At the core of Nietzsche's philosophical quest lies the problem of truth. This problem, however, is extremely difficult. An insufficiently thorough reading of this work stops at the idea that truth is a value that opposes life. Nietzsche would thus be the father of twentieth-century philosophies of the irrational, in the wake of Klages. On the contrary, I try to show that a higher conception of truth as an opening to the World constitutes the heart of Nietzschean thought, as we find it in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. This forces us, so to speak, to consider in a new way the relationship between philosophy and literature and to think of truth from the point of view in which the latter now constitutes the source of the former. This thought does not turn its back on reason. It is that of another reason, which leaves the initiative to the image, to the metaphor, as it is highlighted in literature and poetry. Art, thus envisaged, is not an end in itself; through it human existence receives its own form.
This article offers a hermeneutic reading of Mary Wollstonecraft's Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, drawing extensively on Paul Ricoeur's philosophy of narrative identity. It moves beyond classifying the text as either pure recollection or fiction, arguing instead that it constitutes a profound process of narrative refiguration. This process continuously negotiates the tension between a fixed, sameness-based identity (idem) and a dynamic, self-making identity (ipse), thereby revealing the intricate interplay between the personal and the cultural in self-formation. The analysis situates Wollstonecraft's journey within the dialectic of selfhood and otherness, demonstrating how her encounters with unfamiliar landscapes, languages, and social customs become essential occasions for hermeneutic self-understanding. The paper pays special attention to Ricoeur's notions of attestation and distanciation (the productive gap between experience and telling), while also considering the reader's role as a constitutive moment in the work's truth-claims. Ultimately, it argues that by intertwining raw personal testimony with a performative self-presentation, Wollstonecraft transforms the epistolary form into a unique space of introspection and a projection toward future possibilities, offering a seminal exploration of the conditions under which the self is narrated, recognized, and transformed.
The intermedial field of inquiry studies the relations between media and human interaction with them in perception and communication. Ellestr & ouml;m, with his media modalities model, demarcates the perception of media products according to four modalities (material, spatiotemporal, sensorial and semiotic), while fundamentally distinguishing between semiotic and presemiotic modalities. This article systematically addresses questions, aporias and potentialities emerging during intermedial analysis, as well as indicates basic critical intermedial areas that would benefit from further research and discussion. It revisits the semiotic/pre-semiotic distinction in light of an ecological-performative-phenomenological approach, by challenging the primordiality of materiality in the perception of media products, grounding spatiotemporality in the encounter between the perceiver and the media product and highlighting the making of senso-semiotic making of meaning onthe-go, in real-time. A subjective, embodied, performative perspective from within the dynamic field of the encounter between the perceiver and the media product is proposed, instead of the point of view of an objective making, that involves the coupling of objective entities or events with inner, subjective interpretations, gives way to a broader understanding of semiosis, where pre-interpreted, dynamic signs are abandoned for a dynamic and interactive semiotic functionality.
This article is focused on Theodor W. Adorno's critical interpretation of the truth and untruth of fashion, as it emerges from his influential Aesthetic Theory, in relation to some fundamental categories of his thought that can be derived from his most important writings, such as Dialectic of Enlightenment Dialectics. Although Adorno cannot be said to be a systematic theorist of fashion, nonetheless some paragraphs of his unfinished and posthumously published Aesthetic Theory clearly testify his interest in this topic. However, little attention has been paid yet to Adorno's philosophical account of fashion, which was clearly influenced by the general approach of his critical theory of society. It is important to take into consideration this aspect of Adorno's aesthetic thinking to understand his views of the relation between fashion, art, and the culture industry. Moreover, an analysis of fashion as a site of intersection between Adorno's aesthetics and his rejection of the culture industry, and a reconstruction of Adorno's critical theory of fashion from his brief writings on the subject, is also useful to prompt a re-evaluation of other aspects of Adorno's thought, including his unique conception of truth as dialectically interwoven with its opposite (namely, untruth).
This paper attempts to elaborate the notion of the transitional area of sublime. To accomplish this task, I will first draw on the works of Marc Richir, in which he correlates the concept of the transitional area with the experience of sublime, albeit without insisting on their possible conjunction. Therefore, my task would be to prove how the relation between the transitional area and the experience of the sublime can be considered a consequence of Richir's developing thought. Richir has drawn on Immanuel Kant's aesthetics, concerning the former's theory of sublime, while the transitional area is a concept borrowed from Donald Winnicott's psychoanalytical framework. To demonstrate how the transitional area of the sublime functions, I will provide an account of what Richir calls the phenomenon of celebration. I will argue that, for Richir, the celebration resonates with Winnicott's transitional area, which can represent a hybrid zone where imagination fuses perpetually with the world and the world appears as a coherent dream, this being rendered possible by the experience of the sublime. Finally, I will retrace Richir's steps back to the theories of Kant, Winnicott and Merleau-Ponty, to show how these authors influenced his conception of the transitional area of sublime.
This article presents a critical reinterpretation of Axel Honneth's theory of recognition, arguing that his tripartite model-love, law, social esteem- provides the moral grammar indispensable for diagnosing contemporary social conflicts. By systematically reconstructing Honneth's synthesis of Hegel, Mead, and Winnicott, we demonstrate how struggles against disrespect-rooted in the denial of recognition-are not mere ethical protests, but the main engine of social transformation. This framework uniquely reveals why demands for identity, rights, and dignity (from feminist movements to postcolonial struggles) fundamentally challenge institutionalized patterns of misrecognition, rather than merely material interests. Consequently, we propose that Honneth's theory offers critical theory an essential normative paradigm: it shifts the analysis from economic exploitation to the moral injuries underlying systemic injustice, allowing for a more comprehensive critique of social pathologies. The article thus positions recognition as a vital conceptual tool for understanding and legitimizing emancipatory struggles in pluralistic democracies, where demands for visibility and validation drive progressive change.
The pathology of the human mind, which Spinoza links to the notion of affect, plays a central role in the psychology of the Ethics, particularly through the notion of the fluctuation of the soul (animi vocatur fluctuatio), which we liken to that of acrasia, i.e., the internal conflict within the mind torn between two opposing affects. The solutions proposed by Spinoza to overcome passive affects condition the possibility of salvation that he assigns to intuitive science. This article aims first to clarify the status of the notion of affect, then the power of man to overcome his servitude, and finally the concept of beatitude. We will then examine the therapeutic approach proposed by Spinoza, as well as the insurmountable difficulties it encounters.
This paper aims to challenge the widespread assumption that Hans-Georg Gadamer's philosophy stands in strong opposition to Kantian aesthetics and to show and describe how Gadamer's theory of art has repeatedly engaged with Kant in the very process of defining itself. First (1), I reconstruct the argument of the opening section of Truth and Method, showing that Gadamer's critique of Kant is not simply one-sided. I then examine (2) how Gadamer develops insights from the Critique of Judgment in his later essay Intuition and Vividness. By engaging with Kant's notions of genius and aesthetic idea, Gadamer outlines a theory of art as an experience of truth, thereby revising the opposition drawn in Truth and Method between an aesthetics of form (Kant) and one of content (Hegel). Finally (3), I argue that this rethinking of Kantian aesthetics significantly affects Gadamer's own theory of art. In his interpretation of Celan's poetry, Gadamer explicitly claims continuity with Kantian aesthetics. In this sense, I show how Kantian influences shape central notions in Gadamer's aesthetics and, contrary to the judgment of Truth and Method, contribute to enriching his conception of the experience of art as an experience of truth.
The paper aims to provide a broad construct for understanding skills, what they are, and the ways in which they are situated, i.e., dependent on the conditions for their exercise. Adding to Hinchliffe's approach, we made skills' transferability not only a key aspect of their conceptualization but also a way of exploring their deeply embodied nature and their intricate relation with complex situations. While there is a growing body of research regarding concrete aspects of embodied cognition in learning environments, little attention is given to skilful performances while transferring them into different (mediatized and non-mediatized) learning environments. Our theoretical and empirical investigation offers a preliminary picture of how skills are reconfigured and redeployed in transitioning from one learning environment to another. Regarding the structure of skill, we enlarged Hinchliffe's approach, integrating the perspective of conversational analysis. The structure of skills can be made explicit if we follow their build-up from simple abilities and their integration into larger structures. According to our view, being skilful means that one can cope with scripted and unscripted interactions and move easily between them.
This article proposes an inclusive therapeutic method by which the self recognizes itself in its relation to itself, with the other, with the world and with the body. These dimensions make up its existential integrity. When one of these dimensions compromise itself, all the others compromise themselves as well. Thus, in order to achieve an inclusive equilibrium, therapeutic treatment needs to reestablish the dimensions of the self. This treatment will seek a possible trigger for the self to be able to live spatiotemporally. To make this possible, ethics and therapy intertwine themselves. In other words, the conception of ethics intertwines itself with existential integrity.
Contemporary scholarship in the humanities increasingly adopts a hermeneutics of suspicion to uncover and criticize coercive ideologies in the European cultural tradition. However, there is a growing recognition that the pervasiveness of such a critical spirit overshadows alternative attitudes that humanities scholars can, and do, adopt towards their objects of study. In this article, I leverage these developments to reconsider the relationship between tradition and critique in Gadamer and post-Gadamerian scholarship. Specifically, I argue that Gadamer's hermeneutic assessment of tradition should be understood not as uncritical, nor as critical by default, but as "postcritical." This postcritical stance allows for the exposure and dissolution of dogmatic forces in the process of understanding, while remaining cautious of the absolutization of such a suspicious gesture. I conclude by outlining some of the basic elements of a postcritical hermeneutics, which includes ideology critique as a possibility without excluding other, more affirmative possibilities.
In this text a comparison is drawn between Husserl's The Origin of Geometry and Heidegger's The Origin of the Work of Art, two works written in the same period (between 1932 and 1936). It is argued that both deal with the theme of mathesis, understood in its Greek meaning, i.e. as an area concerning learning and teaching, the origin and transmission of knowledge. The fact that Husserl and Heidegger refer to two different areas shows that they understand mathesis in two different ways. For Husserl, it takes the form of a historical transmission aimed at preserving an original identity of meaning and ensuring the supratemporality of truth, while for Heidegger it takes the form of the memory of the difference that produces (and continues to produce) meaning, i.e. the eventual character of truth.
The article argues that, although scarce, Robert Spaemann's considerations of fiction, creativity and aesthetics disclose an inherently aesthetic character of the constitution of being a person. It also enables us to reconstruct the aesthetic grounding of morality which offers moral certainty instead of moral objectivity as a more suitable alternative for the criterion of moral truth. The article does that by reconstructing an aesthetic constitution of being a person from Spaemann's philosophy. It argues that the category of recognition, which is the grounding of all morality, has an intrinsic aesthetic structure that is similar to aesthetic Kantian concepts of sensus communis and the judgment of sublime. Spaemann's statement that "Poetically man dwells" is an ontological statement about the aesthetic constitution of a person and that it has an essential importance for our understanding of morality and moral truth.
In this article I explore an uncharted facet of the meaning of life: the constitution of meaning itself. The thesis posits that the meaning imbued in life is fundamentally connected to orientation in the world. The objective is to achieve a more comprehensive understanding of this phenomenon by analyzing how meaning-as-orientation arises within three overarching contexts: being-in-the-world, being-with-others, and being-with-oneself. To identify orienting meaning across these contexts, Heidegger's technical concept of "something-as-something" or as-structure from Being and Time is employed, particularly because it unfolds as openclosedness. Interestingly, the way it unfolds as openclosedness varies in each context. Since orientation also invariably carries an existential dimension, this unfolding and its impact are illustrated. Moreover, Heidegger's somewhat elusive yet pertinent differentiation between sense and significance is examined, with Levinas and Jean-Luc Nancy regarding them as two complementary and interacting sources of orientation.
This article investigates the reception of Dionysius Areopagita's hierarchical conception by one of the most famous spiritual authors in Byzantine and post-Byzantine times: Saint Gregory the Sinaite (ca 1275-1346). Written in the last period of his life, the text On the Four Hierarchies represents a synthesis of his spiritual and liturgical thought and a witness to the importance of the Dionysian notion of hierarchy for Byzantine theology. Gregory the Sinaite responds to the question concerning the place of monasticism in the Church's hierarchical structure in a way that is hermeneutically more original than that of Niketas Stethatos but at the same time more liturgical oriented. A key concept for understanding the creation and the Church, the hierarchy is also a hermeneutical tool for reassembling ecclesiastical life's sacramental and liturgical structure with the preeminent role of monastic spirituality.
The article examines the concept of weakness within the framework of the phenomenological and hermeneutical approach. Two research questions are posed: 1. What is weakness as an experience of the subject? 2. How does our understanding of weakness influence our ethical and political conceptions? First, the article provides a characterization of the phenomenon of weakness, using phenomenological methods. The author explores how weakness can be understood and how it differs from other, related notions (e.g., vulnerability). Weakness will be defined as a lack or serious limitation in agency - in the ability to act. Next, the author investigates how the concept of weakness has been historically incorporated into European ethical and political theory, drawing on hermeneutic methodology. Writings from the history of European philosophy that are representative of their respective eras were analyzed, focusing on how they illustrate the relationship between weakness and agency, as well as the political and moral consequences of this connection. This incorporation occurred primarily through the notion of weakness of the will, and secondarily through the neoliberal discourse of empowerment, viewed as a means of overcoming one's own weakness. Judith Butler's writings are an important point of reference in this case. In conclusion, the article argues for the necessity of new ethical and political attitudes toward one's own weakness.
In addition to the inner-psychoanalytical critique of the basic metapsychological concept of the death drive, the radical phenomenological and deconstructivist perspective according to Jacques Derrida is also included. The interpretation of the lethal designification of all meanings comes up against the limits of an irrevocable originality of life before all representation, on the one hand, and Freud's reference to repetition/interpretation as a claim to power to be able to adequately explain it alone, on the other. At the same time, this implies a fundamental question about the future of culture, how the connection between drive/life is to be methodically determined.
Etienne Bimbenet's view on anthropology in Merleau-Ponty's philosophy acknowledges the difficulties such a project has due to the openness of the late Merleaupontian notions of expression and existence. In this research, I aim to contribute to this problematization by proposing that the late Merleaupontian phenomenology drafts a pre-subjective existence in his writings on language and perception. I claim that the notion of human in Merleau-Ponty is impossible due to its ontological dependence on subjectivity, which is problematized in his last works. To achieve this objective, my argumentation follows three parts. Firstly, I present Bimbenet's study on anthropology in Merleau-Ponty, in order to raise questions on the exclusiveness of human symbolic behavior. Secondly, I will address MerleauPonty's proposal of expression, which I affirm implies an ambiguity between an active and a passive dynamism, to address its existential nature, tearing down an anthropological thesis. And, finally, I will take the previous ambiguity to argue a pre-subjective existence in late Merleau-Ponty, further problematizing the anthropological objective of his first work.
This paper investigates the thematization of the event from two different, yet related approaches. First, I will analyze Martin Buber's notion of the relational event, following its manifold usage in his writings. Buber's perspective will help in emphasizing the relational character of the event, which happens between I and Thou. Secondly, I will interrogate Henri Maldiney's concept of the event, in relation to what he has called transpassibility (transpassibilite), namely our radical openness towards the event. Transpassibility will be analyzed alongside the notion of trust, and I will attempt to prove that this radical openness to the event will be the key element that allows the human being to resist and cope with it. My claim is that the perspectives of both Buber and Maldiney can be taken in conjunction and provide a unitary whole regarding the process of attuning to the world. Buber stressed the importance of genuine encounters in the life of the person, while Maldiney addressed the problem of rhythm, regarding our relationship with the world. An adjacent aim of my paper will be that of showing how the conceptualizations of the two authors can lead us to a different approach concerning the psychotherapeutic relationship, hence I will also venture into the paths that Martin Buber and Henri Maldiney opened towards a dialogical psychotherapy. Nevertheless, both authors acknowledged the importance of trust in the world and its distinctive function, which allows the person to cope with the traumatic event. Finally, my paper will test the limits of the possibility of comparing Buber's philosophy of dialogue and Maldiney's phenomenological stance towards events.
This paper examines the phenomenological structure of liturgical experience, highlighting the role and function of affectivity in constituting the sense and feeling of "us" in liturgy. First, it emphasizes the role of a plurality of prereflective bodily awareness of each other as one of the minimal preconditions for the affective constitution of a liturgical "we". Second, considering the corporate nature of worship and the theological primacy of the "we" in liturgy, it elaborates on the proposal that affective experiential structure of it hinges on the constitutive interdependence of I, you, and we, rejecting an undifferentiated homogeneity of the liturgical we.
