Simona Bertolini

As is well known, Roman Ingarden and Edith Stein had a deep intellectual relationship and friendship, which began during their stay in Göttingen and Freiburg. The time spent together during this period and the correspondence that they maintained over the following years allowed them to be in close contact with their respective philosophies and to influence each other. This article aims at illustrating the affinities between Ingarden’s description of soul in § 78 of Controversy over the Existence of the World and the analysis of soul and psyche developed by Stein between 1916 and 1922. Furthermore, it aims at presenting the hypothesis that this analysis influenced the formal anthropology elaborated by the Polish philosopher many years later. Both the depiction of the soul as a personal nucleus that manifests itself in human lived experiences and the description of this manifestation through the notion of “force” are theoretical elements that are essential in Ingarden’s mature ontology of man and that already played a crucial role in Stein’s early writings. Both thinkers, within several years of one another, elaborated an anthropological view that does not have the life of consciousness as a primary guideline, but that brings to light the ontological relevance of the unitary psychic source of human dispositions, of human character, and of consciousness itself.

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.

Existenz und Coexistenz è l’opera in cui Eugen Fink espone la sua filosofia sociale in base ai presupposti dell’ontologia del ‘Mondo’ che egli sviluppa a partire dal secondo dopoguerra. Così come quest’ontologia si compone di piani di analisi differenti, anche la struttura della socialità si rivela complessa e stratificata, tesa fra la descrizione fenomenologica e l’approfondimento speculativo. L’obiettivo del saggio è di esaminare tanto le premesse metodiche e teoriche dell’indagine finkiana, quanto le sue componenti strutturali, al fine di ricostruire la risposta fornita dal pensatore alla questione della coesistenza, nonché la sua originale definizione del rapporto fra individuo e comunità.Existenz und Coexistenz is the work in which Eugen Fink explains his social philosophy on the basis of the ontology of the ‘World’ that he develops since the post-war period. If this ontology is composed of several levels of analysis, so is the definition of the sociality complex and stratified, stretched between the phenomenological description and the speculative deepening. The purpose of this article is to investigate both the methodological- theoretical presuppositions and the structural components of Fink’s investigation, in order to reconstruct the answer the philosopher has provided to the questions about the coexistence and the relation between individual and community.