FUGALI Edoardo Augusto

In my dissertation and in the two volumes I drew from it I have tried to deepen the topic of constitution of human subject, by starting from the criticism expressed by many exponents of mid-19th century German philosophy like Trendelenburg, Feuerbach and Marx against Hegel’s dialectics and his view that pure thought is the main and exclusive feature of subjectivity. In a particular way, I found very interesting not only Trendelenburg’s criticism of Hegelian dialectics, because of its argumentative rigour and persuasive strength, but also his own conception of subjectivity, founded on the notion of intuition as “constructive motion” of soul. By asserting the primacy of intuition upon thought, Trendelenburg tries to introduce an empirical concept of the subject in the broader context of a system with a more distinct metaphysical mark and gives rise to a conception of psychology as a science that hold a median position between sciences of nature and sciences of mind. In this sense, psychology plays a privileged role in comparison with that of the other sciences, which also, each in its own right, represent truly the whole. So, in the system of sciences proposed by Trendelenburg, psychology thus constitutes a median science, in which takes place the passage from the sciences of nature (above all physics), of which it represents the summit, toward ethics, of which it is the base. In other terms, the theme of the soul and of human subjectivity is put back in the ground of an organic concept of the world, where the accent is placed on relations of interaction that the soul has with the multiple levels in which the reality is structured. Trendelenburg’s contribution to the rise of psychology as an autonomous discipline goes in an antagonistic direction as regards what psychology will be as experimental science from 1879 on in Germany. Trendelenburg’s proposal fits into what we can define as philosophical psychology, and constitutes the historical background for Brentano’s empirical psychology, as far as Trendelenburg anticipates with his theory of constructive movement the Brentanian considerations about intentional reference.

In my third book and in some related articles, I’ve undertaken an analyse of Brentano’s conception of self and soul as the substance of mental phenomena, on the basis of several documents going back to the epoch of Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, including for the most part un-published manuscripts from Brentano’s archive. Though Brentano insists on the methodological requirement that psychology as empirical science must deal exclusively with mental phenomena, apart from their belonging to a psychological substratum, he never denied that from a metaphysi-cal standpoint soul has to be conceived as a whole and unitary substance. I tried to underline the relationship of Brentano’s view of the soul as substance with his theory of temporality as individu-ation principle of the soul. According to this account, soul is regarded in itself an autonomous sub-stance, though it is strictly interconnected with the bodily substance, as each of them constitutes a continuum. The higher rank has yet to be attributed to temporal continuum, which constitutes the most universal determination of beings. While the soul is individuated only by temporal determi-nations, the bodies are individuated by both temporal and spatial determinations and therefore con-stitute a minor ontological genus. In this regard arises the crucial question of relationship between mental and bodily substances: even supposing that the common attribute of both ontological kinds, which assures their mutual belonging, is temporal determination, we have still to explain how the spatial determination joins to the temporal one. Brentano tries to give a plausible answer to this by presupposing the existence of a four-dimensional, unitary continuum, whose fourth dimension is time, while space constitutes its three-dimensional boundary. This solution is also far from being satisfactory, since it doesn’t consider the possibility that a pure temporal substance (i.e. the soul) exists – or has to be conceived as existing – without spatial determinations. Apart from these diffi-culties, Brentano’s theory can be reappraised, in so far as it has to be purified from the dualistic residues that still afflict its original formulation and from the supremacy of evidence that Brentano attributes to consciousness.

The central concern of my whole research activity has always been the question of the constitution of human subject and of the features that characterize it in its relationships with the world and other subjects. I began to analyse this topic already at the time of my M.A. thesis in two papers by taking as starting point a confrontation between Hegel’s concept of consciousness and Heidegger’s notion of Dasein. Both Hegel and Heidegger criticize the traditional conceptions of subject that have arisen in the horizon of philosophical reflexion since Descartes and insist abstractly and unilaterally on the self-identity of subject and its static character. In his Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel underlines against this view the fundamental dynamical character of consciousness and its capacity to go beyond itself. In analogous way, Heidegger concentrate his attention to the notion of Entwurf (project), in order to point out the belongingness of subject to its own world, according to the existential structure of being-in-the-world. On the other side, there is a fundamental difference between Heidegger’s and Hegel’s account of subjectivity: the former holds on the finitude and the fundamental disclosedness character of Dasein, based upon the primacy of the temporal mode of future, while Hegel declares himself in favour of the self-overcoming of consciousness in the full presence of absolute knowledge.