In this paper, I will investigate the temporal structure of photographic images. According to a common understanding, photographic images open up a direct access to what has been recorded in the past. In contrast to this view, I will show that photographs have to be conceived in terms of a higher temporal complexity. Referring to Derrida’s reflections upon trace, representation, and the temporal mode of the futur antérieur as well as his involvement in photography, I will understand the temporality of photographic images not as unidirectional relation of presence and past, but rather as an ongoing process of temporalization.

One can find a very strong objection against many kinds of philosophical thematizing of suffering: this objection criticizes and entertains suspicion that these philosophical efforts adopt an arrogant and cynical position toward the sufferer. In the context of the question of theodicy one e.g. criticizes approaches which practice a functionalisation, relativization and depotentialization of the evil and suffering: Toward them one basically objects that these approaches finally result in a rationalisation and instrumentalisation of the annoying and scandalizing moment of suffering. First of all, the distance from the suffering and the sufferer seems questionable, alarming and dubious. This implies the more general and more fundamental question of the relation between experience (concernment) and reflection (consideration) of suffering. The following attempt to reflect philosophically the suffering will thematize this relation and point out some specific limits of the philosophical reflection which will become evident thereby. The central starting point of the following phenomenological considerations is the assumption that suffering represents a paradigmatic boundary-phenomenon of human reality and that this phenomenon departs from the stringent proposition forms of philosophy and thereby limits and denies a philosophical access. By keeping in mind this awareness of the problem, the question to be asked is: What essentially characterizes suffering?

This essay is devoted to the existential interpretation of birth in the fundamental ontology of M. Heidegger. Author argues that Heidegger develops two different lines in conceptualisation of birth—the explicit one (based on such characteristics of the Dasein‘s being as throwness and facticity) and the implicit one (based, correspondingly, on self-projectivity and existentiality)—which can be considered as an echo of the classical metaphysical differentiation between the first (physical) birth and the second (spiritual) birth. It is shown that the discrepancy between two existential conceptions of birth is essentially connected with a remarkable aporetical character of the Dasein’s analytic. In general, the paper is aimed at the demonstration of the key-role of the birth question for the postmetaphysical clarification of the constitution of the Subject.

Traditionally the phenomenon of war and its causes have been predominantly examined by the disciplines of political science, history and political philosophy, but these disciplines seem to be unable to grasp the nature of the phenomenon of war completely. One of the few methods that actually attempts to ‘grasp the phenomenon of war’ in its totality, is the philosophical-phenomenological method. The philosophical-phenomenological approach to the phenomenon of war can be found in the works of the German philosopher and phenomenologist Max Scheler (1874-1928). In his essays on war Scheler tries to fathom the nature of war in a cultural critical way, that is, war is viewed as being able to reveal “true” structures of reality that have been covered by static perceptions. It will be shown that--though it appears counterintuitive--Scheler’s approach to war as katharsis needs to be understood within the wider concept of his value theory and philosophical anthropology: man as ens amans. The major flaw of Scheler’s argument, however, lies in his assumption that meaning and values remain untouched by the destructiveness of war. A counter point to Scheler’s view can be made by turning to the French philosopher Simon Weil. Weil argues that the all-embracing destructiveness of war changes perceived reality altogether, and instead of removing separation between individuals, new and stronger ones arise that cannot be crossed by acts of compassion or empathy. By bringing both Scheler and Weil’s approaches together, it is argued new light can be shed on the phenomenon of war and thus in turn bring about new explorations which aim to grasp the totality of the phenomenon and its causes per se.

Based on the early phenomenological works of Edith Stein, this essay applies to the problem of intersubjectivity. By fleshing out the issues of corporeality and personhood as being specific premises of approved otherness, it can be demonstrated that Stein certainly belongs to the founders of a philosophy of the living body, a fact that has often been disregarded so far. Her inventive conception of corporeality will be defended against a naturalistic interpretation of the person focusing on the brain, whereupon the mind can be reduced to certain brain-activity making it an epiphenomenon lacking important features of its own. By presenting a valid alternative to this problematic conception, the thought of Edith Stein is both substantial and challenging for contemporary anthropology.

The article shows that the apparently range-external acoustic volume is a matter of independent instances of sound. Given the particular occurrence of the acoustic volume, the reference sources prove to be inadequate or unessential conditions of the acoustic effect. The affinity to the dimensions of the felt body allows for a more detailed conceptual identification of the acoustic volumes.

In this text I deal with the theme of the ‘primal conscious’ (das Urbewusste) in Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology. The ‘primal conscious’ or ‘primal consciousness’ (die Ur-Bewusstheit) characterizes those ways of experience and consciousness which represent in some way an intermediate level between the non-conscious, on the one hand, and the act-intentional, objective conscious experiences, on the other,. In the first part three basic forms of the primal conscious are distinguished and illustrated with the help of concrete examples. In the second part I offer a—merely sketched—historical-phenomenological reconstruction of the development of Husserl’s analyses of primal consciousness. Nevertheless, the systematic-phenomenological point of view remains foremost also in this part of the text. In the first part I differentiate three basic forms of the primal conscious: (1.) consciousness of the immanent, retentional-primal-impressional-protentional streaming alteration of the experiences (= the immanent, retentional-protentional time-consciousness), (2.) the pre-thematically or non-thematically affective consciousness (= the pre-apperceptive consciousness and experience) and (3.) the consciousness of the execution of acts (= the „accompanying“ executive consciousness, „the internal consciousness“ or also „the consciousness along with“ especially in early Husserl). The differentiating criteria between the pre-apperceptive and apperceptive consciousness are attention, and the synthetic activities of the subject, i.e. its differing attentional activity and its execution of certain syntheses. It is common to all forms of the primal conscious experiencing that it is a non-thematic, non-act-intentional kind of (self)consciousness of the experiencing—and of that, what is being experienced, though not of that, what objectively appears—, which is indeed already fully determined—with regards to content, time, and emotional character. In the second part of the text it will be shown that Husserl wrestled with the theme of the primal conscious for over four decades and that, after several essential transformations and numerous terminological modifications, he gradually arrived at a conception whose development can be traced back through his writings. However the differentiation of the concept of the primal conscious—as undertaken above—namely, offering an extensive examination of all these phenomena under the concept of the primal conscious can be found only implicitly in Husserl’s writings.

Eugen Fink and Husserl are often considered to share a similar conception on dreams. Indeed, they both assert a firm distinction between a dreaming and a dreamt I, by grounding it on the striking observation that one of them is actually sleeping while the other is necessarily wakeful. Moreover, Husserl and Fink both consider that, from the perspective of the sleeping I, dream is an extreme form of presentiation (Vergegenwärtigung). In spite of these similarities, however, the article wishes to address certain aspects in Husserl’s interpretation of phantasy during the early 1920’s that seem to offer grounds for a quite different approach to dreams.

In Husserl’s thoughts of the 1930s, the relation between the transcendental “I” and the passive synthesis of the consciousness comes gradually and explicitly into question. His investigation aims to phenomenologically fix the origin of absolute temporalization, the reflective “I” or the passive intentionality. The temporalization only through the passive intentionality (pre-intentionality / Vor-intentionalitat) appears to exceed the abilities of the “I” substantially and to refuse that involvement as long as it means an absolute passive ground (Urboden) of the “I” itself. However, the phenomenological investigation must not presuppose naively a stream of passive consciousness which escapes from all of the epistemological, reflective knowledge. Therefore, the self-insight of the “I” who performs the phenomenology indeed (phanomenologisierendes Ich) is demanded iteratively. On the one hand, this insight urges Husserl to recognize the apodictic uniqueness (Einzigartigkeit) of the transcendental “I” and then to abandon the explanation of temporalization through the original passive intentionality, for phenomenological reflections toward this stream without the “I” (ichlos) or before the “I” (vor-ichlich) repeatedly lead to problems of infinite regress. On the other hand, it also falls into a similar problem of infinite regress to define or explain the transcendental “I” as an operative, not as an intentional object; because the operative “I” cannot have any ontic status. Since that time, Husserl’s description of the temporalization through the passive intentionality appears again in his manuscripts. What is important in Husserl’s struggle is that he encountered an original factum that the transcendental “I” as a phenomenologist who generates (werdender Phanomenologe) inevitably is interwoven into the stream of consciousness which has a genetic history. The “I” and the stream are not the same thing, but are intimately intertwined. Whereas the “I” will reflect this stream steadily, the stream generates such performances of the “I”. If Husserl had not found this factum, he could have never reached the problem of the birth and death of the transcendental “I”, unlike an empirical one. And this problem gives us even now various possibilities to develop genetic phenomenology in the future.The structure of this paper is as follows: 1) we start our discussion by delineating a sphere, in which the passive syntheses of the consciousness perform, and there are two forms of their functions, and indicate that primary passivity is more important in both, for it is directly connected with the problem of temporalization in Husserl’s thoughts of the 1930s. 2) This section shows in what way and in what motivation Husserl understands passive intentionality which is based on the stream of consciousness itself and differentiate it strictly from normal intentionality which is derived from the performances of the phenomenological “I”. Despite this distinction, Husserl maintains in 1932 that there is only one type of intentionality, namely the active intentionality of the “I”. At the end of this section, we shall clarify why Husserl drew that conclusion at least temporarily. 3) This section reveals the difficulties of explaining the being of the “I” who performs the absolute temporalization. Accordingly, the problem of original passive intentionality appears again in Husserl’s descriptions. 4) In conclusion, we will describe how the problem of the generation of the transcendental “I” developed in connection with the passive intentionality. Our final goal is to indicate possibilities contained in the Husserlian genetic phenomenology in the 1930s.

The following text, which is now published for the first time, comes from Husserl’s manuscript A III 1 and was probably written in 1914. The text belongs to a bundle of pages which Husserl wrote down during the presentation and examination of the “Staatsexamensarbeit” of his student Jean Hering. The work “Die Lehre vom Apriori bei Lotze” was done by Hering in the summer semester 1914 in order to receive a degree that would qualify him as a secondary school teacher (Prüfung der Befähigung zum höheren Lehramt). Although this “Staatsexamensarbeit” was never published, Hering used parts of it for his article which appeared in the Jahrbuch, “Bemerkungen über das Wesen, die Wesenheit und die Idee. Edmund Husserl zum 60. Geburtstag gewidmet” (in: Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung IV, 1921, pp. 495–543). Husserl characterized pages 5 to 8 of the manuscript A III 1 as his “own reflections” (eigene Refl exionen) on Hering’s work. These pages are published as “Text Nr. 5” in Husserliana XLI (pp. 83–89). What follows here are pages 9 to 16 of this manuscript, which Husserl called “free excerpts” (freie Exzerpte).

The document presented below stems from the Jean Hering Nachlass in the Médiathèque protestante of Strasbourg and was originally preserved in the Archive of the Collegium Wilhelmitanum Argentinense (the Protestant Institute) of the same city. It concerns a typescript of 7 folios, which was unknown up until now, dealing with the idealism-realism controversy and presenting original views on the consequences of this controversy regarding the issue of metaphysics.

Hedwig Conrad-Martius was honoured with the Bundesverdienstkreuz, the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, on March 1st, 1958. What follows is her acceptance speech on that occasion. In this speech, Conrad-Martius not only gives an account of her biography as a phenomenologist who studied directly with Husserl, but also demonstrates that Husserl’s work is open to a peculiar form of subjective materialist interpretation that can explain his transcendental turn. The speech is an important document for those who support the possibility of a Husserlian transcendental materialism.

This paper aims to show how Th eodor Conrad’s theory of meaning goes beyond that of Husserl. By drawing on an unedited typescript dating from the 1950s in which the Munich phenomenologist outlines the controversy between Husserl and the so-called Munich-Göttingen group, I interpret the Bezeichnung–Kennzeichung opposition that Conrad introduces in an article from 1910 as a realist position opposing Husserl’s act-phenomenological concept of meaning. This position stands in contrast not only to the phansisch or phänologisch theory of meaning in the Logical Investigations, but also to the new definition of meaning as phänomenologische Bedeutung that Husserl proposes in his 1908 lectures. Conrad advocates a Gegenstandsphänomenologie, for which the main point of a phenomenological theory of meaning is not, like for Husserl, the intentional acts of the subject but rather the qualities of the object to which the meaning refers.

The central thesis of this article is that film is directing and directed kinaesthesis understood as an opening of world beyond the relation of “subjective” and “objective”. Thus the analysis does not focus on the recipients of a movie but on the origins filming finds in specific ways of experiencing, that is, in the living bodies of the persons who decide on the perspective of a take by using the camera’s body. Moved by its filmmakers, the body of the camera is directed as the product of its authors, and is directing insofar as it establishes a world by its own means. The article explains basic forms of opening world by kinaesthetic processes in general (1), and applies this investigation to the corpus of film (2). Finally, the results of these analyses will be put in concrete terms by relating them to basic film features and a few samples of movies (3).

The paper attempts to propound a new understanding of the experience of the world and others on the basis of a radical phenomenology of the body, as it is revealed in the originary impressibility as affect and desire. This impressibility shapes every relation to beings and others due to the unity of an originary life that founds individuation before any temporal difference, having ethical consequences for a plural communality, which can no longer be characterized by means of mere abstract processes of objectivation.

The phenomenological interpretation of the human being is not a naturalistic explanation. Likewise phenomenology does not interpret the human being as an example of a complex animal: from a phenomenological point of view man is not an animal, inasmuch as his definition and his essence imply a specifically human component, which cannot be attributed to the linear development of animal complexity. However, this does not mean that any animal component is excluded from the structure of humans. How can human animality be acknowledged without denying human specificity and upholding a reductionist view? The purpose of the paper is to analyse and compare two different ways in which the phenomenological tradition has answered this question.