Background
Waldenfels, Bernhard was born on March 17, 1934 in Essen, Federal Republic Germany. Son of Bernhard and Therese (Schröder) Waldenfels.
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book
Ordnung Im Zwielicht (German Edition)
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/3518578413/?tag=2022091-20
Bernhard Waldenfels
Edit ProfileEducation
Degree Greek, Latin, History, U. Munich, 1961; Habilitation in Philosophy, U. Munich, 1967.
Career
1968-1976, Lecturer, then Associate Professor, Munich. Since 1976, Professor Ordinarius in Philosophy, Ruhr University. 1970-1976, Cofounder and Vice President of the German Society for Phenomenological Research.
Coeditor of Phänomenologie und Marxismus 4 vols, 1977-1979), of omnibus volumes on Gurwitsch and Schutz
(1983), Merleau-Ponty (1986) and Foucault (1991), and of the journal Philosophische Rundschau.
Achievements
Works
Views
Waldenfels’ philosophy is at the boundary of modernism and post-modernism. His main influences are Husserlian ‘lifeworld’ phenomenology. Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of ‘chiasm’ and ‘incarnate meaning’ and, more recently, French poststructuralism and posthermeneutics. In his 'The Mid-realm of Dialogue’ (1971) he takes his departure from a ‘bipolar event’—the ‘equiprimordiality’ of self and other—in which dialogue functions as a living medium. ‘The Play-space of Behaviour’ (1980) is influenced by MerleauPonty, structural linguistics and semiotics. It concerns a ‘space’ or ‘free play’ where inside and outside interpenetrate and which forestalls both the retreat into pure consciousness and the reduction to physical mechanisms. French phenomenology encompasses major variants on the Husserlian original, and in his Phenomenology id France (1983) Waldenfels traces these developments particularly in the work of Sartre. MerleauPonty, Levinas and Ricoeur. In his ‘In the Web of the Lifeworld’ (1985), he resists Husserl's view of the lifeworld with its ‘forced unity’, and argues instead that the impact of ‘brute being' forces us to view the lifeworld as an unfinished order with room for otherness and the uncanny. His ‘Order at Twilight’ (1987) is an elegant and pensive study of the threshold between nature and culture, and his ‘The Thorn of the Strange’ (1990) concerns the question of a suitable response to ‘otherness’—the ‘thorn’ or ‘prickle in the flesh’ which causes us to overstep the bounds of the personal and collective order. His most recent book. ‘Introduction to Phenomenology’ (1992) is an overview of the various branches of phenomenology in Europe and the USA.
Membership
Member Deutsche Gesellschaft Philosophie, Deutsche Gesellschaft Pänomenologische Forschung.
Interests
Connections
Married Christin Goes, August 17, 1960. Children: Titus, Aurel.
