Carla Canullo

Although phenomenology’s interest in the work of Maine de Biran is well known, the French philosopher’s work also marks an important path in hermeneutics, namely in what we can call “medical hermeneutics.” To paraphrase the famous phrase of Ricoeur’s hermeneutics, “to explain more in order to understand better,” medical hermeneutics would consist in explaining an illness in order to understand the body better. However, since there is an ambivalence of illness and health in a single body, it is precisely this duality or coexistence of principles that the treatment of illness in the body reveals to us. Thus, by developing Hermann Boerhaave’s phrase “homo simplex in vitalitate, duplex in humanitate,” Maine de Biran makes it possible to discover a radical duality in the unique human being, i.e. a radical and unconscious passivity and a conscious psychological state characterised by effort. This duality constitutes the complexity of the human being, which our philosopher also discovers thanks to his dialogue with the physicians of his time. Finally, thanks to this dialogue, Biran’s work can be inscribed in the history of the relationship between philosophy and medicine.

L'articolo esplora il concetto di essere figli e figlie da una prospettiva filosofica e antropologica, concentrandosi sul significato e sul segreto inerente alla nascita. Attraverso un'analisi approfondita, viene esaminato come l'atto di nascere non implichi solo un evento biologico, ma anche una dimensione esistenziale e spirituale. Si discute l'importanza del riconoscimento dell'altro come figlio o figlia e le implicazioni etiche e sociali di questa relazione fondamentale. Inoltre, viene analizzato come diverse tradizioni culturali e religiose affrontino il mistero della nascita e della filiazione.

After the publication of L’essence de la manifestation and his research on Maine de Biran, Michel Henry devoted two volumes to the work of Karl Marx. Published in the 1970s, at a time when Marxism dominated the cultural and political scene, Henry is quick to gloss over the Marxist debate of the time, without interesting for political implications of Marx’s work and questioning it in the light of the phenomenological proposal he had initiated in his early works. In particular, he shows how Marx’s work can be understood if the phenomena he discovers (praxis, history, alienation) are manifested in the horizon of life. In order to grasp this horizon, I will propose to follow the overturing that Henry’s phenomenology enacts; an overturing that is both thematic and more authentically philosophical, aiming to highlight life as the invisible reverse of phenomena. To do this, I will first explain the meaning of the overturing; secondly, I will outline the main lines of Henry’s phenomenological proposal; thirdly, I will introduce in this framework Henry’s reading of Karl Marx’s work.

The tension between the sense-content of the idea and its scientifically proven objectivity reaches its climax in the plainly expressed claim. However, science is free neither from metaphors nor from rhetorical figures that provide a framework for interpretation, such as paradigm, model, analogy, and so on. In other words, the findings need to be accommodated in order to be received and are not otherwise communicated. [...] The hope of the editors is to offer the reader, thanks to all the contributors, a textbook of quality and relevance, and perhaps a particular input to challenge and find what is given by revealing itself and/or oneself.

The aim of this article is to show that the “attestation of evil and testimony of hope” are characterized by the genitive that accompanies them. This places them both, each no less than the other, in two different horizons: while the horizon of attestation is Heideggerian, the horizon of testimony is a legacy of Jean Nabert. Both of these horizons are present in the thought of Ricœur, and characterize the entire spectrum of his work. However, we are not dealing here with a syncretism resulting from the co-presence of a hermeneutic source and of the philosophy of reflection. On the contrary, I attempt to show that the co-presence of attestation and testimony results from the fact that Ricœur never stopped “walking on two legs,” given what he writes in a conversation published in the Critique and Conviction, and that this presence is rooted in Ricœur’s formation, which is at the same time philosophical, literary and biblical, as he never renounced either the former one, or the latter ones.

La genesi dell’opera di Levinas mostra in atto il prender forma del suo pensiero, forma che si profila nella fattispecie di un rovesciamento della filosofia. Rovesciamento in duplice senso, tematico, nell’inversione dei temi classici, e propriamente filosofico, mirante un rovescio che la filosofia non ha saputo ancora cogliere, suo “sé” che incessantemente muove la ricerca del pensiero. In tale rovesciamento ne va la ridiscussione dei temi classici della filosofia, dell’io e dell’essere, dell’attività e della passività, dell’orizzonte e della fenomenalità possibile, rovesciati verso il loro impensato.

Speaking about translation without mentioning the work of Domenico Jervolino is unjust and meaningless. Unjust because Jervolino was the author who in Italy had strongly promoted a "philosophy of translation" as Philosophical Hermeneutics and not only as branch of Analytic Philosophy. Meaningless because if we ignore Jervolino’s work, we would squander one of the clearest explanations of the implications of translation, namely its political role. Thanks to Jervolino we can meditate on this task and also understand the possible developments of translation, which helps to promote and increase peace.

Michel Henry was, fundamentally, neither a thinker of the Krisis, nor a philosopher of “critical” thought. In his Barbarism, however, and his two volumes on Marx, Henry criticized forcefully the culture of his time and place. Culture, Henry suggests, has brought about an over-turning that has obscured life, its inner essence. Henry’s phenomenology, which opposes itself explicitly to this over-turning, strives to grasp, and to re-turn thought again, to that which, in his view, has been concealed. This doubled turn—an over-turning of an over-turning, advanced in order to restore what modern thought has subtracted, i.e., life—represents the most fundamental, genuinely, ‘critical’ aspect of Henry’s philosophy. The question here, then, is to see whether and how Henry’s phenomenological proposal can regain what has been forgotten and concealed, and how this subtracted element can be returned again to thought. If this can be clarified, the genuinely critical character of Henry’s thought can be constituted, as capable both of protesting against its time and of proposing elements for its renewal. In this essay, I will introduce certain characteristic themes of Barbarism, in order to establish a connection between barbarism and its critique. This connection will be established through a clarification of two such radical reversals in our age; those of culture, on one hand, and psychoanalysis on the other. In order to investigate this connection, and in order to engage the general theme of a reversal, I will take a detour, in order to begin with what I will define as a forgotten overturning.

Where does it bring us, today, the question-God, which phenomenology has not ceased to discuss? What we can say is that this is a controversial issue, which has divided both who has tried to practise in first person phenomenology and who has carefully read Husserl’s works on the topic. If the question-God can be repeated today, it must be done according to Husserl’s gesture that starts any opening of new fields of knowledge, that is the reduction and the epoché. It is practising these two gestures that it is possible to discover what can be reduced and what remains as irreducible. Does the question-God remain irreducible? Yes, on condition that, through the practice of the epoché, the sense itself of transcendence is called into question again in order to identify any givenness of God. This givenness of God, through the epoché, is discovered in the possibility of the free suspension. This is a gesture “of” God that also the human being can execute while discovering that the possibility that what is given is freely suspended to allow further considerations on other freedoms is more originating than every givenness. Thus, another manner of transcendence could manifest itself, that is a manner of transcendence not thought as “presence” to be suspended, but as discovery of the completely free root of what is given. This manifestation of transcendence would allow to repeat phenomenologically the question-God.

This collection of essays is a response to a challenge that is undoubtedly paradoxical: to introduce in Italy an author who is already known and appreciated by scholars who have encountered his work, and, often, followed his teachings. While the transmission of knowledge has traditionally been through both exoteric and esoteric teachings (the former intended for the general public, and the latter for a small group of researchers), this divide is reproduced constantly through the distinction between ‘institutionalised’ knowledge found even in ‘philosophy manuals’, and the knowledge that animates the research and discussions of researchers. If we keep in mind this distinction, we will undoubtedly better understand the influence and role of the work of Jean Greisch (born in 1942), within the Italian hermeneutical tradition from the second half of the last century. If on the one hand, the work of this philosopher is still not much known to the general public (owing to the lack of Italian translations), on the other hand it is difficult, if not impossible, to meet a scholar in the field of hermeneutical tradition who has not been engaged with at least some of Greisch’s works, and who has not suggested or not recommended their reading to junior researchers interested in acquiring hermeneutical reason. This gradual dissemination of Greisch’s work has led to the building of a growing community of scholars gathered around his work, a community that goes beyond all pretentious ‘Rubicon’ divide between German and French hermeneutics.

Translation characterized Levinas’s works since his formation, when he was a young translator of Husserl. But it is also the topic discussed by the philosopher in some talmudic readings, where he wonders about the possibility and about what is at stake of the “s’exposer en grec”. The thesis sustained is that this exposition is, first of all, a translation, surely different from a purely linguistic one, which is characterized by its political value. “S’exposer en grec” means to declare to the Greek world, or to philosophy, new ideas and it means, most of all, to translate the original sociability that causes the impossibility for every man to be without the other. Therefore, writing in Greek, Levinas tried to find a way to transfer to everybody this truth for the man which is neglected by the Western social and political system as model of “pure” Humanism.

Au carrefour de la phénoménologie française contemporaine Depuis la fin des années ’90, la réflexion sur l’événement a permis de compter Claude Romano parmi les protagonistes de la phénoménologie française contemporaine. Sa proposition phénoménologique s’est ensuite nouée (grâce à l’endurante lecture des romans de Faulkner) à l’inouï débordement de l’événement de la vie que le récit est censé redonner, pour ainsi dire, "en elle-même" et à l’abri de toute sorte de réduction. L’enjeu de ces pages – consacrées à l’ouvrage de Claude Romano paru en 2010, Au cœur de la raison, la phénoménologie – sera la même répétition de la phénoménologie que Romano nous a livrée dans cet ouvrage. En effet, notre avis est que Romano, en 2010, a pratiqué une Wiederholung de la phénoménologie et qu’il l’a fait situant celle-ci au centre d’un carrefour où confluent les questions historiques (Husserl, Heidegger), les libres variations de la phénoménologie en France (Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas), la philosophie analytique. Or par cette répétition il s’est installé au carrefour de la phénoménologie française contemporaine, et cela pour deux raisons : premièrement, parce qu’il a donné une contribution décisive à l’alternative "réduction vs intentionnalité" qui ne cesse de représenter l’alternative de la réception française de la phénoménologie. Deuxièmement, parce que par sa répétition il a ouvert aussi un chemin nouveau et original qui maintenant demande à être phénoménologiquement questionné.