Reason, Life, Culture, 1993 Part I Phenomenology in the Baltics Analecta Husserliana Series, Vol. 39

Rationality in its various expressions and innumerable applications sustains understanding and our sense of reality. It is traditionally differentiated according to its sources in the soul: in consciousness, in reason, in experience, and in elevation. Such a functional approach, however, leaves us searching for the common foundation harmonizing these rationalities. The perennial quest to resolve the aporias of rationality is finding in contemporary science?s focus on origins, on the generative roots of reality, tantalizing hints as to how this may be accomplished. This project is enhanced by the wave of recent phenomenology/ontopoiesis of life, which reveals/expresses the workings of the logos at the root of beingness and all rationality, whereby we gaze upon the prospect of a New Enlightenment. In the rays of this vision the revival of the intuitions of classical Islamic metaphysics, particularly intuition of the continuity of beingness in the gradations of life, receive fresh confirmation.

Inaugural Lecture.- Metaphysics of Manifestation: Reason in the Individualization of Life, Sociability, Culture.- One: Rationality and Consciousness.- Silence as a Cultural Phenomenon.- Phenomenology and the Consequences of Postmodernity.- Reason and Reasoning: Husserl’s Way.- Transcendental Reality: Positive Expression.- The Phenomenological Being of Rationality.- “Man Strides along the Solar System...”: Human Existence in the Poems of Anise Koltz.- Two: Personality and the Inner Self in the Moral Significance of Life.- Emotional A Priori and Moral-Metaphysical Meanings of Max Scheler’s Phenomenology.- The Notion of “The Person” in A-T. Tymieniecka’s Thought.- Personality and Culture: Phenomenology and Phenomenological Anthropology.- Critique of Reason in Tymieniecka’s “The Three Movements of the Soul”.- The Inner Moral Self in Tymieniecka’s Vision.- Morals and Ethics in Phenomenology: The Moral Sense of Phenomenological Philosophy.- Three: Rationality and Valuation.- Reason and Culture.- Values in Cognition and Evaluation.- Value as a Phenomenon: Variants of the Phenomenological Understanding of Values.- The Phenomenology of Man in Max Scheler’s Thought.- The Mentality of Morality: Phenomenological and Psychiatric Approaches.- Four: Rationalities in the Societal and Cultural Life.- Life, Reason and Culture in the Lyrical Prose of the Luxembourg Poet Edmond Dune.- Reason and the Utopian Models of Culture: The Utopian Theme in Husserl’s Thought from a Theological Point of View.- Seeing and Reasoning in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Ontology.- Reason, Phenomenology, Pluralism.- The Phenomenology of Absurdity.- Heideggerian Hope.- Index of Names.