Logos and Life: Creative Experience and the Critique of Reason: Introduction to the Phenomenology of Life and the Human Condition

Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka

Dec 2012 · Analecta Husserliana Book 24 · Springer Science & Business Media

About this ebook

It is rare that we feel ourselves to be participating in history. Yet, as Bertrand Russell observed, philosophy develops in response to the challenges of socio-cultural problems and situations. The present-day philosophical endeavor is prompted not by one or two, but by a conundrum of problems and controversies in which the forces carrying life are set against each other. The struggles in which contemporary mankind is fiercely engaged are not confined, as in the past, to economic, territorial, or religious rivalries, nor to the quest for power, but extend to the primary conditions of human existence. They under mine man's primogenital confidence in life and shatter the intimacy of his home on earth. Philosophical reflection today cannot fail to feel the pressure of the current situation within which it unfolds. Since this situation now involves the ultimate conditions of human existence, its demands have at last given to philosophy the impetus and direction needed for conceiving that the first and last of its concerns should be life itself.

About the author

Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka was born in Marianowo, Poland on February 28, 1923. She studied at the University of Krakow, the Sorbonne, and the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, where she received a Ph.D. in philosophy. She was the founder and president the World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and Learning. She was the author of 14 books and the editor of Analecta Husserliana: The Yearbook of Phenomenological Research and Phenomenological Inquiry: A Review of Philosophical Ideas and Trends. She died on June 7, 2014 at the age of 91.