Claude Romano – författare

In At the Heart of Reason, Claude Romano boldly calls for a reformulation of the phenomenological project. He contends that the main concern of phenomenology, and its originality with respect to other philosophical movements of the last century, such as logical empiricism, the grammatical philosophy of Wittgenstein, and varieties of neo-Kantianism, was to provide a ""new image of Reason.""Against the common view, which restricts the range of reason to logic and truth-theory alone, Romano advocates “big-hearted rationality,” including in it what is only ostensibly its opposite, that is, sensibility, and locating in sensibility itself the roots of the categorical forms of thought. Contrary to what was claimed by the “linguistic turn,” language is not a self-enclosed domain; it cannot be conceived in its specificity unless it is led back to its origin in the pre-predicative or pre-linguistic structures of experience itself.

The world into which we are born as the horizon of all our behavior is a world both of things and of events. But what are events? Though familiar to all of us, they are philosophically obscure. However central they may be to the question of being in Western thought, from Aristotle to Heidegger, events have always been assigned a derivative status, indeterminate, at the margins of philosophy.Claude Romano seeks to change all that, to describe precisely what sort of phenomenon an event is and to establish how it can be grasped via a phenomenology. He seeks, above all, to understand a humanbeing as one to whom events can occur, who is able to face them and to appropriate them through experience. "Evential hermeneutics" is the name he gives this approach, which conceives human being as an undergoing of events for which there can be no substitution and as thereby becoming himself.Romano at once forces us to think human existence—or rather, human adventure—in the light of events and helps us understand how and why the event has been neglected in the ontological tradition.

The world into which we are born as the horizon of all our behavior is a world both of things and of events. But what are events? Though familiar to all of us, they are philosophically obscure. However central they may be to the question of being in Western thought, from Aristotle to Heidegger, events have always been assigned a derivative status, indeterminate, at the margins of philosophy.Claude Romano seeks to change all that, to describe precisely what sort of phenomenon an event is and to establish how it can be grasped via a phenomenology. He seeks, above all, to understand a humanbeing as one to whom events can occur, who is able to face them and to appropriate them through experience. "Evential hermeneutics" is the name he gives this approach, which conceives human being as an undergoing of events for which there can be no substitution and as thereby becoming himself.Romano at once forces us to think human existence—or rather, human adventure—in the light of events and helps us understand how and why the event has been neglected in the ontological tradition.

Contemporary philosophy, from Kant through Bergson and Husserl to Heidegger, has assumed that time must be conceived as a fundamental determination of the subject: Time is not first in things but arises from actions, attitudes, or comportments through which a subject temporalizes mtime, expecting or remembering, anticipating the future or making a decision.Event and Time traces the genesis of this thesis through detailed, rigorous analyses of the philosophy of time in Plato, Aristotle, and Augustine, ultimately showing that, in the development of metaphysics, the understanding of the temporal phenomenon as an inner-temporal phenomenon has made possible time's subjectivization.The book goes on to argue that time is in fact not thinkable according to metaphysical subjectivity. Instead, the guiding thread for the analysis of time must shift to the eventual hermeneutics of the human being, first developed in Event and World, and now deepened and completed in Event and Time. Romano's diptych makes a compelling, rigorous, and original philosophical contribution to the thinking of the event.

Contemporary philosophy, from Kant through Bergson and Husserl to Heidegger, has assumed that time must be conceived as a fundamental determination of the subject: Time is not first in things but arises from actions, attitudes, or comportments through which a subject temporalizes mtime, expecting or remembering, anticipating the future or making a decision.Event and Time traces the genesis of this thesis through detailed, rigorous analyses of the philosophy of time in Plato, Aristotle, and Augustine, ultimately showing that, in the development of metaphysics, the understanding of the temporal phenomenon as an inner-temporal phenomenon has made possible time's subjectivization.The book goes on to argue that time is in fact not thinkable according to metaphysical subjectivity. Instead, the guiding thread for the analysis of time must shift to the eventual hermeneutics of the human being, first developed in Event and World, and now deepened and completed in Event and Time. Romano's diptych makes a compelling, rigorous, and original philosophical contribution to the thinking of the event.

"A genuinely innovative contribution to philosophical accounts of subjectivity and temporality. Romano develops what he calls an 'evential hermeneutics' that takes as its starting point the life-changing events that upend our world. He studies the structure of these events in terms of the genuine change and novelty that they open up, distinguishing them from mere occurrences, which can be explained as a subject realizing pre-existing possibilities. Because such events introduce radically new possibilities by transforming me and my world, Romano argues that they must be understood as establishing a world rather than as happening in the world."—Shane Mackinlay, Catholic Theological College, University of Divinity, Melbourne

"A genuinely innovative contribution to philosophical accounts of subjectivity and temporality. Romano develops what he calls an 'evential hermeneutics' that takes as its starting point the life-changing events that upend our world. He studies the structure of these events in terms of the genuine change and novelty that they open up, distinguishing them from mere occurrences, which can be explained as a subject realizing pre-existing possibilities. Because such events introduce radically new possibilities by transforming me and my world, Romano argues that they must be understood as establishing a world rather than as happening in the world."—Shane Mackinlay, Catholic Theological College, University of Divinity, Melbourne

Religious and atheistic belief are presented anew in a volume of essays from leading phenomenologists in both France and the UK. Atheism, often presented as the negation of religious belief, is here engaged with from a phenomenologically informed notion of experience. The focus on experience, sparks new debates in readings of belief, faith and atheism as they relate to and complicate each other. What unites the contributors is their relationship to phenomenology as it has developed in France in the wake of Heidegger and Husserl. Leading French intellectuals from this context, Jean-Luc Nancy, Quentin Meillassoux, and Catherine Malabou, amongst others, contribute arresting ideas on atheistic faith, the death of God, and anarchic faith, opening up new areas of understanding in a field whose parameters and core concepts are ever shifting. Revealing the extent to which religious and atheistic belief must be seen to influence, and on a fundamental level, to co-create one another, the pluralistic society in which religious belief is counted as one option amongst many is given primacy. The fact that religious faith has become not only optional but also, in many contexts, strangely alienated from society, deeply modifies the experience of the believer as much as that of the non-believer. A focus on ‘experience’, over and above ‘belief’, moves us towards a mode of experiential knowledge which refuses to privilege the atheistic believer and deride the reality of religious belief.

Religious and atheistic belief are presented anew in a volume of essays from leading phenomenologists in both France and the UK. Atheism, often presented as the negation of religious belief, is here engaged with from a phenomenologically informed notion of experience. The focus on experience, sparks new debates in readings of belief, faith and atheism as they relate to and complicate each other. What unites the contributors is their relationship to phenomenology as it has developed in France in the wake of Heidegger and Husserl. Leading French intellectuals from this context, Jean-Luc Nancy, Quentin Meillassoux, and Catherine Malabou, amongst others, contribute arresting ideas on atheistic faith, the death of God, and anarchic faith, opening up new areas of understanding in a field whose parameters and core concepts are ever shifting. Revealing the extent to which religious and atheistic belief must be seen to influence, and on a fundamental level, to co-create one another, the pluralistic society in which religious belief is counted as one option amongst many is given primacy. The fact that religious faith has become not only optional but also, in many contexts, strangely alienated from society, deeply modifies the experience of the believer as much as that of the non-believer. A focus on ‘experience’, over and above ‘belief’, moves us towards a mode of experiential knowledge which refuses to privilege the atheistic believer and deride the reality of religious belief.

Examining philosophical views of human identity and calling for a shift in how we discuss this essential conceptThe problem of identity is one of the most debated contemporary issues in philosophy and the social sciences. Human Identity does not approach this question from a sociological or political position but rather seeks to take a step away from the dominant approach in metaphysics and analytical philosophy, putting forward a dialogical concept of identity inspired mainly by the phenomenological-hermeneutic tradition. Claude Romano argues that the question of identity can only be satisfactorily formulated from the point of view of an intrinsically social understanding of the human being: The identity that matters in our lives is the one we can assume before others in truthful conduct and thus the one for which we can bear responsibility in the first person.Romano carefully examines the full historical sweep of the philosophy of identity, referencing not only classic thinkers, including Descartes, Locke, Kant, and Husserl, but also contemporary interlocutors, such as Richard Moran and Charles Larmore. He engages in a sustained dialogue with these fellow philosophers, historical and current, while arguing for a complete paradigm shift in our approach to identity. Romano contends that we need to move on from the question Who?, as used by a prosecutor or judge to identify a guilty party, and instead look to the question used by Montaigne to define himself: Who am I?