Realistische Phänomenologie / Realist Phenomenology – serie

Ethical Personalism proposes to reflect on the person from at least three levels: ontology, epistemology, and ethics. Articulating from various philosophical and religious angles and traditions the ontological and inalienable value of the human person, i.e., her dignity, the contributors to this volume show not just what it means to be a human person, but also what it takes to live accordingly. Hence, beyond the purely theoretical elaboration on ethical personalism that reposes the crucial debates between relativism and realism on the one hand, and consequentialism and deontology on the other hand, this volume offers a range of insights useful for addressing concrete and practical matters that we, as humans, are confronted in our everyday life. With the call “back to the person!” which takes roots from a deep conviction to bring into light the value of the person, Ethical Personalism unequivocally affirms the necessity of (re)placing the person in the centre of our project of society, economic plans, political settings, and environment policies.

Alexander Pfänder's classical phenomenological logic, a masterwork of unmatched clarity, is presented here for the first time in English. The book unfolds the general essence of logic, its object, not acts of thinking but objective "thoughts", meanings and higher unities formed by them: the nature and kinds (1) of judgments (propositions) and their truth and truth claims, (2) of concepts, and (3) of inferences; (4) the first foundational principles of logic (the principles of identity, contradiction, excluded middle, and sufficient reason) and of valid inferences, their foundation in ontological principles, as well as the valid forms of reasoning recognized in traditional logic and the reasons of their validity. Being a new phenomenological exposition of traditional logic, it reduces the symbolic language used to a minimum in order to concentrate on the logical meanings and laws themselves for which these symbols are signs.

The term "method" of realist phenomenology and philosophy can refer to three kinds of things which are being explored extensively in this work: (1) Kinds of philosophical knowledge used to return to things themselves: intellectual "vision" of necessary intelligible essences, insights into necessary states of affairs, knowledge of less than necessary essences, knowledge of existence as such, of the ego cogitans and of a concretely existing world, other persons, and the absolute being, deductive forms of reasoning, and others. (2) Ways to achieve such knowledge: such as various types of distinctions, asking proper questions, correct use of analogies, and replies to objections. (3) Finally, these methods include several "tricks" and devices such as methodic doubt and epoché; these are subordinated to the other methods, and neither necessary nor universal tools of all philosophical knowledge.

The phenomenologists were concerned to show that essential structures of being, knowable by rational insight, are found far more abundantly than is commonly thought. In his great monograph Reinach shows that in the civil law, where one usually thinks that there are only legal structures of human devising, there are in fact many essential structures, such as the structure of promising or of owning. These pre-positive structures, which are something different from the moral norms relevant to the positive law, provide the civil law with a foundation that can be known by philosophical insight. Though the enactments of the civil law are changeable, these essential foundations are not changeable. Of particular significance and originality is Reinach’s concept of a social act, that is, of an act that addresses another and has to be heard by the other in order to be complete. Reinach shows that the essence of legally relevant acts such as promising, comes to evidence when they are understood as social acts. The concept of a social act, in fact, has significance far beyond the part of legal philosophy in which Reinach first discovers it.