This article investigates an intriguing ambivalence in Levinas’s reading(s) of Husserl’s phenomenology of internal-time consciousness. The article focuses on the specific treatment of the Husserlian ‘proto-impression’, suggesting that one (under-appreciated) aspect of Levinas’s approach may serve to undermine, or even ‘un-say’, its better known counterpart.

This paper analyses Heidegger’s controversial advancement of Husserl’s idea of philosophy and phenomenological research towards ‘the Being-Question’ and its relation to ‘Dasein’. It concentrates on Heidegger’s elision of Dilthey and Husserl’s different concepts of ‘Descriptive Psychology’ in his 1925 Summer Semester lecture-course, with Husserl’s concept losing out in the competition, as background to the formulation of ‘the Being-Question’ in Being and Time (1927). It argues that Heidegger establishes his own position within phenomenology on the basis of a partial appropriation of Dilthey’s hermeneutical manner of thinking, an appropriation that was later radically called into question by Levinas on Diltheyean-hermeneutical-philosophical grounds.

The distinction between ‘being’ and ‘essence’ arose in the elaboration of the theory of universal hylomorphism, defended by the Franciscans, which maintained that there is a composition of matter and form in all beings other than the First cause. This paper focuses on a formula which Jean de La Rochelle (1190/ 1200-1245) borrows from Boethius (c. 480-524) to explain how the ‘being’ of the soul is distinct from the ‘essence’ of the soul. It concludes by raising the question whether Jean’s formulation anticipates that of St Thomas Aquinas’s (1224-1274) in his early writings on De Ente et Essentia.

This paper compares Edith Stein’s phenomenological approach to empathy in On the Problem of Empathy (1917) with that of more recent neurological explanations of empathy, broadly exemplified by Tania Singer’s (2006) work. Given that we are dealing with two different methodologies that reflect the general debate that exists between phenomenology and natural science (neurology), a consideration of ‘method’ will be discussed prior to our comparative analysis of Stein and Singer’s account of empathy. In conclusion, we argue that Stein’s phenomenological understanding of empathy provides the most comprehensive description of the act of empathy to date for neurologists to ‘reflect ’ on.

Philippa Foot, with the help of her friend and colleague Elizabeth Anscombe, discovered that Summa Theologiae, II-II of Thomas Aquinas was a powerful resource in seeking objectivism in ethics. Foot’s aim was to produce an ethics of natural goodness, in which moral evil, for example, came to be seen as a ‘natural defect’ rather than the expression of a taste or preference. This brought her to develop a concrete ethics of virtue with a broad sweep, dealing with the individual and communal needs and goods of human beings, and particularly with their central moral quality of acting for a reason, with a practical rationality. This has helped her to return to an Aristotelian meaning of virtue, as simply one kind of excellence among others.