In speaking of the social dimensions of human experience, we inevitably become involved in the debate regarding how they are to be studied. Should we embrace the first-person perspective, which is that of the phenomenologists, and begin with the experiences composing our directly experienced lifeworld? Alternately, should we follow the lead of natural scientists and take up the third-person perspective? This is the perspective that asserts that we must begin with what is true for everyone, i.e., with what is available (...) to both me and Others. Both perspectives are one sided in that each presupposes the other for its intelligibility. The third-person perspective is Cartesian and, as I show, privileges space, while the first-person perspective is social in Levinas’s sense and presupposes time. Our reality, I argue, embraces both perspectives and is, in fact, set by their intertwining. (shrink)

Hegel’s philosophy had a decisive role in the development of Eugen Fink’s thought, by suggesting the conceptual means to elaborate a third phenomenological paradigm beyond Husserl and Heidegger. In particular, this applies to the cosmological ontology that Fink developed after World War II, aimed at overcoming metaphysics while combining ontology with the rigorous method of phenomenology and a cosmological interpretation of being. In this regard, Hegel appeared to Fink as the first Western philosopher who had conceived the ground of beings (...) without basing on ontic models, that is, as dynamical genesis of the structure of the world and human experience. The aim of the paper is to deepen Fink’s interpretation of Hegel’s philosophy and to show how (and to what extent) Hegel is not a metaphysical thinker in this perspective. What is Hegel’s conception of being? Fink’s work Sein und Mensch provides responses to this question. (shrink)

Both in its methods and spirit, Kant’s critical philosophy seems the opposite of recent French philosophy. In its deductive approach, it exemplifies a severe rationality; its structures of argument and proof often abstract from our lived experience. The philosophies of Derrida and Levinas, however, attend to such experience. In particular, they are sensitive to precisely those aspects of it that seem to exceed our conceptual abilities. Thus, for Levinas the face of the other manifests an “inabsorbable alterity.” It cannot be (...) integrated.. (shrink)

Weil aber das volle Wesen der Wahrheit das Unwesen einschließt und allem zuvor als Verbergung waltet, ist die Philosophie als das Erfragen dieser Wahrheit in sich zwiespaltig. Ihr Denken ist die Gelassenheit der Milde, die der Verborgenheit des Seienden im Ganzen sich nicht versagt. Ihr Denken ist zumal die Ent-schlossenheit der Strange, die nicht die Verbergung sprengt, aber ihr unversehrtes Wesen ins Offene des Bergreifens und so in ihre eigene Wahrheit nötigt.

Hegels Werk, für Eugen Fink die Vollendung der abendländischen Metaphysik, dient ihm als Leitfaden zur Erörterung der universalontologischen Grundbegriffe. Er bedenkt eigens und ausdrücklich die prinzipielle Weite von Hegels Seinsbegriffen, indem er dessen Begriff der Erfahrung durchspricht. In der Auseinandersetzung mit der Hegel-Deutung Heideggers verweist Fink auf das Ungedachte in Hegels Grundbegriffen und erarbeitet auf diesem Wege seine eigene kosmologische Dimension der Seinsfrage.