In his 1956 book Das Gemüt, Stephan Strasser presents an original phenomenological investigation into human happiness and pleasure. We will examine Strasser’s theory of happiness in more detail and reveal how he incorporates important phenomenological insights from Thomas Aquinas’ theory of the passions of the soul. Both Strasser and Aquinas view happiness as the fulfilment of intentional striving and differentiate between various feelings associated with the pursuit and attainment of a goal, such as joy and pleasure. However, while Aquinas believes (...) that only an imperfect form of happiness can be attained in this life, Strasser aims to determine the essence of the highest form of happiness possible for human beings as the felt anticipation of perfect happiness in the future. Strasser, therefore, interprets Aquinas’ theory through the lens of an existential-phenomenological approach. (shrink)

Resumen El artículo busca presentar los fundamentos de una teoría de la desigualdad en Husserl a partir de una ampliación del concepto, proveniente de la ética husserliana, de destino. En las dos primeras secciones, presento las principales conclusiones de la ética de Husserl, incluyendo lo que hasta ahora la literatura ha entendido como el concepto de destino (que caracterizo como «destino natural»). Posteriormente, basándome en textos póstumos de Husserl, sugiero la necesidad de ampliar el ámbito del destino a su dimensión (...) social (lo que he denominado «destino social»), lo que hará posible apreciar que la desigualdad es un problema central para las preocupaciones prácticas de Husserl. Finalizo mostrando un sentido en que el destino social tiene cierta preeminencia sobre el destino natural. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to provide comparative research of the concept of authentic existence in Stoicism and Phenomenology. The analysis in the article is carried out by comparing select authors’ understanding of a few key concepts which appear to be the most alike: authentic and inauthentic existence, personal renewal, seeking cosmologic framework for ethics, being part of community, and the role of death in shaping awareness of authentic existence. The analysis concludes that there are various degrees of convergence (...) in all concepts considered in the article, which allows the argument that despite substantial differences between philosophies, concepts of authentic existence of Stoicism and Phenomenology at times have compatible aspects, and even complement each other. (shrink)

The fundamental goal of this paper is to clarify the importance of Husserl’s reflections on destiny (Schicksal) in the context of his post-WWI ethics. In the first section, I sketch Husserl’s reflections on war in his private correspondence. In the second section, I show that, in his post-WWI research manuscripts on ethics, Husserl conceptualized various forms of meaningless suffering under the heading of destiny. One of the main questions of Husserl’s post-WWI ethics can be formulated as follows: in the dark (...) horizon of senselessness, how is an ethical life possible? In the remaining sections, I show that Husserl’s reflections on this question led him to deformalize his earlier ethics and motivated him to ground his ethics of reason in an ethics of love. In the third and fourth sections, I sketch Husserl’s two fundamental answers to this question, the first of which concerns his phenomenology of love, while the second one – his phenomenological metaphysics in general, and his phenomenological teleology, in particular. While for Husserl, these answers are complementary, after clarifying Husserl’s view on the conflicts of values, I conclude with some reflections on the importance of not overlooking that these answers are analytically distinct. (shrink)

In this paper, I focus on Edmund Husserl’s analyses of the act of approval and the role he attributes to it in his ethics. I show that we can deepen our understanding of both if we rely on his critical reflections on Shaftesbury’s theory of affections in his lecture course Einleitung in die Ethik. The sections of this course devoted to Shaftesbury are the only place in Husserl’s later philosophical production where he addresses the need to clarify the nature of (...) approval from a phenomenological point of view and provides precise indications about the role that such emotions play in our life. I thereby examine Husserl’s criticisms of Shaftesbury’s account of reflective emotions, and I compare these criticisms with Husserl’s account of approval in the texts from the Konvolut über Billigung collected in the Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins. I argue that, according to Husserl, approval is an essential but not sufficient component in the pursuit of virtue. The upshot is that crucial parts of Husserl’s ethics come from a radical and original reworking of central notions of the early modern sentimentalist tradition. (shrink)