School · 19 thinkers
Phenomenology & Hermeneutics
19 thinkers of Phenomenology & Hermeneutics on the Agora star map, from Franz Brentano to Byung-Chul Han, in chronological order.
- 1838–1917Franz Brentano
What marks the mind is that every mental act is directed at something – you always think of, want or fear something.
- 1853–1920Alexius Meinong
Every thought has an object, but objects need not exist: the golden mountain and the round square have properties although they have no being; a theory of objects must therefore cover everything that can be thought, whether it exists or not.
- 1859–1932Christian von Ehrenfels
For Ehrenfels, a melody stays recognisable when transposed, although every tone has changed: the whole has a quality of its own, a “Gestalt quality”, that is more than the sum of its parts; and value, he held against Meinong, rests on desire rather than on feeling.
- 1859–1938Edmund Husserl
Set aside assumptions about whether the world exists and describe exactly how things appear to consciousness – that is where philosophy must begin.
- 1874–1928Max Scheler
We grasp values directly through feeling, in an order from pleasant to holy – and the human being is the creature open to the world.
- 1889–1976Martin Heidegger
For Heidegger, philosophy forgot to ask what it means to be; we exist thrown into a world, shaped by time and our own death.
- 1891–1942Edith Stein
We know other people by empathy, directly feeling their experience as theirs – and faith and philosophy can be joined in one view of being.
- 1893–1970Roman Ingarden
The real world exists independently of consciousness; a work of art, by contrast, has gaps that readers, listeners or viewers fill in themselves, and only then is it fully there.
- 1895–1975Mikhail Bakhtin
Every person occupies a unique place in being for which no one else can answer; to live and to speak is to respond to others, and meaning arises in a dialogue of voices that no single voice can absorb.
- 1898–1983Xavier Zubiri
To understand is already to sense: intelligence apprehends things directly as real, as what they are of their own, before it asks what they are; reality comes before being, and human beings are bound to its power.
- 1900–2002Hans-Georg Gadamer
For Gadamer, understanding a text or a person means letting your own horizon meet theirs – our prejudices are not obstacles but the starting point.
- 1905–1981K. E. Løgstrup
We never meet another person without holding something of that person’s life in our hands; the trust with which people meet each other carries an unspoken, radical demand to take care of the other, a demand that no rule can fully spell out.
- 1906–1995Emmanuel Levinas
Ethics comes before everything else: the face of another person makes a demand on me that I can never fully meet.
- 1907–1977Jan Patočka
Europe arose from the care for the soul, a life that examines itself in the light of truth; history begins where accepted meaning is shaken, and those who have been shaken can stand together against a world that only manages life.
- 1908–1961Maurice Merleau-Ponty
We do not just have a body, we are our body, and all perception and thought grows out of this bodily being in the world.
- 1913–2005Paul Ricœur
We understand ourselves through the stories we tell about our lives, and interpreting texts means staying open to meanings beyond the obvious.
- 1936–2023Gianni Vattimo
For Vattimo, after Nietzsche and Heidegger there is no final foundation, only interpretations; philosophy should accept this weakening of Being as a chance for tolerance, and the Christian message of God’s self-emptying, read as secularisation, points the same way.
- b. 1947Peter Sloterdijk
Humans always build protective spaces, from the womb to cities and global networks, and work on themselves through practice and self-training.
- b. 1959Byung-Chul Han
Today’s society no longer represses us – it tells us we can do anything, so we exploit ourselves until we burn out.