Lecture
LCCP Research Seminar: Thinking the in-between. World and alienness in Waldenfels and Merleau-Ponty
- Date
- Monday 5 February 2024
- Time
- Series
- LCCP work in progress and research seminar 2023 - 2024
- Location
-
Gravensteen
Pieterskerkhof 6
2311 SR Leiden - Room
- 1.11
Leiden Centre for Continental Philosophy is pleased to announce a talk by Ovidiu Stanciu, Professor, Director del Programa de Doctorado Instituto de Filosofía, Universidad Diego Portales, Chili.
Abstract
My talk aims to propose a phenomenological approach to the questions of the world and alienness, by drawing on the analyses put forth by Bernhard Waldenfels and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. I will start out by reconstructing the outlines of the experience of the alien, as described by Waldenfels, and show that, on his account, this experience can function as a powerful impetus enabling us to call into question some of the most deeply held commitments of Western philosophical tradition: the sovereignty of the ego, the supremacy of order, the priority of the whole. Then, I will maintain that a patient analysis of this experience compels us to undertake an inquiry concerning the “inter-world,” understood as the place of the encounter and the threshold of separation between the self and the alien. Finally, drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s alternative description of the “inter-world,” I will claim that Waldenfels’s account is insufficiently radical and show that the in-between realm cannot be assimilated to an interstice lodged between two insulated spheres. Rather, the “inter-world” should be conceived of as a shared dimension, subtending the partition between the spheres of ownness and alienness, as the one inclusive world.
About
Ovidiu STANCIU is Assistant Professor of philosophy at the Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago de Chile and Research Associate at the Husserl Archives in Paris. He is a former student of the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris. He holds an MA in Contemporary Philosophy (Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne, 2008) and a PhD in Philosophy (Université de Bourgogne / Bergische Universität Wuppertal, 2015), with a thesis on “the problem of metaphysics in Heidegger and Patočka”. He was previously University Lecturer in Philosophy at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques (Sciences Po), Paris and at the Institut Catholique de Paris. He has edited two special issues of the Revue Philosophique de Louvain (one dedicated to Eugen Fink and the other to Tran-Duc-Thao) and two books: Patočka lecteur d’Aristote. Phénoménologie, ontologie, cosmologie (Argenteuil: Le Cercle Herméneutique, 2015) and Finitude and Meaning. Understanding History with Ricœur and Patočka (Bucarest: Zeta Books, 2024). He has published papers in journals such as Continental Philosophy Review, Research in Phenomenology, Phänomenologische Forschungen, Revue de métaphysique et de morale, Revue Philosophique de la France et de l’étranger, Alter. Revue de phénoménologie.
All are welcome!