The Phenomenology of Testimony

From Inner Truth to Shared World

Series: 

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.

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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
The book’s main audience is scholars working in the fields of phenomenology and continental philosophy, but through its positioning it may be of wide interest to any academic working on testimony, as well as – especially the final essays – to historians and literary researchers dealing with testimonial literature. The book is important for academic institutes, libraries and specialists.
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