Research

The Center’s research activities develop along three main lines: reconstructive investigation, critical-theoretical analysis, and the promotion of original research across various application fields.

 

a) Reconstruction:

  • The debate in the second half of the 19th century and the early 20th century on the logical question and on the relationship between ideal validity and psychic actuality

  • The late 19th-century discussion on the status of psychology (empirical-descriptive psychology and experimental psychology)

  • The initial reception of Husserlian phenomenology by the so-called Munich and Göttingen circles and, later, in Freiburg im Breisgau

  • The development of Husserl’s thought in light of his published works and unpublished manuscripts

  • The formation of the phenomenological constellation and the many figures who shaped its complex configuration (Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Levinas, Ricoeur, Gadamer, Derrida, Henry, etc.)

 

b) Theoretical analysis of the following themes:

  • The intentionality of consciousness (subjective and collective, cognitive and emotional, etc.)

  • Subjectivity

  • Alterity

  • Embodiment

  • The transcendental

  • The lifeworld

  • Ontological and metaphysical questions in phenomenology (the problem of categories; the debate on realism and idealism, and on naturalization vs. non-naturalization; the metaphysical status of abstract entities such as numbers and values, and of secondary qualities such as colors, etc.)

  • Epistemological questions from a phenomenological perspective (sensuous intuition, categorial intuition, belief, knowledge, justification)

  • Issues in phenomenology of religion (specificity of religious experience, transcendence, the sacred, the divine)

  • The relationship between history of philosophy and phenomenology (intersections, continuities and distortions, phenomenology and Platonism, phenomenology and Aristotelianism, phenomenology and Cartesianism, etc.)

  • Issues in the phenomenology of education and formation

 

c) Original research in the following application fields:

  • Psychology, psychoanalysis, psychiatry

  • Anthropology and ethnology

  • Phenomenology of religious experience

  • Pedagogy and educational sciences

  • Social philosophy and sociology

  • Political philosophy

  • Aesthetics and the arts

  • Biology, medicine, neuroscience, ecology

  • Philosophy of mind and cognitive sciences