Merleau-Ponty's categories of the visible and the invisible are investigated afresh and with originality in this penetrating collection of literary and ...

This volume marks a phase of accomplishment in the work of the World Phenomenology Institute in unfolding a dialogue between Occidental phenomenology and the Oriental/Chinese classic philosophy. Going beyond the stage of reception, the Oriental scholars show in this collection of studies their perspicacity and philosophical skills in comparing the concepts, ideas, the vision of classic phenomenology and Chinese philosophy toward uncovering their common intuitions. This in-depth probing aims at reviving Occidental thinking, reaching to its intuitive sources, as well as (...) providing Chinese thinking with a precise apparatus of expression toward its rejuvenation in a new significance. Studies by Korean and Chinese phenomenologists: Nam-In Lee, Inhui Park, Benjamin I. Schwartz, Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, Sitansu Ray, Zhang Xian, Zhang Qingxiong, Tsung-I Dow, Ashok K. Gangadean, Yushiro Takei, Louise Sunderarajan, Gregory Tropea, James Sellmann, Tyong Bok Rhie, Sang-Ki Kim, Daniel Zelinski, Qingjie Wang, Calvin O. Schrag, Jung-Sun Han. (shrink)

Through mystery, literature reveals to us the Great Unknown. While we are absorbed by the matters at hand with the present enactment of our life, groping for clues to handle them, it is through literature that we discover the hidden strings underlying their networks. Hence our fascination with literature. But there is more. The creative act of the human being, its proper focus, holds the key to the Sezam of life: to the great metaphysical/ontopoietic questions which literature may disclose. First, (...) it leads us to the sublimal grounds of transformation in the human soul, source of the specifically human significance of life (Analecta Husserliana, Volume III, XIX, XXIII, XXVII) Second, it leads us to the unveiling of the hidden workings of life in the twilight of knowing in a dialectic between The Visible and the Invisible, (Volume LXXV, 2002, Analecta Husserliana) down to the ontopoietic truth. (Volume LXXVI, 2002, Analecta Husserliana) This prying into the unknown which provokes the human being as he or she attempts to conquer, step by step, a space of existence, finds its culmination in the phenomenon of mystery as the subject of the present collection. Its formulation brings us to the greatest question of all: the enigmatic solidarity -in-distinctiveness of human cognition and existence. Papers are written by: Tony E. Afejuku, Gary Backhaus, Paul G. Beidler, Matthew J. Duffy, Raffaela Giovagnoli, Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei, Matti Itkonen, Lawrence Kimmel, Catherine Malloy, Vladimir L. Marchenkov, Nancy Mardas, Howard Pearce, Bernadette Prochaska, Victor Gerald Rivas, M.J. Sahlani, Dennis Skocz, Jadwiga S. Smith, Mara Stafecka, Max Statkiewicz, Mariola Sulkowska, Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, Leon U. Weinman, Tim Weiss. (shrink)

The contemporary revival of interest in the Sacred as a category of philosophico-religious reflection here finds a radical reversal of the traditional direction, taking the Sacred as the starting point of the itinerary toward the Divine. The wide variety of essays contained in this volume attempt to ground philosophy of the Sacred and the Divine in phenomenological evidence. Though employing different methodologies, the contributors register by and large the contribution of A-T. Tymieniecka's phenomenology of life in providing a significant 20th (...) century vision for the accomplishment of this task. Its pursuit finds here expression in philosophical, historical, literary and political explorations leading to construing phenomenology of the Sacred as a prerequisite to the investigation of the Divine. The contributors to this extraordinary collection are: C. Bédard, A. Ales Bello, Gerard Bucher, D. Chidester, D. Conchi, M. Kronegger, S. Laycock, Ph. Liverziani, J.N. Mohanty, E. Moutsopoulos, A.M. Olson, Y. Park, G. Penzo, B. Ross, C. Osowiec Ruoff, Th. Ryba, J. Smith, A-T. Tymieniecka and E. Wyschogrod. (shrink)

Fifty years after the death of Edmund Husserl, the main founder of the phenomenological current of thought, we present to the public a four book collection showing in an unprecedented way how Husserl's aspiration to inspire the entire universe of knowledge and scholarship has now been realized. These volumes display for the first time the astounding expansion of phenomenological philosophy throughout the world and the enormous wealth and variety of ideas, insights, and approaches it has inspired. The basic commitment to (...) phenomenological concerns found in all this variety makes this collection a most signifi cant historical document. This second volume of the collection bears witness to a deliberate shift of attention from the earlier to the later phase of Husserl's reflections. We see how his issues - intersubjectivity, ethics, human encounter, the societal world, empathy, the sphere of the self, and the surpassing of dichotomies (bodylpsyche, etc.) - are now at the center of attention in the human sciences. Among the authors are H. Tellenbach, A. Rigobello, C. Balzer, C. Bjurvill, V. Molchanov, E. Syristova, O. Balaban, R. Boehm, M. Sancipriano, O. M. Anwar, Y. Okamoto, B. Holyst, T. Sodeika, and M. De Negri. The studies were gathered at the programs held by The World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and Learning in the commemorative year 1988/1989, chiefly at the First World Congress of Phenomenology at Santiago de Compos tela, Spain, with the aim of assessing the current state of phenomenology. A-T. T. (shrink)

Medicine's crucial concern with health is perennial, but its reflection, concepts, means change with the advance of science and social life. We present here a fascinating panorama of current medical discussions with their philosophical underpinnings, and queries as they have evolved from the past. The role of Tymieniecka's phenomenology of life is brought forth as the system of philosophical reference.

To introduce this collection of research studies, which stem from the pro grams conducted by The World Phenomenology Institute, we need say a few words about our aims and work. This will bring to light the significance of the present volume. The phenomenological philosophy is an unprejudiced study of experience in its entire range: experience being understood as yielding objects. Experi ence, moreover, is approached in a specific way, such a way that it legitima tizes itself naturally in immediate evidence. (...) As such it offers a unique ground for philosophical inquiry. Its basic condition, however, is to legitimize its validity. In this way it allows a dialogue to unfold among various philosophies of different methodologies and persuasions, so that their basic assumptions and conceptions may be investigated in an objective fashion. That is, instead of comparing concepts, we may go below their differences to seek together what they are meant to grasp. We may in this way come to the things them selves, which are the common objective of all philosophy, or what the great Chinese philosopher Wang Yang Ming called "the investigation of things". It is in this spirit that the Institute's programs include a "cross-cultural" dialogue meant to bring about a profound communication among philosophers in their deepest concerns. Rising above artificial cultural confinements, such dialogues bring scholars, thinkers and human beings together toward a truly human community of minds. Our Institute unfolds one consistent academic program. (shrink)

This book celebrates the investigative power of phenomenology to explore the phenomenological sense of space and time in conjunction with the phenomenology of intentionality, the invisible, the sacred, and the mystical. It examines the course of life through its ontopoietic genesis, opening the cosmic sphere to logos. The work also explores, on the one hand, the intellectual drive to locate our cosmic position in the universe and, on the other, the pull toward the infinite. It intertwines science and its grounding (...) principles with imagination in order to make sense of the infinite. This work is the first of a two-part work that contains papers presented at the 62nd International Congress of Phenomenology, The Forces of the Cosmos and the Ontopoietic Genesis of Life, held in Paris, France, August 2012. It features the work of scholars in such diverse disciplines as biology, anthropology, pedagogy, and psychology who philosophically investigate the cosmic origins of beingness. Coverage in this first part includes: Toward a New Enlightenment: Metaphysics as Philosophy of Life, Transformation in Phenomenology: Husserl and Tymieniecka, Biologically Organized Quantum Vacuum and the Cosmic Origin of Cellular Life, Plotinus "Enneads" and Self-Creation, The Creative Potential of Humor, Transcendental Morphology - A Phenomenological Interpretation of Human and Non-Human Cosmos, and Cognition and Emotion: From Dichotomy to Ambiguity.. (shrink)

Surging from the ontopoietic vital timing of life, human self-consciousness prompts the innermost desire to rise above its brute facts. Imaginatio creatrix inspires us to fabulate these facts into events and plots with personal significance attempting to delineate a life-course in life-stories within the ever-flowing stream – existence. Seeking their deep motivations, causes and concatenations, we fabulate relatively stabilized networks of interconnecting meaning – history. But to understand the meaning and sense of these networks’ reconfigurations call for the purpose and (...) telos of our endless undertaking; they remain always incomplete, carried onwards with the current of life, while fluctuating with personal experience in the play of memory. Facts and life stories, subjective desires and propensities, the circumambient world in its historical moves, creative logos and mythos, personal freedom and inward stirrings thrown in an enigmatic interplay, prompt our imperative thirst for the meaning of this course, its purpose and its fulfillment – the sense of it all. To disentangle all this animates the passions of the literary genius. The focus of this collection is to isolate the main arteries running through the intermingled forces prompting our quest to endow life with meaning. Papers by: Jadwiga Smith, Lawrence Kimmel, Alira Ashvo-Munoz, William D. Melaney, Imafedia Okhamafe, Michel Dion, Franck Dalmas, Ludmila Molodkina, Victor Gerald Rivas, Rebecca M. Painter, Matti Itkonen, Raymond J. Wilson III, Christopher S. Schreiner, Bruce Ross, Bernadette Prochaska, Tsung-I Dow, Jerre Collins, Cezary Jozef Olbromski, Victor Kocay, Roberto Verolini. (shrink)

By proposing the Microcosm and Macrocosm analogy for dialogue between Islamic Philosophy and Occidental Phenomenology, the authors of this volume are reviving the perennial positioning of the human condition in the play of forces within and without the human being. This theme has run from Plato through the Middle Ages, Renaissance and Modernity, and has been ignored by contemporaries. It now acquires a new pertinence and striking significance due to the scientific discoveries into the "infinitely small" in life, on the (...) one hand, and the prodigious technological discoveries of the "infinitely great" on the other. Both open up undreamt-of prospects for the continuing conquest of cosmic forces. The human person – thrown into turmoil by the new approaches to life and needing to acquire new habits of mind, having lost security of all beliefs – desperately seeks a new clarification of the Human Condition within the unity of everything-there-is, of cosmic forces, and of his destiny. The dialogue between Islamic Philosophy and phenomenology of life can show the way. Papers by: Gholam-Reza A'awani, Mehdi Aminrazavi, Roza Davari Ardakani, Mohammad Azadpur, Gary Backhaus, Marina Banchetti-Robino, William Chittick, Seyed Mostafa Muhaghghegh Damad, Golamhossein Ebrahimi Dinani, Nader El-Bizri, Kathleen Haney, Salahaddin Khalilov, Sayyid Mohammad Khamenei, Mahmoud Khatami, Mieczyslaw Pawel Migon, Nikolay Milkov, Sachiko Murata, Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, Daniela Verducci. (shrink)

What is truth? This fascinating spectrum of studies into the various rationalities of our human dealings with life - psychological, aesthetic, economic, spiritual - reveals their joints and calls for a new approach to truth. Putting both classical and contemporary conceptions aside, we find the primogenital ground of truth in the networks of correspondences, adequations, relevancies, and rationales at work in life's becoming. Does this plurivocal differentiation mean that the status of truth is relative? On the contrary, submits Anna- (...) class='Hi'>Teresa Tymieniecka, given the universal significance of the crucial instrument of the logos of life, "truth is the vortex of life's ontopoietic unfolding". (shrink)

Prompted and ever diversified by the specifically human interrogative logos, scientific inquiries seek a common system of links in order to mutually confirm and rectify their results. Coming closer and closer to phenomenology, the sciences of life find the common ground of the reality in the ontopoiesis of life. Could it not be that the interrogative logos of science, participating in human creative inventiveness will bring together also the divergent scientific methods in a common network? A network which comprises natural (...) processes, societal sharing-in-life, and existential communication. Papers by: Gary Backhaus, Anjana Bhattacharjee, Simon Du Plock, Ignacy Fiut, Maria Golaszewska, Wendy C. Hamblet, Alexandr Kouzmin, Nikolay Kozhevnikov, Olga Louchakova, Jarlath Mc Kenna, Amy Louise Miller, Aria Omrani, Arthur Piper, Leszek Pyra, W. Kim Rogers, A.L. Samian, Camilo Serrano Bonitto, Natalia Smirnova, Eva Syristova, Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, Roberto Verolini, Eldon C. Wait, Leo Zonneveld. (shrink)

This volume represents the first which interfaces with astronomy as the fulcrum of the sciences. It gives full expression to the human passion for the skies. Advancing human civilization has unfolded and matured this passion into the comprehensive science of astronomy. Advancing science’s quest for the first principles of existence meets the ontopoietic generative logos of life, the focal point of the New Enlightenment. It presents numerous perspectives illustrating how the interplay between human beings and the celestial realm has informed (...) civilizational trends. Scholars and philosophers debate in physics and biology, the findings of which are opening a more inclusive, wider picture of the universe. The different models of the universal order and of life here presented, all aiming at the first principles of existence—accord with the phenomenology/ontopoiesis of life within the logos-prompted primogenital stream of becoming and action, which points to a future of progressing culture. (shrink)

"Does the World exist?" There would be no reason to resurrect this question of modernity from its historical oblivion were it not for the fact that recent evolution in science and technology, impregnating culture, makes us wonder about the nature of reality, of the world we are living in, and of our status as living beings within it. Thus great metaphysical subjacent queries are forcefully revived, calling for new investigations to proceed in the light of the innumerable novel insights of (...) science. This collection presents a wealth of material toward an elaboration of a new metaphysical groundwork of the ontopoiesis/ phenomenology of life sought to effect such investigations. The classic postulates of the metaphysics of reality, those of necessity and certainty here find a new formulation. Away from sclerotized ontological and cognitive assumptions and congenial with the views of contemporary science, the understanding of reality, of our world of life, and of ourselves within it is to be sought in the existential/ontopoietic ciphering of life (Tymieniecka). (shrink)