Riccardo Valenti

This paper reconstructs a phenomenological itinerary from existential analysis to legal normativity and back to ontology, taking coexistence as its guiding concept. Focusing on Nicola Abbagnano and Sergio Cotta, it argues that coexistence is not a secondary social notion but the original structure through which existence, meaning, and normativity are constituted within Italian phenomenology. In Abbagnano's early existential phenomenology, coexistence grounds intersubjectivity, historicity, and commitment, while already carrying an intrinsic normative tension. Although this does not yet amount to a theory of law, it discloses the existential conditions that make normativity intelligible. Cotta's philosophy of law is then read as a systematic development of this framework. Through socionomy and ontological or primary justice, law appears as a diffusive and parifying practice oriented towards preserving coexistence among finite beings. The paper thus offers a phenomenological account of legal normativity rooted in relational and historical coexistence.

In this paper, I defend the claim that objectivity, in classical phenomenology, is best read as an instituted invariant: not a static given but the diachronic achievement of cooperative validation within transcendental intersubjectivity, mediated by technics—above all, writing and inscription—that ensure the iterability, transmissibility, and public critique of sense. The essay unfolds in five movements. The first revisits Husserl’s critique of the mathematization of essences, showing how the very ideality of meaning depends on technical exteriorizations—above all writing—which sustain intergenerational communication and open the space for a non-reductive account of objectivity. The second turns to Fink’s analysis of objectivation and mundanization, redefining science as a form of supra-individual habituality. The third expands on Merleau-Ponty’s notion of expressive technicity, in which linguistic and artistic expression institutes fields of objectivity through indirect language and style. A fourth section develops a comparative synthesis—sociogenesis, diachrony, technics—and formulates criteria for instituted objectivity (addressability, iterability, transmissibility, responsivity). The conclusion bridges classical phenomenology and contemporary debates on digital technics, arguing that what endures is not what withdraws from history, but what remains fit to be repeated, challenged, and renewed within it.

_La vita felice: Argomenti a favore e contro l'oggettività fenomenologica e l'oggettivazione nelle riflessioni di Giovanni Piana ed Enzo Paci_ Questo lavoro si concentra su alcune delle riflessioni più pregnanti di Enzo Paci e Giovanni Piana a proposito dei temi dell’oggettività e dell’oggettivazione a partire dal commento di alcuni passaggi della proposta fenomenologica di Edmund Husserl. Ne _La crisi, _soprattutto, Husserl si concentra sulla polemica inerente alla possibile matematizzazione delle essenze, che egli ravvisa all’opera nella filosofia moderna e che lentamente conduce a uno stato di _crisi, _appunto. In questo testo, Husserl denuncia pertanto l’applicazione di un metodo ritenuto illecito secondo la sua proposta di rettifica fenomenologia, che discrediterebbe il valore dell’intuizione e dell’acquisizione storica e progressiva del sapere. Questo studio riprende i punti salienti di questa revisione teorica seguendone il commento poi offerto da Paci e Piana che si concentra, in modo del tutto originale, su una potenziale lettura e interpretazione politica di queste posizioni, e sulle quali questo contributo pone particolare attenzione.

The following contribution focuses on the crucial role of technology in comprehending climate change and global warming. It emphasises that this phenomenon is imperceptible and enigmatic to traditional phenomenological approaches. To answer this, the text highlights the arguments scholars such as the late Don Ihde and Timothy Morton put forth about the imperative need to utilise technology to sensibly comprehend and raise awareness of this complex reality, each employing distinct conceptual frameworks. The essay examines how it is feasible to integrate these emerging technological resources without disregarding the foundational assumptions that guide our sensory intuition, shaped by the influence of Husserl’s ideas.

This paper undertakes a thorough examination of the impact of Edmund Husserl’s The Origin of Geometry on the philosophical development of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. It aims to analyse the pivotal conceptual intersections between the two thinkers, highlighting the innovative ideas that emerged in Merleau-Ponty’s work as a response to Husserl’s text. Additionally, this study seeks to clarify the unique factors that contribute to the originality of Merleau-Ponty’s ideas, exploring how he both engages with and transcends Husserlean’s thought in his own writings. By closely investigating these relationships, the paper aspires to offer a deeper understanding of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical contributions while situating them within the broader context of existential and phenomenological discourse.

What happens when consciousness fails? What happens to the connection with our experiences when we abandon ourselves to torpor, when “the light goes out”? Merleau- Ponty answered these questions in his course on Passivity, commenting on the status of the unconscious, sleep, dreams and memory. These are modalities through which the subject discovers a renewed adherence, a deeper sense of belonging to the world, and a peculiar ontological inherence or confidence. In the lethargic reabsorption, Merleau- Ponty so read Proust in The Problem of the Word, the sleeper rediscovers a carnal past with an enigmatic character, for which the anchorage to the stasis of rest, already personifies, the virtualities of a project, a specific “kinetic initiation”, the attribute of an ‘imminent movement’. It is from these intentions that one can trace the genesis of Dardel’s reflection on the nature of inhabiting, of human existence confined to the Earth. To inhabit a surface geographically is first and foremost to “rely, through sleep, on what lies (...) beneath us: the base on which our subjectivity folds”. To exist means “[re]starting from there (...) in order to untie from the surrounding world the ‘objects’ to which (...) our attention will be directed”. Starting from the Berquean assumption according to which the “spatiality of existence”, in all its meanings, “is movement and not -, conversely, motionless, and therefore sterile, - rootedness”, as also attested by Barbaras in L’appartenance, this essay highlights the essential character of ‘coexistence’ in which men and the world in its geographical consistency participate. It, therefore, investigates the conditions, the conjugations, as said, ‘terrestrial’, by means of which the ‘inner geography’ is articulated - and therefore, in the same way, disarticulated - as past, repetition and the creative newness, the future of which is the indispensable presupposition, is the ‘basis’; and the work of man, the implication of which ties his destiny to the ‘moving extension’ that is the Earth. This study concludes with the recognition of a twofold but unique, singular movement within existence, which alternates exhibition and withdrawal, vital élan and relapse into materiality, according to the coordinates of a “reality that is made through that which is undone”.