will be invaluable for students and scholars of Husserl's work and of phenomenology in general.

The Far Reaches

The Far Reaches PDF

Author: Michael D Gubser

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2014-07-30

Total Pages: 359

ISBN-13: 0804792607

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“By restoring morality to phenomenology, and phenomenology to East European politics, Gubser has rewritten the intellectual history of the twentieth century.” —Samuel Moyn, author of Liberalism Against Itself When future historians chronicle the twentieth century, they will see phenomenology as one of the preeminent social and ethical philosophies of its age. The phenomenological movement not only produced systematic reflection on common moral concerns such as distinguishing right from wrong and explaining the status of values; it also called on philosophy to renew European societies facing crisis, an aim that inspired thinkers in interwar Europe as well as later communist bloc dissidents. Despite this legacy, phenomenology continues to be largely discounted as esoteric and solipsistic, the last gasp of a Cartesian dream to base knowledge on the isolated rational mind. Intellectual histories tend to cite Husserl’s epistemological influence on philosophies like existentialism and deconstruction without considering his social or ethical imprint. And while a few recent scholars have begun to note phenomenology’s wider ethical resonance, especially in French social thought, its image as stubbornly academic continues to hold sway. The Far Reaches challenges that image by tracing the first history of phenomenological ethics and social thought in Central Europe, from its founders Franz Brentano and Edmund Husserl through its reception in East Central Europe by dissident thinkers such as Jan Patocka, Karol Wojtyla (Pope John Paul II), and Václav Havel. “In his fascinating and elegantly written book, Michael Gubser leads us away from intellectual history’s traditional stomping grounds in France, Germany, and the United States, and focuses on the understudied Eastern bloc.” —Edward Baring, Modern Intellectual History

Europe (in Theory)

Europe (in Theory) PDF

Author: Roberto M. Dainotto

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2007-01-09

Total Pages: 283

ISBN-13: 0822389622

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Europe (in Theory) is an innovative analysis of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ideas about Europe that continue to inform thinking about culture, politics, and identity today. Drawing on insights from subaltern and postcolonial studies, Roberto M. Dainotto deconstructs imperialism not from the so-called periphery but from within Europe itself. He proposes a genealogy of Eurocentrism that accounts for the way modern theories of Europe have marginalized the continent’s own southern region, portraying countries including Greece, Italy, Spain, and Portugal as irrational, corrupt, and clan-based in comparison to the rational, civic-minded nations of northern Europe. Dainotto argues that beginning with Montesquieu’s The Spirit of Laws (1748), Europe not only defined itself against an “Oriental” other but also against elements within its own borders: its South. He locates the roots of Eurocentrism in this disavowal; internalizing the other made it possible to understand and explain Europe without reference to anything beyond its boundaries. Dainotto synthesizes a vast array of literary, philosophical, and historical works by authors from different parts of Europe. He scrutinizes theories that came to dominate thinking about the continent, including Montesquieu’s invention of Europe’s north-south divide, Hegel’s “two Europes,” and Madame de Staël’s idea of opposing European literatures: a modern one from the North, and a pre-modern one from the South. At the same time, Dainotto brings to light counter-narratives written from Europe’s margins, such as the Spanish Jesuit Juan Andrés’s suggestion that the origins of modern European culture were eastern rather than northern and the Italian Orientalist Michele Amari’s assertion that the South was the cradle of a social democracy brought to Europe via Islam.