This volume articulates and develops new research questions and original insights regarding the philosophical dialogue between Hegel’s philosophy, his heritage, and contemporary phenomenology, including, among others, Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Ricoeur. The collection discusses methodological questions concerning the relevance of Hegel’s philosophy for contemporary phenomenology, addressing core issues revolving around the key concepts of history, being, science, subjectivity, and dialectic. The volume fills a gap in historiography, expanding the knowledge of the impact of Hegel's philosophy on contemporary philosophy and raising (...) new questions on the transformation of transcendental philosophy in post-Kantian philosophy. The contributions gathered in this volume shed new light on issues related to the problem of scientific method in philosophy, on the philosophy of history, as well as on the dimension of subjectivity. By providing critical insights into Hegel’s philosophy and contemporary phenomenology, the book opens up new research perspectives recommended to philosophers and scholars of different traditions, especially classical German philosophy, phenomenology, and history of Western philosophy. (shrink)

The Critique of Pure Reason—Kant’s First Critique—is one of the most studied texts in intellectual history, but as Alfredo Ferrarin points out in this radically original book, most of that study has focused only on very select parts. Likewise, Kant’s oeuvre as a whole has been compartmentalized, the three Critiques held in rigid isolation from one another. Working against the standard reading of Kant that such compartmentalization has produced, The Powers of Pure Reason explores forgotten parts of the (...) First Critique in order to find an exciting, new, and ultimately central set of concerns by which to read all of Kant’s works. Ferrarin blows the dust off of two egregiously overlooked sections of the First Critique—the Transcendental Dialectic and the Doctrine of Method. There he discovers what he argues is the Critique’s greatest achievement: a conception of the unity of reason and an exploration of the powers it has to reach beyond itself and legislate over the world. With this in mind, Ferrarin dismantles the common vision of Kant as a philosopher writing separately on epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics and natural teleology, showing that the three Critiques are united by this underlying theme: the autonomy and teleology of reason, its power and ends. The result is a refreshing new view of Kant, and of reason itself. (shrink)

Husserl on the Ego and its Eidos (Cartesian Meditations, IV) ALFREDO FERRARIN THE THEORY OF the intentionality of consciousness is essential for Husserl's philosophy, and in particular for his mature theory of the ego. But it runs into serious difficulties when it has to account for consciousness's transcendental constitution of its own reflective experience and its relation to immanent time. This intricate knot, the inseparability of time and constitution, is most visibly displayed in Husserl's writings from the 192os (...) up to the notion of the eidos ego in the fourth Cartesian Meditation. In this paper I want to dwell on the most problematic aspects of this theory. After a few preliminary remarks about the intentionality of consciousness (sec- tion 1), I try to place the theory of the substrate of habitualities in the context of Husserl's evolution on the issue of the reflection of the ego on itself (section ~). I briefly follow the threads of Husserl's shifting position from the Logical Investi- gat/ons and Ideas I to Ideas II, the Cartesian Meditations and the Cr/s/s. I indicate Husserl's works are quoted with the following abbreviations: CM = Cartesiani.~he Meditationen, Husserliana Bd. I, hrsg. v. S. Strasser (Den Haag, 195o); Carte- s/an M~, trans. D. Cairns (Dordrecht, 196o ) SW = Husserl, Shorter Works, ed. P. McCormick and F. Elliston (Notre Dame, 198a) IZ = Zur Phttnomenologie des inneren Zeilheun~tseim (z 893-z 917), Husserliana Bd. X, hrsg. v. R. Boehm (Den Haag, 1966 ) Ideen I = ldeen zu einer reinen Ph~nomenologie und ph~nomenologischen Philosophic, Husserliana Bd. III, hrsg. v. W. Biemel (Den Haag, t95o); Ideas I, trans. F. Kersten (The Hague, Boston, Lancaster, s983) ldeen// = ld., Hussefliana Bd. IV, hrsg. v. M. Biemel (Den Haag, 1952); Ideas I1, trans. R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer (Dordrecht, Boston, London, x 989) FTL = Forma/e und transzendenta~ Log/k, Husserliana Bd. XVII, hrsg. v. P. Janssen (Den Haag, t974) Kr/sh = Kr/s/s der europ~/schen W/ssen~haften, Husserliana Bd. VI, hrsg. v. W. Biemel (Den Haag, 1954) I wish to express my gratitude to Pierre Kerszberg and Alessandra Fussi for their helpful com- ments on an earlier draft of the paper, and to Graham Harman for checking the final version of my English text. [645] 646 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 32:4 OCTOBER 1994 some historical antecedents, in particular Aristotle, of Husserl's theory of abid- ing properties which, as far as I can see, have not been pointed out before. Husserl's Entwicklungsgeschichte on the topic of the pure ego has already been the object of important scholarly works, of which Kern's 1964 Husserl und Kant seems to me the best example. But what the secondary literature does not do is develop thematically the ambiguities of Husserl's definitions of consciousness and temporality in a unitary and comprehensive way. While I follow the lead of Berger, Broekman, Kern, Marbach,' and others, I find that their work does not sufficiently stress the difficulties at the core ofintentionality and reflective time- consciousness. Therefore, although section 2 is a necessary presupposition for drawing some critical conclusions in the final two sections, it does not exhaust my theme. After clarifying the peculiarity of the notions of essence, intuition, tran- scendental and apriori, as well as their irl:educibility to a Kantian meaning, I turn to the "de facto transcendental ego" resulting from eidetic variation (section 3) in order to introduce an examination of temporality. The difficul- ties in the twofold requirement, namely, that consciousness be the identical subject of its Erlebnisse and be synthetically unified in time, concern the unity, primacy, and mutual relation of time and consciousness in the constitution of our experience. They have been heady pointed out by Ricoeur in his commen- tary on the Cartesian Meditations. But what I want to argue in section 4, going beyond Ricoeur's text, is that the tension between temporally constituted and constitutive consciousness in the ego's reflection on its own retentions and protensions does not simply make the question of time ambiguous, but has crucial and problematic bearings on the very definition of consciousness as intentionality. In this respect... -/- . (shrink)

Hegel is, arguably, the most difficult of all philosophers. To find a way into his thought interpreters have usually approached him as though he were developing Kantian and Fichtean themes. This book demonstrates in a systematic way that it makes much more sense to view Hegel's idealism in relation to the metaphysical and epistemological tradition stemming from Aristotle. The book offers an account of Hegel's idealism in light of his interpretation, discussion, assimilation and critique of Aristotle's philosophy. There are explorations (...) of Hegelian and Aristotelian views of system and history; being, metaphysics, logic, and truth; nature and subjectivity; spirit, knowledge, and self-knowledge; ethics and politics. No serious student of Hegel can afford to ignore this major interpretation. It will also be of interest in such fields as political science and the history of ideas. (shrink)

In this article I discuss the primacy that, following Sellars, Robert Brandom ascribes to the intersubjective and discursive space of reasons over all other processes in which the human mind is involved. I will compare Brandom’s perspective with that of the situated approach to the study of mind. At first, my aim is to show that the origin of intentionality has to be found in the sphere of sentience and the living body. Second, by comparing the enactivist account of language (...) that derives from the naturalization of Husserl’s phenomenology with the neo-pragmatist approach to the linguistic turn, I argue for a heuristic primacy owing to the linguistic practice of giving and asking for reasons. This allows me to reflect with a meta-philosophical approach on to what extent two families of views such as pragmatism and phenomenology, with their different variants, interact in the attempt to blend things together, i.e., nature and culture; mind and world; and what happens inside the human body and what happens outside it. (shrink)

In this article, I adopt the problem of world-experience as a clue to tackling the issue of the transformation of Husserl’s phenomenology in the United States. Starting from Landgrebe’s article on the world as a phenomenological problem I distinguish those thinkers who see in Husserl’s treatment of the life-world the fundamental issue of phenomenology from those who, by contrast, describe phenomenology as an analysis of the given experience. Through a comparison between Farber and Schutz, I reflect on the ways to (...) conciliate the phenomenological method with a natural view of the world, and finally, referring to Gurwitsch’s perspective, I ask to what extent this sort of mundane phenomenology could deal with constitutive analyses. (shrink)

In the present essay, I will compare Hegel’s and Husserl’s conceptions of the history of philosophy. I will show how Hegel and Husserl recast Kant’s idea of a philosophizing history of philosophy in two different ways. Both Hegel and Husserl share the conviction that reason unfolds itself in history. Nonetheless, whereas Hegel identifies the history of philosophy with the contingent manifestation of the self-actualization of the Idea, Husserl develops a critical history of ideas. On the one hand, Hegel conceives of (...) the history of philosophy as a complex whole and each determinate philosophy as interpreting a specific articulation of the logical deduction of thought-determinations. On the other hand, perhaps influenced by Windelband, Husserl appropriates the Kantian thesis according to which the objects of the history of reason represent specific constellations of problems. (shrink)

In the present essay I would like to explore the different meanings of the emotion named Schadenfreude from a perspective integrating Plato’s and Aristotle’s moral philosophy with the analyses of phenomenological anthropologists such as Scheler, Plessner and Blumenberg. In the first half of my essay I will focus on Aristotle’s distinction between, on the one hand, a pleasure at another’s misfortune which does not necessarily obstruct pity in the opposite position and provides relief from indignation, and a malicious pleasure at (...) another’s misfortune understood as the opposite of envy. In the second half of the essay I will examine the link between the joy involved in Schadenfreude and laughter by asking whether and to what extent this contemplative emotion contributes to the emergence of a theoretical attitude. (shrink)

For Kant as for Hegel method is not a structure or procedure imported into philosophy from without, as, e.g. a mathematical demonstration in modern physics or in the proof-structure of philosophies such as Spinoza’s or Wolff’s. For both Hegel and Kant method is the arrangement that reason gives its contents and cognitions; for both, that is, method and object do not fall asunder, unlike in all disciplines other than philosophy. For Kant method is the design and plan of the whole, (...) the scientific form that guides the organization of cognitions (KrV A 707/B 736, Ak 24, 780). Likewise, Hegel writes that method is the consciousness of the form of its inner movement (WL 1, 49, SL 53, W 3 47, PhS 28). Unfortunately, Hegel never considers Kant an example or a precursor or a positive role model. It is important to ask why Hegel never takes seriously Kant’s Doctrine of Method. Why, if he shares so many central points with the Architectonic of the first Critique, does he never acknowledge Kant as a possible ally? Why does he misunderstand Kant on analysis and synthesis as he does? These are some of the questions I plan to discuss in this paper. (shrink)

In this article, I propose a comparison between Natorp, Husserl, and Sellars that has a twofold aim. First, I ask to what extent Sellars’s perspective can be considered to be Neo-Kantian. Second, I demonstrate that the point of divergence among these three thinkers does not have to do with the role they ascribe to givenness in knowledge, but with the way they conceive the activity of thinking. Focusing on Husserl’s reading of Natorp’s theses concerning the subjective and objective ground of (...) knowledge, I show that both Natorp and Husserl agree with Sellars on the limits of a positivistic and empiricist perspective that relies on what is given in perception for the justification of one’s epistemic beliefs. On the other hand, the differences between the three thinkers emerge as soon as we consider how they attempt to integrate the spontaneity of thinking into the sphere of intuition from a renewed Kantian perspective. (shrink)

In this paper, I shall investigate Edith Stein’s account of empathic subjectivity in light of the “affective turn” that characterises the current literature on Stein’s phenomenology. I shall argue that Stein develops an original approach to empathy that is not restricted to the model of “direct access” to others. I shall claim that, for Stein, empathy is an attitude that shares significant similarities with retention and imagining-how. More precisely, I shall show that the significance of empathy lies in striving to (...) respond appropriately to the other through the constitution of types or examples that involve features inherent in personality and values. (shrink)

In this article, I will explore the enactive approach to science and the pragmatic motifs that guide it. In particular, in the first half of the article, I will discuss to what extent enactivism can be seen as a philosophy of nature, and by comparing it with Sellars’s interpretation of the conflict between the manifest and the scientific image of humans in the world, I will focus on the view of nature that enactivism defends. In the second part, I will (...) compare the enactive approach with Dewey’s conception of the organism-environment interaction by focusing on the underlying similarities between their views of evolution and their way of seeing science as the most sophisticated expression of an organism’s sense-making. (shrink)

European Journal of Philosophy, Volume 30, Issue 2, Page 725-739, June 2022.

Name der Zeitschrift: Kant Yearbook Jahrgang: 8 Heft: 1 Seiten: 1-16.

With the exception of James Ostrow’s 1990 study, social sensitivity has received scarce attention in philosophy, whilst it has become an important area of research in social and clinical psychology, where it is commonly known as interpersonal sensitivity. The latter is usually understood as a form of social skill to appropriately recognise and decode the appearance and behaviour of others. However, this view suffers from conceptual limitations in that it tends to reduce social sensitivity to standardised skilful behaviour. Drawing on (...) Husserl’s phenomenology of perception, I disambiguate social sensitivity from social skills, arguing that the former builds on the receptivity of habit to beliefs and cognitive dissonance. In this revised sense, social sensitivity informs processes of attitude change that challenge ingrained dispositions and potentially defy social codes and expectations. (shrink)

In the present article, I will discuss Lotze’s attempt to “sublate” Hegel’s conception of logic in his Logic of 1874. I will demonstrate that Lotze operates as a filter by recasting many Hegelian notions in a way that will influence the 20th-century philosophers in a decisive manner. In the first section, I will focus on how, according to both Hegel and Lotze, the relationship between representation and language conditions the transition from sensible impressions to concepts. In the second section, I (...) will discuss Lotze's re-elaboration of Hegel's idea of the objectivity of thought based on his notion of validity. In the third part, I will finally show how Lotze's revaluation of the function of imagination in the domain of “logic” allows us to re-discover the early modern idea of logic understood as an ‘ars inveniendi’. (shrink)

Riassunto: Il 12 e il 13 gennaio 2017 si è svolto a Pisa un seminario di studi su La filosofia di Massimo Barale. Di seguito si presenta un resoconto degli interventi tenuti in quell’occasione dagli ultimi allievi di Massimo Barale e da alcuni degli studenti che hanno seguito i suoi ultimi corsi. Gli interventi abbracciano gran parte degli interessi e degli studi di Massimo Barale, dalla critica al metodo adottato da Kant nella Critica della ragion pura alla valorizzazione della prospettiva (...) della Critica del Giudizio condotta sulla scia dell’influenza di Eric Weil, dalla sua originale interpretazione delle prospettive dell’idealismo tedesco e della fenomenologia di Husserl e di Sartre sino al suo confronto con le filosofie della mente, per concludersi con una discussione dei limiti e delle potenzialità della rivalutazione di Barale del punto di vista trascendentale in filosofia. Parole chiave: Massimo Barale; Filosofia trascendentale; Idealismo tedesco; Fenomenologia; Filosofia della mente Massimo Barale’s Philosophy: In the following article, I will provide an account of the conference on The Philosophy of Massimo Barale, held in Pisa 12-13 January 2017. Younger scholars who had studied with Professor Barale or attended his last classes discussed Barale’s work and ideas. Some of them analyzed Barale’s criticism of Kant’s method in Critique of Pure Reason and his appreciation – in line with Eric Weil – for the perspective of the Critique of Judgement. Other scholars explored Barale’s interpretations of Classical German Philosophy and Phenomenology. One talk dealt with Barale’s discussion of the perspective of philosophy of mind and the last three talks focused on the limits and the potential of Barale’s revaluation of a transcendental point of view in philosophy. Keywords: Massimo Barale; Transcendental Philosophy; German Idealism; Phenomenology; Philosophy of Mind. (shrink)

This paper deals with the role played by science in the elaboration of a philosophical image of nature. In particular, I will consider two alternative approaches. On the one hand, I will look at Sellars’ distinction between the manifest image of man, stemmed from common sense framework, and the scientific image, which involves the postulation of imperceptible entities to explain the behaviour of perceptible things. On the other hand, I will focus on Merleau-Ponty’s redefinition of the Husserlian distinction between the (...) natural dimension of lifeworld and the artificial horizon of scientific attitude. I will show that Sellars’ scientific realism turns out to be a mere reduction of Nature to complexes of physical particles; by contrast, Merleau-Ponty’s emergentism describes Nature as an articulated structure divided in different layers, each of them understood as a self-organizing totality. Accordingly, I claim that Merleau-Ponty’s rehabilitation of Philosophy of Nature, as an attempt to think the complexity of reality, becomes an inquiry on the way through which “Science” arises from the symbolic and virtual behaviour of that living organism called “man”. (shrink)

In this article, I will explore the enactive approach to science and the pragmatic motifs that guide it. In particular, in the first half of the article, I will discuss to what extent enactivism can be seen as a philosophy of nature, and by comparing it with Sellars’s interpretation of the conflict between the manifest and the scientific image of humans in the world, I will focus on the view of nature that enactivism defends. In the second part, I will (...) compare the enactive approach with Dewey’s conception of the organism-environment interaction by focusing on the underlying similarities between their views of evolution and their way of seeing science as the most sophisticated expression of an organism’s sense-making. (shrink)

What are the different kinds of role played by receptivity and spontaneity in the natural experience? This question will be the clue of the essay. To answer, I will take into account some remarks raised by McDowell in Mind and World. After having shown why spontaneity should be considered as drawn into operation in experience, I will ask where the unconscious activity of conceptual capacities could be grasped. Referring on Hegels Faith and Knowledge, as first step, I will focus on (...) the idea that the blind synthesis of imagination could be identified with the hidden work of pure reason. Consecutively, as second step, by considering what Hegel said in the Phenomenology of Spirit chapter on Sense-certainty and in the Second Preface to Science of Logic, I will delve into Hegels idea that reasons instinct is operative within natural language. My aim is to understand in what a Hegelian radicalization of Kant could consist. (shrink)

In the present article, I will address the question of whether Paul Valéry’s thought can somehow contribute to the recent debate concerning the philosophy of literature. Firstly, I will focus on the idea according to which philosophy can be meant not only as a literary genre but also as an art of thinking. This allows Valéry to state that the poet, too, has a philosophy insofar as he or she is able to think abstractly by practicing his or her own (...) mind. Secondly, following some remarks of Derrida and Rorty, I will discuss Valéry’s idea according to which the philosopher is a philosopher to the extent that he or she forgets that philosophy has to be written. This will lead me to distinguish the peculiar aesthetics of the philosopher as writer from that of the poet. (shrink)

The notion of productive imagination is not only of crucial importance for Kant’s idea of pure reason, and for the unity of our theoretical experience, it is also stunningly seminal for post-Kantian philosophy: think, for instance, of Fichte, Schelling, the German Romantics, and of Hegel’s Glauben und Wissen. For the historian of philosophy, in particular, it is a very intriguing notion. Yet, however fundamental the notion of productive imagination is, it is not easy to determine its precise role in the (...) Critique of Pure Reason; the question of its historical genealogy is even more obscure. (shrink)

This collection offers the first systematic, comparative analysis of Wilfrid Sellars's Pittsburgh school of thought and Husserlian phenomenology. Beginning with an introduction to contemporary philosophical debates about the mind and pragmatism, the essays examine and clarify the discursive divide between analytic and Continental philosophy.

Phenomenology is one of the leading movements in twentieth-century philosophy and continues to exert a strong influence on many contemporary philosophical traditions and investigations. In recent years, phenomenological insights have been increasingly developed in relation to philosophy of illness, disability, race, gender, sexuality, and politics, leading to the emergence of critical phenomenology as a new, prominent field for interdisciplinary research. Magrì and McQueen's Critical Phenomenology: An Introduction is the first book of its kind, addressing the critical questions at the (...) core of both classical and contemporary phenomenology. This book provides a concise, accessible introduction to key areas of phenomenological research, such as intersubjectivity, bodily experience, race, gender, social experience, and political action. In doing so, it demonstrates both the rich history of phenomenology and its continuing philosophical and ethical importance. (shrink)

discussion of contemporary theories of self-consciousness.

: This paper aims to situate the roles of attention and habit in contemporary approaches to embodied cognition with particular regard to the conceptualisation of affordances. While Chemero has argued that affordances have a relational character that rules out dispositions, Rietveld and Kiverstein have suggested that engaging with affordances amounts to exercising skills. By critically reconsidering the distinction between dispositions and abilities proposed by Chemero, as well as the standard theory of habit that underpins accounts of skilful coping, I propose (...) to disambiguate habit from skill and to reassess the phenomenology of dispositions. Dispositions are motivational factors that depend on two elements: sensitivity to context clues, which is regulated by habit and attention, and the positionality of the subject, which is inseparable from context-awareness. Drawing on Husserl’s and Merleau-Ponty’s insights, I argue that both and can accommodate a dispositional view of affordances. Keywords: Habit; Attention; Affordances; Dispositions; Phenomenology; Embodied Cognition Situare attenzione e abitudine nel panorama delle affordance Riassunto: L’articolo mira a situare i ruoli svolti dall’attenzione e dall’abitudine negli approcci contemporanei all’ embodied cognition, con particolare attenzione alla concettualizzazione delle affordance. Se, un da un lato, Chemero ha sostenuto che l’ affordance ha un carattere relazionale, che esclude le disposizioni, Rietveld e Kiverstein, dall’altro lato, mantengono che il coinvolgimento nell’ affordance corrisponde all’esercizio di abilità pratiche. Nel riconsiderare criticamente la distinzione fra disposizioni e abilità avanzata da Chemero, così come la concezione standard dell’abitudine che è alla base delle teorie di skilful coping, propongo di disambiguare l’abitudine dalle abilità e di rivalutare la fenomenologia delle disposizioni. Queste ultime sono elementi motivazionali che dipendono da due fattori: sensibilità verso il contesto, che è governata dall’abitudine e dall’attenzione, e la posizionalità del soggetto, la quale è inseparabile dalla consapevolezza del contesto. Basandosi su Husserl e Merleau-Ponty, l’articolo difende l’ipotesi che sia che possono soddisfare una concezione disposizionale dell’ affordance. Parole chiave: Abitudine; Attenzione; Disposizioni; Fenomenologia; Cognizione incarnata. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper reconsiders Heather Battaly’s argument that empathy is not a virtue. Like Battaly, I argue that empathy is a disposition that includes elements of virtue acquisition, but is not in itself a virtue in the Aristotelian sense. Unlike Battaly, however, I propose a distinction between care and respect. Drawing on Darwall’s view of recognition respect as well as on phenomenologically inspired views of empathy, I argue that respect can be regarded as the moral feeling that is distinctive of empathy. (...) In my view, the feeling of respect towards another’s situated experience grants epistemic dignity, which is the recognition of the intrinsic significance of subjective experience. By way of conclusion, I suggest that the relation between empathy and respect can be relevant for an account of vulnerability that is not opposed to autonomy. (shrink)