Our world's cultural circles are permeated by the philosophical influences of phenomenology and existentialism and the illuminations of movements following on them. These two quests to elucidate rationality - ever renewed in the progress of thought - took their distinct inspirations from Kierkegaard's existentialism plumbing the subterranean source of subjective experience and Husserl's phenomenology focusing on the constitutive aspect of rationality. From a century's distance, however, we can see that those who continued Husserl's investigations and the existentialists could meet and mingle readily because they had this in common, the vindication of full reality.

The two projects melded in the inquisitive minds (Scheler, Heidegger, Sartre, Stein, Merleau-Ponty, et al.) and numerous philosophical issues were expanded in various perspectives (the lived body, subjectivity, personhood, etc.) In a fruitful cross-pollination of insights, ideas, approaches, fused in one powerful wave and undermined the dominant reductionism, empiricism, naturalism then being disseminated throughout science and all domains of thought.

Existentialist rejection of ratiocination and speculation together with Husserl's shift to seeking the genesis of meaning in experience closed a gap between philosophy and literature (Wahl, Marcel, Berdyaev, Wojtyla, Tischner, etc.), the foundational nature of language (Wittgenstein, Derrida, etc.) and opened the "hidden" behind the "veils" (see herein Sezgin and Dominguez-Rey).

This wondrous renewing wind had not only transformed the culture of our day, but has also paved the way to the renewal of our humanity in a New Enlightenment, to which we will pass in our following third and final volume in which we appreciate the impact and promise of Phenomenology and Existentialism in the twentieth century.

Contenu

Section I.- Was Merleau-Ponty a Phenomenologist? Some Reflections Upon the Identity of Phenomenology.- Sartre's Postcartesian Ontology: On Negation and Existence.- "Brute Being" and Hyletic Phenomenology: The Philosophical Legacy of Merleau-Ponty's the Visible and the Invisible.- Physis and Flesh.- Embodiment and Existence: Merleau-Ponty and the Limits of Naturalism.- Section II.- The Method of Karol Wojty?A: A Way Between Phenomenology, Personalism And Methaphysics.- The Role of Experience in Karol Wojti?a's Ethical Thought.- Camus and Tischner: in Search of Absolute Love.- Edith Stein and Jean Paul Sartre: A Possibile Comparison?.- Section III.- The Dimension of Existence Disclosed by Unraveling the Intentional Structure of Imagining.- Phenomenological and Poetical Grounds of Linguistics.- Perception, Textual Theory and Metaphorical Language.- La Phénomenologie et le Problème de L'imagination.- Section IV.- Merleau-Ponty and the Eternal Return to the Life-World: Beyond Existentialism and Phenomenology.- Dis-Identity as Living Identity.- De-Situatedness: The Subject and its Exhaustion of Space in Gilles Deleuze.- The Post-Structural Effect on the Life-World: Re-Thinking Critical Subjectivity and Ethics through Existential Performance and the Constitutive Power of Performativity.- Section V.- Jean Wahl The Precursor.- Albert Camus: Phenomenology and Postmodern Thought.- Jan Kott and The Aesthetics of Reception: Aspects of An Existential Theatre.- The Existential and Aesthetic Aspects of The History Museum at The Turn of The Century.- Section VI.- Playing with Places: The Aestethetic Experience of Place in a Play Situation.- Mythopoetics of Stone.- Towards a Phenomenology ff the Instrument-Voix.- Hors D'Oeuvre Revisited: An Existential Exchange.-Section VII.- The Human Telos Beyond the Instrumental Closure: The Contribution of Phenomenology and Existentialism.