Situated at the crossroads of nature and culture, physics and consciousness, cosmos and life, history – intimately conjoined with time – continues to puzzle the philosopher as well as the scientist. Does brute nature unfold a history? Does human history have a telos? Does human existence have a purpose? Phenomenology of life projects a new interrogative system for reexamining these questions. We are invited to follow the logos of life as it spins in innumerable ways the interplay of natural factors, human passions, social forces, science and experience – through interruptions and kairic moments of accomplishment – in the human creative imagination and intellective reasoning. There then run a cohesive thread of reality.

Prompted and ever diversified by the specifically human interrogative logos, scientific inquiries seek a common system of links in order to mutually confirm and rectify their results. Coming closer and closer to phenomenology, the sciences of life find the common ground of the reality in the ontopoiesis of life. Could it not be that the interrogative logos of science, participating in human creative inventiveness will bring together also the divergent scientific methods in a common network? A network which comprises natural processes, societal sharing-in-life, and existential communication.

Beauty fulfils human existence. As it registers in our aesthetic experience, beauty enhances nature’s enchantment around us and our inward experience lifting our soul toward moral elevation. This collection of art-explorations seeks the elemental ties of the Human Condition. It endeavors to explain the relation of beauty and human existence, and explores the various aspects of beauty.

PART I THE CRITIQUE OF REASON CONTINUED: FROM LOGOS TO ANTI-LOGOS 1. THE NEW CRITIQUE OF REASON A new critique of reason is the crucial task imposed on the philosophy of our times as we emerge more and more from so-called "modernism" into a historical phase which will have to take its own paths and find its own determination. It may be considered that the main developmental line of modern times in its philosophy as well as in its culture at large was traced by the Cartesian cogito. The unfolding of Occidental philos ophy has culminated in reason or intellect's being awarded the central place. This is its specific trait. We can see a direct line of progression from the cogito to Kant's Critique. It is no wonder that this work is the landmark of modern philosophy. Kant's Critique was concerned with the foundation of the sciences. Edmund-Husserllaunched a second major, renewed, critique of reason, one which addresses not only the critical situation of the sciences but extends the critique even to the situation of Occidental culture as its malaise is diagnosed by this great thinker. Edmund Husserl voiced, in fact, the conviction that Occidental humanity has reached in our age the peak of its unfolding. His identify ing this peak with the formulation of phenomenological philosophy strikes at the point in which the significant and novel developments of Occidental culture and philosophy (phenomenology, that is) coincide.

Underscores the limitations of traditional psychology to envision a more healthy ecological and psychological future.

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.

This volume of the collected writings of John Sallis presents a two-semester lecture course on Maurice Merleau-Ponty given at Duquesne University from 1970 to 1971. Devoted primarily to a close reading of the French philosopher's magnum opus, Phenomenology of Perception, the course begins with a detailed analysis of The Structure of Behavior. The central topics considered in the lectures include the functions of the phenomenological body; beyond realism and idealism; the structures of the lived world; spatiality, temporality, language, sexuality; and perception and knowledge. Sallis illuminates Merleau-Ponty's first two works and offers a thread to follow through developments in his later essays. Merleau-Ponty's notion of the primacy of perception and his claim that "the end of a philosophy is the account of its beginning" are woven throughout the lectures. For Sallis's part, these lectures are foundational for his extended engagement with Merleau-Ponty's The Visible and the Invisible, which was published in Sallis's Phenomenology and the Return to Beginnings.