Abstract

The object of the study is Meaning in Philosophy. Our purpose is to follow, step by step, the elaboration and constitution of Meaning in Husserl, the subsequent reactions of Heidegger, then, Derrida. ;Husserl views meanings as constituted in and by consciousness. Through intuition, consciousness apprehends meanings from things that discovers in them invariable elements. Those invariants are interrelated in judgments that express the validity and truth of the things which, thus, become objective and rational. ;Replacing the things by their relations, Husserl treats meanings as pure ideas, essences that enable him to comprehend reality, including the products of human activity in all necessity. ;According to Heidegger, meanings result from man's situation in a pre-given world. His relations with the environment are significant: they reveal the world to man, man to himself at a certain period in history. Meanings are the expressions of the many possibilities of man, timely actualizing themselves with understanding. ;Meanings are thus existential and historical. In their variety, they represent man's past, present and projected investments for the maintenance, interpretation, and survival of the human world. ;According to Derrida, our inherited meanings have been elaborated in a specific way: the elimination or exclusion, in principle, of certain aspects of reality judged irrelevant. The next step is to reappropriate those elements that, in an underhanded fashion, become also constitutive of meanings. The hierarchy converts meanings into values. ;Derrida's main focus is the veridical rehabilitation in our communal relations and in our institutions of the Other, who is always characterized by his difference. ;The results of the study point to an ineradicable truth: for us, human beings, the places of elaboration and constitution of meanings are numerous and multifarious. To privilege exclusively one domain of meanings over the others is tantamount to causing a disequilibrium by truncating human experience.