Husserl saw the Cartesian critique of scepticism as one of the eternal merits of Descartes’ philosophy. In doing so, he accepted the legitimacy of the very idea of a universal doubt, and sought to present as an alternative to it a renewed, specifically phenomenological concept of self-evidence, making it possible to obtain an unshakable foundation for the edifice of knowledge. This acceptance of the skeptical problem underlies his entire conceptual framework, both before and after the transcendental turn, and especially the (...) immanence/transcendence distinction, i.e., the very basis of intentionality. In taking as its starting point an analysis of perception, the article puts forth a certain number of phenomenological arguments in order to put into question the validity of the skeptical problem and, therefore, of the Husserlian conceptual framework; it defends, in the first place, a disjunctive conception of perception and, in the second place, a holism of experience. (shrink)

Taking the problem of perception and illusion as a leading clue, this article presents a new phenomenological approach to perception and the world: holism of experience. It challenges not only Husserl’s transcendentalism, but also what remains of it in Heidegger’s early thought, on the grounds that it is committed to the skeptical inference: Since we can always doubt any perception, we can always doubt perception as a whole. The rejection of such an implicit inference leads to a relational paradigm of (...) Being-in-the-World that differs from Heidegger’s on many points. (shrink)

Contemporary philosophy, from Kant through Bergson and Husserl to Heidegger, has assumed that time must be conceived as a fundamental determination of the subject: Time is not first in things but arises from actions, attitudes, or comportments through which a subject temporalizes mtime, expecting or remembering, anticipating the future or making a decision. Event and Time traces the genesis of this thesis through detailed, rigorous analyses of the philosophy of time in Plato, Aristotle, and Augustine, ultimately showing that, in the (...) development of metaphysics, the understanding of the temporal phenomenon as an inner-temporal phenomenon has made possible time's subjectivization. The book goes on to argue that time is in fact not thinkable according to metaphysical subjectivity. Instead, the guiding thread for the analysis of time must shift to the eventual hermeneutics of the human being, first developed in Event and World, and now deepened and completed in Event and Time. Romano's diptych makes a compelling, rigorous, and original philosophical contribution to the thinking of the event. (shrink)

Claude Romano seeks to change all that, to describe precisely what sort of phenomenon an event is and to establish how it can be grasped via a phenomenology.

L'Odyssée, le plus ancien poème de la culture occidentale, met en scène la métamorphose qui change Ulysse en lui-même sous les yeux dessillés de ceux qui échouaient jusque-là à le reconnaître. Ulysse constitue ainsi la première d'une longue série de figures donnant corps à cette opération mystérieuse : le passage de l'existence en régime d'obscurité à l'existence "en personne", dans une forme de vérité. Que signifie un tel passage? Comment s'opère cette transition? Quelles formes cette idée d'existence en personne a-t-elle (...) pu revêtir dans la pensée occidentale? Claude Romano interroge les sources, y compris lointaines, de cette idée d' "existence en vérité" telle qu'elle sous-tend notamment l'idéal moderne d'authenticité personnelle, en retraçant la généalogie de cet idéal et en exhumant certaines de ses formes plus anciennes. Chemin faisant, le lecteur découvre différents types et régimes de discours, philosophique, mais aussi théologique, spirituel, rhétorique, littéraire, esthétique. Romano esquisse ainsi une histoire de la philosophie occidentale aux contours bien différents de ceux qu'on lui prête généralement : à l'écart des grandes métaphysiques du moi et de la subjectivité, il emprunte les chemins de traverse d'une enquête sur les formes de vie et les modes d'existence. (shrink)

Throughout the Works and Days (WD), Hesiod reaffirms and promotes his audience’s belief in the reality of the supernatural — that is, the gods of Olympus, whose power the poet clearly takes seriously, given the somber warnings that populate the final calendrical portion of the piece. Drawing on S.I. Johnston’s recent The Story of Myth, as well as the work of folklorists K. Hänninen and G. Bennett, I outline the techniques Hesiod employs to render believable the influence of the divine (...) in both the distant past and the contemporary period. Hesiod constructs a story world familiar to his audience in order to bolster the credibility of the supernatural events, both mythical and contemporary, that he reports. When speaking of the gods’ influence in his own time, Hesiod remains firm on the fact of the gods’ continued intervention only in concrete, mundane phenomena experienced by each of his audience members. Otherwise, the poet tends toward vague language, leaving his audience to come to their own conclusion about the influence of the divine. To encourage a positive conclusion, Hesiod creates an analogy between abstract concepts, such as Strife, and the anthropomorphic gods of myth. Using these strategies, Hesiod imbues WD with belief in divine influence in the world, past and present. (shrink)

Samotność i tajemnica. Prolegomena do fenomenologii ludzkiej więzi (tłum. Marek Drwięga).

What does the ostensibly innocuous phrase “das Selbst” exactly mean in Heidegger’s fundamental ontology? Does Heidegger really have a “theory of the self ” in the same way as, say, Descartes, Locke or Husserl? This is what has been often concluded by many interpreters of Being and Time, and it is that view that the current paper attempts to challenge. Heidegger not only rejects the supposition of a substantial ego, along the lines of Descartes’ conception, but he also repudiates any (...) “self ” understood as a present-at-hand being, an inner core of Dasein, and he insists on the intrinsic connection between the “egologies,” from Descartes to Husserl, and “traditional ontology”. What seems to be at stake in the fundamental-ontological approach of Sebstheit and Selbstsein, Being-oneself, is rather a complete paradigm-shift, since both concepts refer to “ways of being” or “ways of existing” of Dasein, and no longer at all to a self-identical being of a condition of its self-identity. In trying to investigate the economy of the related existential concepts of Jemeinigkeit, Selbstheit and Man-selbst, this article makes the claim that Heidegger’s break with egology is much deeper that it has been often thought, and that the phenomenologist raises a completely new question, rather than trying to give a new response to older ones. (shrink)

"A genuinely innovative contribution to philosophical accounts of subjectivity and temporality. Romano develops what he calls an 'evential hermeneutics' that takes as its starting point the life-changing events that upend our world. He studies the structure of these events in terms of the genuine change and novelty that they open up, distinguishing them from mere occurrences, which can be explained as a subject realizing pre-existing possibilities. Because such events introduce radically new possibilities by transforming me and my world, Romano argues (...) that they must be understood as establishing a world rather than as happening in the world."--Shane Mackinlay, Catholic Theological College, University of Divinity, Melbourne. (shrink)

Le moins que l’on puisse dire est que la question de la surprise (Überraschung) ne paraît pas revêtir un statut central dans le chef d’œuvre philosophique de Heidegger, puisque ce mot même y est absent et qu’on n’y découvre, en tout et pour tout, que deux uniques occurrences de deux de ses dérivés : Überraschtwerden [être surpris] et Überraschende [surprenant], présents dans deux phrases de la page 355. Le passage où ils interviennent est le suivant : Umgekehrt gründet die Möglichkeit (...) des Übe... (shrink)

O artigo pretende investigar se há uma intencionalidade da perceção e caminhar na direção de um realismo fenmenológico.

In this essay, I approach issues of post-truth and fake news from the perspective of “ignorance studies,” a fairly recent multidisciplinary area of scholarship. It looks at epistemology from the opposite direction adopted by traditional theorists of knowledge, seeing if analyzing ignorance can shed light on knowledge and truth in new ways. After looking at examples of ignorance from a common-sense standpoint informed by my dual careers as a philosopher and a journalist, I argue in the first half that journalists, (...) like philosophical pragmatists and scientists, make the best knowledge judgments they can at a particular time, conscious that future context and circumstances may alter their judgments. Journalists, I note, also often choose to be ignorant of less important facts, part of the inevitable selectivity required when covering news. In the second half of the essay, I seek to address a fresh, traditionally philosophical issue in journalism—the widespread use by reporters of casual generalizations not backed up by rigorous empirical investigation. I suggest that readers may tolerate such generalizations because they recognize them to function rhetorically as something other than strict truth claims. At the same time, many thinkers, from Machiavelli to William Blake, have heavily criticized generalization, and most people repudiate insulting generalizations, such as racial slurs. I end by strongly advising greater scrutiny of journalistic generalizations by both philosophers and media professionals. (shrink)

This paper tries to explore the legitimacy of applying the phenomenological approach to poems, novels, to all that we classify, too conveniently, under the term “literature.” Such an approach is grounded in one claim: the literary text opens up to a world that is its “thing itself”. The thing of the text is not the text as a thing, in its linguistic and formal properties, no more than the thing of the painting is the canvas coated with pigments. However, what (...) is the status of such a “world”? Is this “opening of a world” only a metaphor? Is the world of the literary work only an imaginary one? In order to answer these questions, it is necessary, first of all, to understand the limits of the structuralist claim that the object of literature is only literature as an object, that is as a linguistic construction and, secondly, to be aware of what is specific to the phenomenological account of the imaginary, in contrast with alternative accounts, such as the one grounded in the theory of speech acts and developed, among others, by Searle. (shrink)

Il n’y a pas de question plus urgente, pour la phénoménologie, que la question du « corps propre », comme il est convenu de l’appeler depuis Husserl. Mais il n’y a pas non plus de question qui ait été davantage négligée par les phénoménologues contemporains. À première vue, cette affirmation se heurte à l’évidence d’une production littéraire quasi exponentielle autour de cette notion depuis plus d’une trentaine d’années, aussi bien en histoire de la philosophie que dans des travaux qui se (...) sont efforcés de croiser la perspective phénoménologique avec les apports des sciences du cerveau et de la cognition. L’ennui est que cette ample littérature ne pose aucune des questions préjudicielles à l’adoption du concept de corps propre ou de chair ( Leib ) en phénoménologie ; pour l’essentiel, elle fait comme si ce concept allait de soi et se borne à se demander de quelle manière il pourrait « féconder » des approches scientifiques plus positives. La légitimité du concept même de Leib et de ses prolongements à l’intérieur du courant phénoménologique n’y est jamais questionnée en tant que telle. Non seulement on ne se demande pas si les descriptions de cette « chair » au fil conducteur de l’expérience du toucher redoublé est tenable, mais on ne soulève même pas la question de savoir si l’adoption de ce concept chez Husserl et ses successeurs n’est pas conditionnée par des présupposés discutables et, en vérité, par tout un cadre théorique, de sorte que la mise en question de certains aspects centraux de ce cadre devrait conduire inévitablement à une révision en profondeur de ce concept. C’est cette question que nous voudrions aborder dans ces pages. Compte-tenu de l’ampleur du sujet, notre but sera uniquement d’indiquer un certain nombre de directions que pourrait – ou devrait – emprunter la réflexion. (shrink)

In this interview, Claude Romano discusses his phenomenological project of the event in relation to hermeneutics, reason, realism, and some other fundamental problems of phenomenology. He explains common themes in his phenomenological project and elucidates why he considers it important to leave behind the transcendental perspective in phenomenology. He distinguishes his descriptive realism from other realist movements in contemporary French philosophy. The interview also questions the Eurocentric orientation of many phenomenological authors and considers the possibility of going beyond such assumptions (...) in phenomenology. (shrink)

In this article, Claude Romano challenges one of the more widespread assumptions in the phenomenological school, and especially in Husserl and his disciples, that of the intentional character of perception. Not denying that perception could have some aspects that are intentional, he claims that perception is not an intentional relation to the world. Indeed, intentionality is a basic feature of mind that remains connected to a form of representationalism. Now, as Heidegger has suggested with his concept of In-der-Welt-sein, and as (...) Erwin Straus and Maurice Merleau-Ponty also emphasized, perception is rather an innerently bodily relation to world itself, that is, to the world as it exists independently of the mind and beyond all representations. Only such an approach can do justice to our ordinary and philosophical intuitions about the perceived world, and lead us to a genuine variety of phenomenological realism. (shrink)

A bold, insightful book that rejects the myth of America the Unphilosophical, arguing that America today towers as the most philosophical culture in the history of the world, an unprecedented marketplace of truth and argument that far surpasses ancient Greece or any other place one can name.Publisher's description.

Le philosophe canadien Charles Taylor est un des penseurs contemporains qui jouit d’une reconnaissance mondiale : il a initié et participé à plusieurs débats relatifs au libéralisme, au communautarisme et au multiculturalisme. Son œuvre est pluridimensionnelle puisque ses travaux portant, entre autres, sur la théorie de science, la théorie du langage, la théorie de l’action et de la personne, la théorie de la modernité.La pensée de Charles Taylor s’est élaborée non seulement en se nourrissant des traditions aussi bien phénoménologique qu’analytique, (...) mais, très concrètement, en prise directe avec les problèmes soulevés dans la société canadienne par la très grande diversité des immigrations. Sa pensée mérite d’autant plus à être méditée que les tentations de repli communautaire, si ce n’est de purification ethnique, semblent aujourd’hui croissantes. Les contributions – pour moitié en anglais – de ce colloque organisé à Budapest en 2012 en l’honneur et en présence de Charles Taylor invitent au contraire à interroger et à poursuivre son analyse des conditions qui permettraient l’avènement d’un monde véritablement pluriel. (shrink)

The governance of human (germline) genome modification at the international and transnational level -- The regulation of human germline genome modification in Canada (E Kleiderman) -- The regulation of human germline genome modification in the United States (Kerry Macintosh) -- The regulation of human germline genome modification in Mexico (M Medina Arellano) -- The regulation of human germline genome modification in Europe (J Almqvist, C Romano) -- The regulation of human germline genome modification in the United Kingdom (J Lawford Davies) (...) -- The regulation of human germline genome modification in Germany (T Faltus). (shrink)

We report the identification of a recurrent, 520-kb 16p12.1 microdeletion associated with childhood developmental delay. The microdeletion was detected in 20 of 11,873 cases compared with 2 of 8,540 controls and replicated in a second series of 22 of 9,254 cases compared with 6 of 6,299 controls. Most deletions were inherited, with carrier parents likely to manifest neuropsychiatric phenotypes compared to non-carrier parents. Probands were more likely to carry an additional large copy-number variant when compared to matched controls. The clinical (...) features of individuals with two mutations were distinct from and/or more severe than those of individuals carrying only the co-occurring mutation. Our data support a two-hit model in which the 16p12.1 microdeletion both predisposes to neuropsychiatric phenotypes as a single event and exacerbates neurodevelopmental phenotypes in association with other large deletions or duplications. Analysis of other microdeletions with variable expressivity indicates that this two-hit model might be more generally applicable to neuropsychiatric disease. © 2010 Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved. (shrink)

Religious and atheistic belief are presented anew in a volume of essays from leading phenomenologists in both France and the UK. Atheism, often presented as the negation of religious belief, is here engaged with from a phenomenologically informed notion of experience. The focus on experience, sparks new debates in readings of belief, faith and atheism as they relate to and complicate each other. What unites the contributors is their relationship to phenomenology as it has developed in France in the wake (...) of Heidegger and Husserl. Leading French intellectuals from this context, Jean-Luc Nancy, Quentin Meillassoux, and Catherine Malabou, amongst others, contribute arresting ideas on atheistic faith, the death of God, and anarchic faith, opening up new areas of understanding in a field whose parameters and core concepts are ever shifting. Revealing the extent to which religious and atheistic belief must be seen to influence, and on a fundamental level, to co-create one another, the pluralistic society in which religious belief is counted as one option amongst many is given primacy. The fact that religious faith has become not only optional but also, in many contexts, strangely alienated from society, deeply modifies the experience of the believer as much as that of the non-believer. A focus on 'experience', over and above 'belief', moves us towards a mode of experiential knowledge which refuses to privilege the atheistic believer and deride the reality of religious belief. (shrink)

Retrace l'histoire du néant en Occident en étudiant ses étapes décisives et ses principales désignations.

What is the event? How the phenomenology of event is possible if the "event" is not the phenomenon in the classical meaning of this word? French philosopher Claude Romano discusses these questions with his Russian colleague Ruslan Loshakov. The interlocutors consider the concept of event in different contexts, paying special attention to the relationships which connect the phenomenology of event with Husserl, Bergson, Heidegger and Levinas' ideas.

The title of any book can bear only so much weight. At its best, a title projects the scope of a book’s ambition, its viewpoint, the territory it covers, and perhaps even serves up some quick entertainment—the joy of wordplay, the pleasurable indictment of a settled belief, even the physical pleasure of a rhyme. I wanted America the Philosophical to strike both professional philosophers and lay readers as a playful, putative oxymoron, challenging the encrusted belief suggested by such famous book (...) titles as Richard Hofstadter’s classic Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, and the more recent, ephemeral Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free by Charles Pierce, a... (shrink)

In At the Heart of Reason, Claude Romano boldly calls for a reformulation of the phenomenological project. He contends that the main concern of phenomenology, and its originality with respect to other philosophical movements of the last century, such as logical empiricism, the grammatical philosophy of Wittgenstein, and varieties of neo-Kantianism, was to provide a "new image of Reason." Against the common view, which restricts the range of reason to logic and truth-theory alone, Romano advocates "big-hearted rationality," including in it (...) what is only ostensibly its opposite, that is, sensibility, and locating in sensibility itself the roots of the categorical forms of thought. Contrary to what was claimed by the "linguistic turn," language is not a self-enclosed domain; it cannot be conceived in its specificity unless it is led back to its origin in the pre-predicative or pre-linguistic structures of experience itself. (shrink)

On connaît de Charles Larmore (1950), philosophe moral américain contemporain, ses célèbres objections à John Rawls, mais peu de travaux se concentrent sur sa philosophie : son réalisme moral, sa réhabilitation partielle de l'idéal d'authenticité, sa version du libéralisme politique ou encore à sa théorie normativiste du moi. Ce sont ces différents aspects de sa pensée que les études contenues dans ce volume, premier ouvrage entièrement consacré à l'oeuvre de Charles Larmore, interrogent et mettent en perspective. Un essai inédit du (...) philosophe américain ainsi qu'un débat entre Charles Larmore et Alain Renaut autour de la controverse réalisme-idéalisme y figurent également, en guise de conclusion. (shrink)

¿Qué significa exactamente la frase aparentemente inocua “das Selbst” en la ontología fundamental de Heidegger? ¿Tiene Heidegger realmente una “teoría del yo” de la misma manera que, digamos, Descartes, Locke o Husserl? Esto es lo que a menudo han concluido muchos intérpretes de Ser y tiempo, y es precisamente esa tesis la que el presente artículo intenta criticar. Heidegger no solo rechaza la suposición de un yo sustancial, en la línea de la concepción de Descartes, sino que también refuta cualquier (...) “yo” entendido como simple presencia, cualquier núcleo interno del Dasein, e insiste en la conexión intrínseca entre las “egologías”, de Descartes a Husserl, y la “ontología tradicional”. Lo que parece estar en juego en el planteamiento ontológico fundamental de la Selbstheit y del Selbstsein es más bien un cambio de paradigma completo, ya que ambos conceptos se refieren a “modos de ser” o “modos de existir” del Dasein, y de ninguna manera a un ser idéntico a sí mismo o a una condición de su identidad consigo mismo. Al tratar de investigar la economía de los conceptos existenciales relacionados entre sí de Jemeinigkeit, Selbstheit y Man-selbst, este artículo afirma que la ruptura de Heidegger con las “egologías” clásicas es mucho más profunda de lo que a menudo se ha pensado, y que el fenomenólogo de Messkirch, en lugar de intentar dar una nueva respuesta a viejas cuestiones, plantea una pregunta completamente nueva. (shrink)

En este trabajo se analizan las nociones de esencia en Husserl y Kripke marcando sus relaciones y diferencias. Husserl excluye una definición modal de la esencia, considerando que las necesidades incondicionadas tienen su fuente en las esencias y no recíprocamente. Por su parte, la concepción de Kripke obliga a repensar nociones supuestamente evidentes sostenidas por Husserl, como la equivalencia a priori/necesario, a posteriori/contingente, así como los lazos entre concebibilidad y posibilidad. Tomando distancia respecto de la posición de Husserl, se rechaza (...) aquí la variación eidética como método único y se enfatiza finalmente el valor de la discusión razonada. (shrink)

This text deals with the phenomenological issue of the world's ways of givenness. As is well known, on the one hand Husserl approaches this question by reducing the givenness of the world to the ego's constituing acts. On the other hand, Heidegger aims at overcoming the transcendental ego by the notion of the being-in-the-world, even if this latter still plays the role of a world-configurator. In dialogue with Husserl, Heidegger, and some other phenomenologists and analytic philosophers, I develop a new (...) framework, which I propose to call “holism of experience”, in order to address anew the question of the world's givenness. (shrink)

Faut-il définir la phénoménologie comme une discipline transcendantale? Si toute phénoménologie consiste en un " dire les phénomènes " (legein ta phainomena) qui les approche et les décrit tels qu'en eux-mêmes, le logos phénoménologique doit-il être compris exclusivement - ou même principalement - en référence à la logique mathématique issue de Frege? Enfin, qu'en est-il de la phénoménologie dans son rapport à la métaphysique, non pas au sens " scolaire " du terme, mais dans celui - que lui ont conféré (...) Nietzsche, Bergson et Heidegger - d'une configuration historique unitaire de la pensée occidentale dans son ensemble? Ces trois questions parcourent ce recueil d'études et lui confèrent sa cohésion interne. À travers elles, il s'agit de se frayer un chemin vers la question de l'apparaître en tant que tel, qu'Héraclite a placée au ceux du questionnement de la " philosophie " naissante, et que l'entreprise phénoménologique ne peut manquer de soulever et, à son tour, de perpétuer. (shrink)

La question soulevée par cet article est celle de la légitimité d’un des concepts qui semble le mieux établi dans le lexique philosophique contemporain, celui du moi. Ce concept qui, à sa création, répond à des problèmes bien définis, a revêtu un sens de plus en plus vague au fur et à mesure de sa diffusion, au point qu’il est devenu souvent difficile de dire ce qu’il signifie au juste chez la plupart des philosophes qui l’emploient. En revenant à la (...) source de cette notion, le présent article s’efforce d’examiner quelques-uns des problèmes qu’elle soulève. Il s’attache plus particulièrement à montrer que la thèse selon laquelle le moi possède une identité en première personne, distincte de l’identité en troisième personne de l’individu dans le monde, soulève des problèmes insolubles. Or cette thèse repose nécessairement au fondement de toute conception qui prétend distinguer le moi de l’être humain individuel. (shrink)

Le temps est-il fondamentalement une détermination du sujet? A la suite d'Augustin, des philosophies aussi différentes que celles de Bergson, Husserl ou Heidegger n'hésitent pas à le soutenir : le temps n'est pas d'abord dans les choses, mais il provient, plus originairement, des actes, des attitudes ou des comportements par lesquels un sujet (ou, éventuellement, un Dasein) s'attend ou se souvient, anticipe des possibles ou décide de lui-même, c'est-à-dire temporalise dans leur unité indissoluble l'avenir, le passé et le présent. C'est (...) cette thèse que le présent ouvrage s'efforce de discuter et de soumettre à un examen critique. Quelle compréhension du temps au cours de la métaphysique a rendu possible sa " subjectivation "? N'est-ce pas d'abord une certaine saisie du phénomène temporel comme phénomène intratemporel? Et cette interprétation, dont il devient possible d'entreprendre une généalogie à la lumière des analyses de Platon, Aristote et Augustin, ne prescrit-elle pas son cadre conceptuel à la métaphysique elle-même? Mais, si la temporalité n'est pas pensable à l'aune de la subjectivité métaphysique (dont le Dasein, à certains égards du moins, constitue l'ultime figure), n'est-il pas requis, pour tenter d'en produire une phénoménologie, de changer de fil conducteur? C'est en ce point que le présent ouvrage rejoint le projet de L'événement et le monde, celui d'une herméneutique événementiale de l'humain, dont il constitue à la fois l'approfondissement et l'achèvement. (shrink)