Phenomenology and the Primacy of the Political ― Essays in Honor of Jacques Taminiaux

This volume is a Festschrift in honor of Jacques Taminiaux and examines the primacy of the political within phenomenology. These objectives support each other, in that Taminiaux's own intellectual itinerary brought him increasingly to an affirmation of the importance of the political. Divided into four sections, the essays contained in this volume engage with different aspects of the political dimension of phenomenology: its dialogue with classic texts of political philosophy, the political facets of phenomenological praxis, phenomenology's contribution to actual political debates, and the impact of Taminiaux's work in the shaping of phenomenology's notion of politics.

The phrase “the primacy of the political” echoes the “primacy of perception” as it was famously defined by Merleau-Ponty. This book emphasizes, however, the inescapability of the political rather than its “foundational” character, i.e. the fact that various itineraries of thought, explored in different fields of phenomenological research, give rise to politically relevant reflections. It points out and elucidates political connotations that haunt phenomenological concepts, such as ‘world', ‘self', ‘nature', ‘intersubjectivity, or ‘language', and traces them to a broad range of approaches, concepts, and methods. In its explorations, the book discusses a broad range of thinkers, including, but not limited to, Aristotle and Kant, Bergson, Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Gadamer, Ricoeur, and Arendt.

Veronique Foti is Professor of Philosophy Emerita at Pennsylvania State University. She is the author of Tracing Expression in Merleau-Ponty: Aesthetics, Philosophy of Biology, and Ontology (Northwestern UP: Evanston, Illinois, 2013), Epochal Discordance: Holderlin's Philosophy of Tragedy (SUNY: Albany, 2007), Vision's Invisibles: Philosophical Investigations (SUNY: Albany, 2003), Heidegger and the Poets: Poiesis, Sophia, Techne (Humanities Press: New York, 1992). She is currently working on a new book, tentatively titled Merleau-Ponty at the Gallery: Phenomenological Aesthetics and Practices of Visual Art.

Pavlos Kontos is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Patras. His publications include: (ed.) Evil in Aristotle (Cambridge UP: Cambridge, 2017), (ed.) Phenomenology and The Metaphysics of Sight (with A. Cimino. Brill: Leiden, 2015), Aristotle’s Moral Realism Reconsidered. Phenomenological Ethics (Routledge: New York, 2013), (ed.) Gadamer et les Grecs (with J.C. Gens & P. Rodrigo. Vrin: Paris, 2005), L’action morale chez Aristote (Presses Universitaires de France: Paris, 2002), D’une phenomenologie de la perception chez Heidegger (Kluwer: Dordrecht, 1996).