Around Bernhard Waldenfels’ Phenomenological Perspective: Margins, Abysses, and Enigmas of Experience

Bernhard Waldenfels is certainly one of the leading representatives of the contemporary philosophical tradition with a phenomenological orientation. His scientific education, his intellectual background and his very rich range of publications, many of which have been translated into the major languages, characterise him as a significant heir to the great German philosophical tradition, which he has enlivened in creative contact with contemporary thought, of which he is an acknowledged protagonist. At the centre of his theoretical work is the proposal of a pathic founded and responsively oriented phenomenology, attentive to the problems of corporeity, artistic expression, interculturality, and ethics, and elaborated in confrontation with the great classics of the philosophical tradition, starting with Plato, to whom he always returns. Extremely original is his rethinking of the phenomenological tradition, through a close examination of the legacy of Edmund Husserl, and of the solicitations of post-World War II French philosophy, which was profoundly influenced precisely by that German thought of the first half of the 20th century that had experienced the lacerations of persecution and diaspora following the disasters of history...