In Edith Stein’s pinnacle work Finite and Eternal Being, she describes in a footnote that the act of bracketing (reduction) that Husserl committed to starting in Ideas—an act that separates fact from nature where only the aspect of essential being is considered—was the philosophic knife that severed phenomenology into idealist and realist factions. In opposition to Husserl’s ap­proach, she writes, Adolf Reinach, Alexander Pfänder, Jean Hering, Hedwig Conrad-Martius, and others were instead “guided by the full meaning of the term nature, [and] became ever more confirmed in their realistic ways.” In this paper, I will describe what this full meaning of wesen is held by some of Husserl’s contemporaries and students and what it entails, specifically looking to how Reinach conceived it. This will include a discussion of phenomenological method, his views on the a priori, essences, and the laws that govern them, as well as an investigation into why Reinach felt reductions were dangerous and unnecessary for the intuition of essences and essential being.

The aim of this article is to clarify how Husserl applies his formal ontology to the constitution of immanent temporality. By doing so, my objective is to unravel the relationships between the phases of this temporality that make up a unit—that is, the relationship between protentions and retentions and a proto-impression that gives rise to the temporal moment “now” in an experience of the immanent consciousness. In connection with this reconstruction, I will attempt to clarify Husserl’s definition of time as a “one-dimensional orthoid multiplicity,” the roots of which lie in Riemann’s work. I interpret Husserl’s description as a model for the description of the phenomenon of time. Its nature as a model seems to unfold with the problem of the time diagram. Which diagram best represents the constitution of immanent temporality? Larrabee has discussed this issue, and I propose that the best interpretation of the diagram is to consider it as applying to a spherical surface rather than a flat one. This interpretation allows us to account for the multiple relationships among presentations, memories, and other presentifications in an empirically appropriate manner while at the same time providing us with another vision of Husserl’s consciousness, which allows us to reconsider the relationship between subjectivity and objectivity.

One of the deepest contributions of Dietrich von Hildebrand towards a philosophy of love is the ingenious chapter seven of his book The Nature of Love on the intentio benevolentiae of love (the “intention of benevolence”). According to von Hildebrand, the intention of benevolence constitutes in some sense the inner core of love and its goodness and should always, as he explains, take priority over that other most distinctive trait of love, the intentio unionis, the “desire for union.” This paper shows that von Hildebrand’s distinction between the three “categories of importance” (of the “good”) allows us to understand the benevolent intention and desire for the happiness of the beloved person in a deeper way than was possible ever before. This benevolent intention enables the loving person to see and experience the objective goods for the beloved person from within. The loving person partakes in his affective and free response of love in the innermost and unique center of the beloved person to whom the objective good for him or her is directed. In the intentio benevolentiae, however, the objective good for the beloved person is desired and willed by the loving person not only inasmuch as it is endowed with intrinsic value, but also insofar as it addresses itself to the unique center of consciousness of the beloved person. This applies to all categories of love, even the love of an enemy. Above and beyond this, however, in the love of friendship and in spousal love, in parental love, etc., the objective goods and evils for the other person are not only desired and rejoiced in under the point of view that they are goods for the beloved person, as also in the love of neighbor. Rather, because they are goods and evils for the person beloved in friendship or spousal love, they also become (indirect) objective goods for the friend or spouse. The paper ends with a comparison between some of the texts of Saint Anselm on heaven and von Hildebrand’s chapter, showing that what Anselm says in a sublime text on heaven (that in heaven we will not rejoice more over our own good and blessedness than over that of the beloved persons, and even will rejoice in the beatitude of God more than in our own) can only be truly understood by analyzing it in the light of von Hildebrand’s insights and sharp distinctions. Thus von Hildebrand makes a decisive contribution to the clarification of a central topic in the philosophia perennis: the benevolence of love.