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Articles

Being and Becoming

Christopher Macann explains the basis of his ‘genetic’ system of phenomenology.

In Raphael’s painting The School of Athens, we see an elderly Plato pointing upward and a middle-aged Aristotle standing beside him, with his right palm held horizontally over the ground. This conjunction has been interpreted as the upward-oriented philosophy of the master (Plato) contrasting with the down-to-earth ideas of the pupil (Aristotle). This is by no means the only instance of a philosophy of heights contrasted with a philosophy of depths. Kant’s upward-oriented, ‘transcendental’ philosophy set in motion a reaction which led through Fichte and Schelling to the ‘ontological’ philosophy of Hegel. Again, Heidegger in Being and Time was prompted to transform Edmund Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology of pure essences into an ontological phenomenology of existence.

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