The Phenomenology of Testimony

From Inner Truth to Shared World

Gert-Jan van der Heiden, Paul Marinescu (Herausgeber)

Buch | Hardcover

224 Seiten

2025
Brill (Verlag)
978-90-04-72678-9 (ISBN)

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This volume shows how a philosophical approach to testimony, informed by hermeneutics and phenomenology, provides a novel and thought-provoking perspective on the experience of testifying, thus making a significant contribution to the contemporary debate on bearing witness in the humanities.

Testimony is a central topic in contemporary philosophy, with a vast array of disciplines, from epistemology to testimonial literature, demonstrating considerable interest in it. Among these approaches, phenomenology and hermeneutics offer exemplary ways of capturing essential dimensions of testimony that are often overlooked. This volume explores the fundamental issues at stake in such a hermeneutical phenomenology, by developing new insights into the defining role testimony holds in shaping personal identity and human reality in general. By examining how testimony is engaged in the creation of a common world that includes singular experiences, the eleven essays collected here provide thought-provoking questions for other concerned disciplines, including history, sociology, and ecology.

Gert-Jan van der Heiden is professor of metaphysics at Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. He has published on continental philosophy with an emphasis on hermeneutic phenomenology, including The Voice of Misery: A Continental Philosophy of Testimony (2020). Paul Marinescu is a researcher at the “Alexandru Dragomir” Institute for Philosophy, Romania. He coedited several journal issues and collective volumes devoted to the phenomenology of history, memory, violence, and testimony, including “The Articulation of Phenomenology and Hermeneutics in Paul Ricœur” (2023).

Contents

Notes on Editors

Notes on Contributors

Introduction: on the Stakes of a Phenomenology of Testimony

Gert-Jan van der Heiden and Paul Marinescu

1 The Temporality of Witnessing

Cristian Ciocan

2 A Hermeneutic Phenomenology of Witnessing and Testimony: on Being-There-With and Being-Gathered-Around

Gert-Jan van der Heiden

3 The Experience of Testimony: from the Individual to the Collective

Paul Marinescu

4 Portrait Painting, Photography, and the Subliminal Testimony of the Environing Life-World

Jeffrey Andrew Barash

5 Testimony as Articulation of Natality: an Arendtian Approach to Bearing Witness

Ileana Borţun

6 Arendt’s Phenomenology of Identity

Aoife McInerney

7 Summoning Witnesses: Arendt’s Practice of Quoting in Her Last and Unfinished Book Project, The Life of the Mind

Wout Cornelissen

8 Testimony of an Exile from Language within Language—or How to Read Genet with(out) Sartre

Dorothée Legrand

9 Testimonial Literature and the Meaning of the Past: the “Other” Narratives of the Gulag in Women’s Memoirs

Lovisa Andén

10 Witnesses of Fake History

Roland Breeur

11 Topical Issues in Testimony: Literature, Digital Communication, and Ecology

Jean-Philippe Pierron

Index

Erscheinungsdatum	14.05.2025
Reihe/Serie	Studies in Contemporary Phenomenology ; 27
Verlagsort	Leiden
Sprache	englisch
Maße	155 x 235 mm
Gewicht	501 g
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie ► Erkenntnistheorie / Wissenschaftstheorie
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie ► Metaphysik / Ontologie
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie ► Philosophie der Neuzeit
ISBN-10	90-04-72678-0 / 9004726780
ISBN-13	978-90-04-72678-9 / 9789004726789
Zustand	Neuware