Husserl's transcendental phenomenology is not a mere egology, but gets its concrete accomplishment only as a phenomenology of 'transcendental intersubjectivity'. However, the subjective centers of any transcendentality and thus of every constitution — even of intersubjectivity itself — have to be such unities as Leibniz' 'monads', that is, individually concrete subjects producing all their representations of one another completely out of themselves, respectively. Thus the problem arises, how the genuine transcendental status of each monadic subject in all its constitutive achievements (...) could be maintained so that they develop their own intentional lives in a universal mutual accordance, without presupposing again a supra-monadic ground for their 'harmony', i.e. a higher-levelled ordering unity. I shall argue that th peculiar Husserlian 'transcendental monadology' is inevitably bound to this intrinsic paradox which can at best be reduced to a mere postulate but never be resolved. (shrink)

In as far as every philosophy appears at a certain point in time it later inevitably becomes a historical fact. If its content is then to be recognizable, if it is to be reclaimed as philosophy in the present, then we ourselves must have a philosophical conception of history and, furthermore, a conception of philosophy's own historicity. Only since Kant has modern metaphysics expressly and methodically developed such a conception within its systematic claim to truth. Moreover, for the presentday philosophy (...) and its relationship to a completed metaphysics such a conception is indispensable - under the presupposition that the history of philosophy is to be taken seriously as philosophy. (shrink)

The intention of my comments is mainly to draw attention to a necessary distinction between that prereflective cogito of post‐metaphysical subjectivity that is analysed in Westphal's paper and the subject of the cogito that can be identified and verified as the very principle of modern philosophy from Descartes to Hegel, namely, as the subject of reason. This means first of all to step back from the conviction, taken as self‐evident, that the subject of reason — and thereby the truth claims (...) of that entire philosophical epoch — are illusionary, that is, without any right of their own. Instead we should be ready to ask how it is brought about philosophically that the subject is “shattered,” “humiliated,” “declared forfeit,” etc. My thesis is that post‐metaphysical subjectivity with its contaminated opacity can be made understandable in principle out of the endogenous crisis of the fully developed “absolute” subject of reason, if this crisis is carried out and decided as the transformation of the subject from its absolute to its decentered status. (shrink)

On November 21, 1994, Werner Marx passed away peacefully in the place he loved so well, his apartment in the Schloß in Bollschweil. Professor Marx was born in 1910 in Mulheim, Germany. He studied law and philosophy in Berlin, Freiburg, and Bonn before completing his state examination and doctorate in law in 1933. In the same year, he was removed from civil service and from an apprentice judgeship by the Nazis. After this, he emigrated first to Palestine and then in (...) 1938 to New York, where he took up academic studies again. After receiving an M.A. in economics, he completed the Ph.D. in philosophy, working with Kurt Reizler and Karl Löwith at the German University in Exile, later to become the New School for Social Research, and writing a dissertation on Aristotle’s ontology. During this period, he renewed his interest in Hegel and German Idealism, and also in Heidegger’s critique of the tradition and attempts to make “another beginning” in philosophy. Marx began teaching at the New School in 1949. After the appearance of his classic study, Heidegger and the Tradition, he was named successor to the Husserl-Heidegger chair in philosophy and director of Philosophical Seminar I in Freiburg, which he held from 1964 until his retirement in 1979. He also served as Director of the Husserl-Archives in Freiburg until his death. (shrink)