Shifting Roles. The Manifold Identities of Phenomenology (The 5th Conference on Traditions and Perspectives of the Phenomenological Movement in Central and Eastern Europe)

Organized in collaboration with the Romanian Society for Phenomenology and the ICUB Humanities project: PN-III-P4-ID-PCE-2016-0273: The Structures of Conflict: A Phenomenological Approach to Violence.

The present conference aims to celebrate and question the contemporary versatility of phenomenology, by addressing its manifold shifts in function, its present identity and its possible perspectives, in both a systematic and a historical perspective.

Argument: Looking back at phenomenology’s century-long history, one is particularly struck by the puzzling variation of its function, that is, by its changing role and its shifting status as a discipline. Phenomenology, prior to being established as a “science” by Husserl, was already in use as a “method” in the natural sciences as well as in psychology. In its first years, phenomenology was conceived only as a preliminary technique for clarifying fundamental concepts, and not as a philosophical discipline in its own right. Even Husserl’s early interpretation of phenomenology as “descriptive psychology” still implied such a subordinate function. It is only after the publication of the Ideen that phenomenology actually acquired the status of a philosophy proper, which came along with Husserl’s “radicalisation” of the phenomenological method and his construction of the ultimately paradoxical concept of “pure phenomenology”. However, his tendency to regard phenomenology as an incarnation of “first philosophy” was soon challenged by thinkers like Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Schütz, Levinas or Ricoeur, for whom a “pure phenomenology” was no longer defensible. Consequently, they variously reshaped the place of phenomenology in relation to traditional philosophy and metaphysics, as well as to the human and social sciences, in the context of which the phenomenological method simultaneously developed a still on-going parallel history. In more recent times, this diversification of its functions proliferated with the advent of neo- and post-phenomenological platforms, with the repurposing of phenomenological elements in deconstructivist and critical projects, or with hybrid attempts to merge phenomenological procedures with those of the empirical sciences, most notably in the case of neurophenomenology. In addition to this, it can also be noted that through the works of Patočka, Dragomir or Tischner, phenomenology acquired a different function, as a clandestine social practice, in the specific historical context of Eastern Europe during the Cold War. It is in view of such reflections that the present conference aims to celebrate and question the contemporary versatility of phenomenology, by addressing its manifold shifts in function, its present identity and its possible perspectives, in both a systematic and a historical perspective.