Krakow was the setting of the August 2008 conference on Phenomenology and Existentialism from which the papers in this and two succeeding volumes were drawn. Phenomenology and Existentialism had strikingly different inspirations and yet the two waves of thought became closely linked as both movements flourished in the mid-twentieth century. Time has given us greater perspective on that interaction. Piotr Mroz s study in this first volume -- "What Does It Mean To Be an Existentialist Today?" -- shows the distance we have traveled. It was thought that a conference devoted to these movements...

From Aristotle to the present, memory has been grasped as a trace or impression of lost reality bridging physiological experience and consciousness. Philosophers have vainly sought the nature of this bridge. The present-day physiologizing/naturalizing of consciousness is not resolving their congenital continuity, in which the very existence and practice of life is rooted. We have to change our approach (Erwin Straus). The Aristotelian congenital ties between memory and temporality, acquire crucial significance in our primogenital ontopoiesis of life (Tymieniecka). It reveals memory to be...

The great flourishing in the Twentieth Century of the amalgamated movement of Phenomenology and Existentialism, having reached its unfolding and reverberation as we have shown in our two preceding books and continue in this one seems to have spanned the entire gamut of their marvels.

Although the philosophical field is being still corroborated by phenomenologico-existential insights, phenomenology remains itself enigmatic. The question of its foundations, as the source of sense remaining unsolved by Husserl (herein Verducci s study of Husserl and Fink, infra-page).

And yet, the...

While the vital logos of beingness recollects for its constitutive use fragments from memory s magazine, ensuring constructive continuity in accordance with its genetic patterns, the creative logos of the human mind also is indebted to the work of memory in creative imagination for the essential role it plays in the selective transformation, invention, projection that informs the felt and intelligible logos of human selfhood, personality, meaning, fullness, destiny... the world of life.

As fragmentary and seemingly disjointed as it is in relation to concrete subjective experience,...

Our world s cultural circles are permeated by the philosophical influences of existentialism and phenomenology. Two contemporary quests to elucidate rationality took their inspirations from Kierkegaard s existentialism plumbing the subterranean source of subjective experience and Husserl s phenomenology focusing on the constitutive aspect of rationality. Yet, both contrary directions mingled readily in common vindication of full reality.

In the inquisitive minds (Scheler, Heidegger, Sartre, Stein, Merleau-Ponty, et al.), a fruitful cross-pollination of insights, ideas, approaches,...

Phenomenology is the philosophy of our times. Through the entire twentieth century this philosophy unfolded and flourished, following stepwise the intrinsic logic and dynamism of its original project as proposed by its founder Edmund Husserl. Now its seminal ideas have been handed over to a new era. The worldwide contributors to this volume make it manifest that phenomenological inspiration knows no cultural barriers. It penetrates and invigorates not only philosophical disciplines but also most of the sectors of knowledge, transforming our way of seeing the world, our actions toward...