PHENOMENOLOGY AS A FUNDAMENTAL INVESTIGATION (Fenomenologia jako badanie fudamentalne)

• Authors: Poltawski Andrzej
• Languages of publication: PL

Abstracts

EN

The essay starts with Walter Biemel's report on the introduction of the concept of 'Lebenswelt' by Husserl who, in his lecture in Vienna in 1935, passed from accepting as basic the ideal world of science to stating that this world is grounded in the 'Lebenswelt', the world as we perceive it. The 'Lebenswelt' is for Husserl the topic of phenomenology as a discipline of the spirit - a discipline of a very special, not objectively-logical character. This leads to the problem of historicity, discussed by Ludwig Landgrebe in the context of its end. He argues that history may be understood as history only from the point of view of a teleological principle (Kant's regulative principle of action) mediating between expecting the Last Things and the actual consequences of actions. But this must be connected with understanding time as the time of 'action' as analyzed by Heidegger, not as a continuous linear process directed by causal laws. The continuity of history is achieved by the free actions of people and the unpredictability in question is one of the free actions themselves. An outline of a consistent philosophy of the human person acting and morally developing on the strength of his or her actions has been given by Karol Wojtyla's 'perfectiorism'. Wojtyla stresses as basic the seemingly trivial distinction between a free action and what merely happens in us. Thomistic metaphysics can express both of those dynamisms only by the same terms 'agere-pati'. This is due, argues Wojtyla, to its basically cosmological character. Thus, there exists a tension between the personalistic approach of Thomism and its alleged empiricism. Thomistic philosophy is based, in fact, not on experience as understood by empiricism, but precisely on the exploration of the 'Lebenswelt'; and this field of investigation, being the domain of free action and moral development, i.e. of what is basically human, is not that of scientific theories and demonstrations but one of vision, persuasion, and testimonies.

Keywords

EN

ACTION; HISTORICITY; HUMAN PERSON; WORLD AS PERCEIVED

Discipline

• PHILOSOPHY: PHILOSOPHY

• Publisher: Polska Akademia Umiejętności / Uniwersytet Jagielloński
• Journal: Kwartalnik Filozoficzny
• Year: 2009
• Volume: 37
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 5-15
• Document type: ARTICLE

Contributors

author

Poltawski Andrzej

• Andrzej Poltawski, Redakcja 'Kwartalnik Filozoficzny', Uniwersytet Jagiellonski, Instytut Filozofii, ul.Grodzka 52, 31-044 Kraków, Poland

Identifiers

CEJSH db identifier

09PLAAAA062210