Remus Breazu

In Categories 12 Aristotle gives several meanings of the concept of priority. Since this chapter belongs to what was traditionally called “post-predicaments,” Aristotle’s presentation of priority was rather neglected by commentators. In this paper, I analyse the concept of priority as it is presented by Aristotle in Categories 12. First, I analyse priority with respect to opposites, contraries, and relatives. Second, I investigate each of the five meanings, and I show their inner connection with other concepts from Categories. Furthermore, I show that we can find an additional meaning of priority, which is implicit in Aristotle’s presentation from Categories 12.

The main goal of this paper is to interpret the experience of attempting to think one’s own death, an experience which is de-constitutive. The second goal is to show that this experience may be the ground of some paradoxical philosophical concepts, such as the Aristotelian concept of prime matter. In the first part of the paper,(i) it is laid out the phenomenological concept of constitution. In the second part of the paper,(ii) it is laid out the Heideggerian concept of being into death. Starting from here,(iii) constitution and death are brought together, in order to enfold (iv) the question of one’s own death, which is something different from being into death. The analysis is deepened through (v) the interpretation of the temporality of this experience. Last,(vi) it is suggested the similarity to the experience brought by the attempt to think prime matter.

This article accounts for Heidegger’s phenomenological concept of violence from the period of Being and Time. Violence is relevant for Heidegger in two different contexts: (i) methodological, where we speak of hermeneutic violence, and (ii) thematic, where we should speak of existential violence. The former is grounded in the latter. In the first part of the article, I analyze hermeneutic violence, showing that this concept is ambiguous, and one has to distinguish between two different meanings of it. In the second part of the article, I show that at the core of the original sense lies the existential violence of bursting out of senselessness. In the final part, I contextualize Heidegger’s concept in light of the contemporary phenomenological developments of the phenomenon of violence, showing that existential violence is constitutive and has the peculiar character of being at the same time sense-destroying and sense-making.

The paper aims to give a phenomenological account of the way in which the experience of violence is modified in the aesthetic images. The phenomenological framework in which I place my analysis is primarily given by Edmund Husserl’s conception. The investigation starts from the curious fact that violence cannot be aesthetically experienced when it is presented in person, but it can be aesthetically experienced in images. I claim that the reason for this asymmetry lies in the structure of image-consciousness, that is, in the differences between the physical thing, the depicting object and the depicted subject. Given that the image-consciousness presupposes the background of the physical thing, which is constantly and implicitly aimed by the consciousness, it is possible to focus only on the manner in which the depicted violence appears. In this way, we can aesthetically contemplate a violent scene without being disturbed by it. To show this, I bring forth a brief presentation of the a priori structure of (i) image-consciousness and (ii) aesthetic attitude, as they have been theorised by Husserl. After (iii) providing a minimal concept of violence and explaining some of the modifications that violence undergoes in image-consciousness, (iv) I show how violence is modified in aesthetic images.

In this article, I address the question of violence with respect to the phenomenological difference between the transcendental and the empirical field. In the first part, I phenomenologically address the notion of violence, developing a concept required for an account of the phenomenon of violence. Thus, I correlate it with the notion of vulnerability, arguing that violence cannot be understood irrespective of vulnerability. However, a proper phenomenological account has to indicate the subjective conditions of possibility of a phenomenon as it is given in experience. Therefore, we should ask: what is the status of violence when we are talking about the transcendental field? This question leads to the second part of my article, where I address the notion of violence from the perspective of the difference between the pure and the empirical ego, as it has been traced out by Husserl. If from the point of view of an empirical ego the concept of violence is meaningful, from the point of view of the transcendental ego it seems to be absurd. This is particularly significant, because Husserl is talking about the transcendental ego as being immortal. The pure ego is thus invulnerable and this means that violence—understood from the point of view of both the violating subject and the violated one—is something that cannot be linked to the transcendental field. The question that arises—how is violence possible on the empirical level, since it is impossible on the transcendental level?—is a question to which Husserl cannot respond.