The essays in this book respond to Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka's recent call to explore the relationship between the evolution of the universe and the process of self-individuation in the ontopoietic unfolding of life. The essays approach the sensory manifold in a number of ways. They show that theories of modern science become a strategy for the phenomenological study of works of art, and vice versa. Works of phenomenology and of the arts examine how individual spontaneity connects with the design(s) of the logos - of the whole and of the particulars - while the design(s) rest not on some human concept, but on life itself. Life's pliable matrices allow us to consider the expansiveness of contemporary science, and to help create a contemporary phenomenological sense of cosmos.

Literature reveals that the hidden strings of the human "passional soul" are the creative source of the specifically human existence. Continuing the inquiry into the "elemental passions of the soul" and the "human creative soul" pursued in several previous volumes of this series, the present volume focuses on the "passions of the earth", bringing to light some of the primogenital existential threads of the innermost bonds of the "Human Condition" and mother earth. In the author's words, the book's purpose is to unravel the essential bond between the living human being and the earth - a bond that lies at the heart of our existence. A heightened awareness of this bond should enlighten our situation and help us find our existential bearings.

This is an exceptional volume which expands upon the World Phenomenology Institute's recent research: the study of the beautiful intertwining of the skies and the cosmos with the human pursuits of philosophy, literature and the arts. The relationship of humans to the cosmos is examined through the exploration of phenomenology, metaphysics and the arts. The authors of this volume write on a variety of topics which all seek to open the reader's eyes to the relationship of humans and our perception of our place in the cosmos. This volume offers a framework in which to present a rich panorama; a variety of perspectives illustrating how the perception of the interplay between human beings and the celestial realm advances in common experience and worldviews. This attempt to uncover our cosmic position is a great and worthwhile intellectual challenge. Philosophy as well as literature and the arts are nourished by this human quest for knowledge and understanding.

Transcendental phenomenology presumed to have overcome the classic mind-body dichotomy in terms of consciousness, yet, according to progress in scientific studies, the biological functions of the brain seem to appropriate significant functions attributed traditionally to consciousness. Should we indeed dissolve the specificity of human consciousness by explaining human experience in its multiple sense-giving modalities through the physiological functions of the brain? The present collection of studies addresses this crucial question challenging such "naturalizing" reductionism from multiple angles. In search for the roots of "The Specifically Human Experience" (Bombala), moving along the line of "Animality and Intellection"(Gosetti-Ferencei), "Naturalistic Attitude and Personalistic Attitude"(Villela-Petit), and numerous other perspectives, we arrive at a novel proposal to explain the scholar functional differentiation of conscious modalities. We reach their source in the ontopoietic thread conducting the Logos of Life in its stepwise "Evolutive Unfolding"(Carmen Cozma), and in "sentience" as its quintessential core of further irreducible continuity (Tymieniecka) dispelling dichotomies and reductionisms.

Papers by:
Grahame Lock, Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, Daniela Verducci, Ted Toadvine, Mary Trachsel, Martin Holt, Mary Jeanne Larrabee, Leszek Pyra, Bronislaw Bombala, Konrad Rokstad, Ilja Maso, Nancy Mardas, Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei, Maria Villela-Petit, Mara Stafecka, Carmen Cozma, Francesco Totaro, Andreas Brenner, Sinan Kadir Celik, Osvaldo Rossi, Maria Manuela Brinto Martins, Elga Freiberga, Klymet Selvi, J.C. Couciero-Bueno, Patricia Trutty-Coohill, Walter Lammi, Ljudmila Molodkina, Martin Nkafu Nkemnkia.

"There is no greater gift to man than to understand nothing of his fate", declares poet-philosopher Paul Valery. And yet the searching human being seeks ceaselessly to disentangle the networks of experiences, desires, inward promptings, personal ambitions, and elevated strivings which directed his/her life-course within changing circumstances in order to discover his sense of life. Literature seeks in numerous channels of insight the dominant threads of "the sense of life", "the inward quest", "the frames of experience" in reaching the inward sources of what we call 'destiny' inspired by experience and temporality which carry it on. This unusual collection reveals the deeper generative elements which form sense of life stretching between destiny and doom. They escape attention in their metamorphic transformations of the inexorable, irreversibility of time which undergoes different interpretations in the phases examining our life. Our key to life has to be ever discovered anew.

The challenge presented by the recent tendencies to "naturalize" phenomenology, on the basis of the progress in biological and neurological sciences, calls for an investigation of the traditional mind-body problem. The progress in phenomenological investigation is up to answering that challenge by placing the issues at stake upon a novel platform, that is the ontopoiesis of life.

Flashes of lightning, resounding thunder, gloomy fog, brilliant sunshine...these are the life manifestations of the skies. The concrete visceral experiences that living under those skies stir within us are the ground for individual impulses, emotions, sentiments that in their interaction generate their own ever-changing clouds. While our intellect concentrates on the discovery of our cosmic position, on the architecture of the universe, our imagination is informed by the gloomy vapors, the glimmers of fleeting light, and the glory of the skies. Reconnoitering from the soil of human life and striving towards the infinite, the elan of imagination gets caught up in the clouds of the skies. There in that dimness, sensory receptivity, dispositions, emotions, passionate strivings, yearnings, elevations gather and propagate. From the "Passions of the Skies" spring innermost intuitions that nourish literature and the arts. "

Creative force or creative shaping?

This unprecedented effort to plumb the workings of the ontopoiesis of life by disentangling its primordial forces and shaping devices as they enter into the originary matrixes of life yields fascinating insights.

Prepared by the investigation of the first two matrixes (the womb of life' and sharing-in-life', Analecta Husserliana Volume 74) the present collection of essays focuses upon the third and crowning creative matrix, Imaginatio Creatrix here proves itself to be the source and driving force which brings us to the origins of the human mind - human life.
Studies by: Elof Axel Carlson, A-T. Tymieniecka, N. Milkov, Eldon C. Wait, K. Rokstad, M. Golaszewska, M. Kule, W. Kim Rogers, Piotr Mroz, R. Pinilla Burgos, A. Carrillo Canan, G.R. Ronsivalle, J.E. Smith, A. Pawliszyn, A. Rizzacasa, L. Galzigna and M. Galzigna, Jiro Watanabe, M. Jakubczak, K. Tarnowski, M. Durst, W. Pawliszyn, R.A. Kurenkova, Carmen Cozma, E. Supinska-Polit, I.S. Fiut, Gerald Nyenhuis, Osvaldo Rossi, R.D. Sweeney, and D. Ulicka. "

During its century-long unfolding, spreading in numerous directions, Husserlian phenomenology while loosening inner articulations, has nevertheless maintained a somewhat consistent profile. As we see in this collection, the numerous conceptions and theories advanced in the various phases of reinterpretations have remained identifiable with phenomenology.

What conveys this consistency in virtue of which innumerable types of inquiry-scientific, social, artistic, literary may consider themselves phenomenological?

Is it not the quintessence of the phenomenological quest, namely our seeking to reach the very foundations of reality at all its constitutive levels by pursuing its logos? Inquiring into the logos of the phenomenological quest we discover, indeed, all the main constitutive spheres of reality and of the human subject involved in it, and concurrently, the logos itself comes to light in the radiation of its force (Tymieniecka).

A world ever more extensively interlinked is calling out for serving human interests broader and more compelling than those inspiring our technological welfare. The interface between cultures - at the moment especially between the Occident and Islam - presents challenges to mutual understandings and calls for restoring the resources of our human beings forgotten in the struggle of competition and rivalry at the vital spheres of existence. In the evolutionary progress of the living beings the strictly vital concerns, emotions, attributes become sublimed and elevated to the spiritual sphere at which human beings encounter each other and share. Studies presented here bring forth sublimity, generosity, forgiveness, beauty, and are exalting the quest after ciphers and symbols which lead to our sharing the common deepest stream of fraternal reality.

Identifying quickly illusion with deception, we tend to oppose it to the reality of life. However, investigating in this collection of essays illusion's functions in the Arts, which thrives upon illusion and yet maintains its existential roots and meaningfullness in the real, we might wonder about the nature of reality itself.

Does not illusion open the seeming confines of factual reality into horizons of imagination which transform it? Does it not, like art, belong essentially to the makeup of human reality?

Papers by: Lanfranco Aceti, John Baldacchino, Maria Avelina Cecilia Lafuente, Jo Ann Circosta, Madalina Diaconu, Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei, Brian Grassom, Marguerite Harris, Andrew E. Hershberger, James Carlton Hughes, Lawrence Kimmel, Jung In Kwon, Ruth Ronen, Scott A. Sherer, Joanne Snow-Smith, Max Statkiewicz, Patricia Trutty-Coohill, Daniel Unger, James Werner.

This highly personal account of a lifetime's spiritual and philosophical enquiry charts the author's journey of faith through contemporary culture. Distinguishing between what she posits as the 'universal' and the 'rhapsodic' "logos," Tymieniecka interrogates concepts as varied as creativity and the media, joy and suffering, and truth and ambiguity. She contemplates the possibilities and limits of communication between human beings, and outlines what she calls the 'transnatural destiny' of the human soul.

The book asserts that unlike theory, which unfolds a logical continuity, and unlike dialogue, which is directed sequentially upward toward intellectual conclusions, the mode of reflection of the 'rhapsodic logos' imposes no limits or caps upon its understanding. Instead, the 'logoic' flow interlaces the rhapsodic cadences of our reflections on reality, in all their innumerable fluctuations, and sifts them to mold the intimate mind/soul inwardness that we experience as faith.

The radiative meditations of this 'rhapsodic logos' weave their way through the entanglements of the mystery of incarnation, the constitutive archetypes, the inwardly sacred, the transnatural destiny of the soul, and finally ascend the rhapsodic scales toward culminating faith in the Christo-Logos."

The world was first introduced to the expertise and originality of Japanese scholars in phenomenology in Analecta Husserliana Vol. IX (1979). The third generation of Japanese scholars, belonging to the newly-founded Merleau-Ponty Japanese Circle, are now presented. Following Merleau-Ponty's tendency, the studies collected here seem to make a fresh phenomenological start in relation to classical Husserlian phenomenology, turning deliberately towards the `concrete', `the wild world', `flesh', `embodiment', `natural signs', `primal nature'. The rule of intentionality, natural language is thereby devalued. The wealth of insights, the freshness of intuition and the seminal power of these fascinating enquiries well merit a close reading.

In medicine the understanding and interpretation of the complex reality of illness currently refers either to an organismic approach that focuses on the physical or to a 'holistic' approach that takes into account the patient's human sociocultural involvement. Yet as the papers of this collection show, the suffering human person refers ultimately to his/her existential sphere. Hence, praxis is supplemented by still other perspectives for valuation and interpretation: ethical, spiritual, and religious. Can medicine ignore these considerations or push them to the side as being subjective and arbitrary? Phenomenology/philosophy-of-life recognizes all of the above approaches to be essential facets of the Human Condition (Tymieniecka). This approach holds that all the facets of the Human Condition have equal objectivity and legitimacy. It completes the accepted medical outlook and points the way toward a new medical humanism'.

From time immemorial, concern with timing of life has been crucial for the regulation of human praxis as well as for the philosophical quest to understand existence by seeking its meaning. The two used to inform each other, until modernity, when they parted. In spite of the extensive progress in manipulating change and motion, and of the abundance of metaphysical attempts to enlighten human beings about their fate, the puzzling nature of temporality and timing of reality remains controversial.The present collection of studies seeks a new answer by initiating a novel investigation informed by the ancient wisdom of the Greaco-Arabic-Islamic sources and inheritance, on the one side, and the contemporary discernment of Occidental phenomenology of life, on the other, in a common dialogical effort to unravel this great enigma of existence.

The contemporary revival of interest in the Sacred as a category of philosophico-religious reflection here finds a radical reversal of the traditional direction, taking the Sacred as the starting point of the itinerary toward the Divine. The wide variety of essays contained in this volume attempt to ground philosophy of the Sacred and the Divine in phenomenological evidence. Though employing different methodologies, the contributors register by and large the contribution of A-T. Tymieniecka's phenomenology of life in providing a significant 20th century vision for the accomplishment of this task. Its pursuit finds here expression in philosophical, historical, literary and political explorations leading to construing phenomenology of the Sacred as a prerequisite to the investigation of the Divine. The contributors to this extraordinary collection are: C. BA(c)dard, A. Ales Bello, Gerard Bucher, D. Chidester, D. Conchi, M. Kronegger, S. Laycock, Ph. Liverziani, J.N. Mohanty, E. Moutsopoulos, A.M. Olson, Y. Park, G. Penzo, B. Ross, C. Osowiec Ruoff, Th. Ryba, J. Smith, A-T. Tymieniecka and E. Wyschogrod.

This collection is the final volume of a four book survey of the state of phenomenology fifty years after the death of Edmund Husserl. Its publication represents a landmark in the comprehensive treatment of contemporary phenomenology in all its vastness and richness. The diversity of the issues raised here is dazzling, but the main themes of Husserl's thought are all either explicitly treated, or else they underlie the ingenious approaches found here. Time, historicity, intentionality, eidos, meaning, possibility/reality, and teleology are the main concerns of this collection devoted to studies in aesthetics, metaphysics and literary interpretation, written by such authors as, among others, R. Cobb-Stevens, C. Moreno Marquez, J. Swiecimski, Sitansu Ray and M. Kronegger. These original studies of phenomenological aesthetics and literary theory by scholars from all parts of the world were gathered by the World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and Learn ing during the year 1988/89 during its assessment of the phenomeno logical movement, fifty years after Husserl's death. IX A -T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana, Vol. XXXVII, ix."

Philosophy has been always received or bypassed for its resonance or aloofness with the spirit of the time. Should not philosophy/phenomenology of life be expected to do more to ascertain its validity? Should it not pass the pragmatic test, that is to respond directly to the life-concerns of its time? What is the role of the philosopher and philosophy today? Due to the ever-advancing scientific, technological, social and cultural changes that are shaping human life and the life-world-in-transformation, we are desperately seeking a measure to estimate life's unfolding, a compass to stir the course between Scylla and Charibda to maintain human-hood and creative insight for laying the cornerstones for the unforeseeable unfolding of life dynamisms. It is this challenge which philosophy/phenomenology of life meets with underlying ontopoietic unraveling of the hidden logoic concatenations of beingness-in-becoming.

The present collection of essays offers contributions to answer this challenge by focusing upon measure, sharing-in-life, intersubjectivity and communication, societal equilibrium, education, and more. It will be of great interest to those working in the fields of Phenomenology, Philosophy, History of Philosophy, and Contemporary Philosophy.

This volume is relevant to Islamicists, phenomenologists, comparatists, metaphysicians, philosophers of religion, and historians of ideas. This book is the first volume in a new and unique book series: Islamic Philosophy and Occidental Phenomenology in Dialogue. The main aim of this series is to engage in a philosophical exploration, bringing back to the philosophical arena key philosophical issues presently forgotten.

This volume marks a phase of accomplishment in the work of the World Phenomenology Institute in unfolding a dialogue between Occidental phenomenology and the Oriental/Chinese classic philosophy. Going beyond the stage of reception, the Oriental scholars show in this collection of studies their perspicacity and philosophical skills in comparing the concepts, ideas, the vision of classic phenomenology and Chinese philosophy toward uncovering their common intuitions. This in-depth probing aims at reviving Occidental thinking, reaching to its intuitive sources, as well as providing Chinese thinking with a precise apparatus of expression toward its rejuvenation in a new significance. Studies by Korean and Chinese phenomenologists: Nam-In Lee, Inhui Park, Benjamin I. Schwartz, Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, Sitansu Ray, Zhang Xian, Zhang Qingxiong, Tsung-I Dow, Ashok K. Gangadean, Yushiro Takei, Louise Sunderarajan, Gregory Tropea, James Sellmann, Tyong Bok Rhie, Sang-Ki Kim, Daniel Zelinski, Qingjie Wang, Calvin O. Schrag, Jung-Sun Han.

In this third volume of a monumental four book survey of Phenome- nology world-wide fifty years after the death of its chief founder, Edmund Husserl, we have a collection of studies which, in the first place, consider Husserl's legacy in the postmodern world. The extent of our indebtedness to the Master is shown in explora- tions of the archeology of knowledge, hermeneutics, and critical studies of language by A. Ales Bello, P. Pefialver, P. Million, V. Martinez Guzman, H. Rodriguez Pifiero, Y. Vlaisavlevich, and others. There follow calls for renewing the critique of reason by C. Schrag, F. Bosio, and J. Lerin Riera and discussion by D. Laskey, K. G6rniak-Kocikowska, M. R. Barral, Y. Park, and N. Delle Site on A-T. Tymieniecka's phe- nomenology of life, which proposes a total reorientation of phenome- nology by introducing a conception of the human condition in which the human creative act is the Archimedean point for philosophy.