Projects
2022 – 2024: The Experience of Alienness: Between Responsivity and Transposability
Recenty, phenomenology proved to be a philosophical movement capable of bringing significant contributions to a wide interdisciplinary landscape. Beyond the ongoing debates concerning the various configurations and adaptations of the phenomenological method to different research fields, there is still a need to better grasp its the boundaries. (PD Project Director: Dr. Alexandru BEJINARIU)
2022 – 2024: Limit-Phenomena and Nonsense. A Phenomenological Approach
This research project aims to provide a phenomenological account to the problem of limit-phenomena in phenomenology, by resorting to the notion of nonsense and its plurality of forms: the “refusal of sense” (i.e., what is inherently not given to consciousness), the “surpassing of sense” (i.e., what is exceeding the consciousness), and the “withdrawal of sense” (i.e., what is withdrawing our production of sense). (PD Project Director: Dr. Remus BREAZU)
2021 – 2023: Structures of Bodily Interaction. Phenomenological Contributions to Gesture Studies
The project aims to bring phenomenology into dialogue with the effervescent research conducted in contemporary gesture studies, an interdisciplinary conglomerate comprising cognitive analysis, ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, psychology, linguistics and ethnographic study as well as, more recently, film and media studies. (PCE Project Director: Dr. Christian FERENCZ-FLATZ)
2021 – 2023: Philosophy in Socialist Romania. A Case Study in Institutionalized Thought
The present project offers an in-depth analysis of philosophical thought under the communist regime in Romania, combining hermeneutical analysis with comparative, historical, and quantitative research. (PCE Project Director: Dr. Alexandru CISTELECAN)
2020 – 2022: “I was there.” Laying the Foundations for a Comprehensive Phenomenology of Testimony
The underlying premise of our project is that only a phenomenology which is open to historical hermeneutics and which develops its analyses in the horizon of a philosophical anthropology of the subject is able to capture adequately the fundamental structures of the experience of testimony and to account for the new dimension of subjectivity… (TE Project Director: Dr. Paul MARINESCU)
2018 – 2020: Continental Philosophy as a Rigorous Science. Elements of Empirical Research in Early Phenomenology and Critical Theory
The project concerns the relation between philosophy and empirical research in the first half of the 20th century in two of the most important schools of continental philosophy: phenomenology and critical theory. (TE Project Director: Dr. Christian FERENCZ-FLATZ)
2018 – 2020: Finitude and Meaning. Phenomenological Perspectives on History in the Light of the Paul Ricoeur Jan Patocka Relationship
This project aims to capture the complexity of the phenomenological perspectives on history by focusing on Paul Ricœur and Jan Patočka’s theories on this topic. The premise from which this research work starts is that intertwining the historical life and the reflection on history provides new insights in the understanding of history. (TE Project Director: Dr. Paul MARINESCU)
2018 – 2020: The Development of an Existential Ethics through a Phenomenological Approach to Political Judgment
The goal of this project is to offer an existential-phenomenological interpretation of the account of political judgment sketched by Arendt (starting from Kant), meant to clarify the relevance of judging politically for the personal identity of the judging individual. (PD Project Director: Dr. Ileana BORȚUN)
2017 – 2019 : Brentano – Comte – Mill: The Idea of Philosophy and Psychology as Science
The main goal of the project is to change the approach to Brentano’s psychology from analysis of it as a work of the philosophy of mind – which it undoubtedly is to a great extent – to investigation of it from the viewpoint of the method and concept of science as found in A. Comte and J. St. Mill. (PCE Project Director: Dr. Ion TĂNĂSESCU)
2017-2019: Theories of divination in Late Antiquity and Early Byzantium (2nd-7th centuries)
The present project concerns the debates over the nature of divination (μαντεία) in Late Antiquity and Early Byzantium (2nd-7th centuries). It proposes a new approach of late antique religious thought, based mostly on understudied Neoplatonic texts, highlighting their mutual interaction with Early Christian texts dealing with similar topics. (PCE Project Director: Dr. Andrei TIMOTIN)
2015 – 2017: The Ethico-Political Relevance of Thinking. An Interdisciplinary Approach to the Relation Between Thinking and Action
In this project we intend to discuss the relationship thinking–action from a perspective combining methods and approaches pertaining to several philosophical disciplines. (TE Project Director: Dr. Bogdan MINCĂ)
2015 – 2017: Self-Constitution and Discursive Mediation in Late Neoplatonism
The present project is focused on the history of Greek Neoplatonism, the tradition that dominated philosophical reflection during Late Antiquity (II–VI centuries CE). (TE Project Director: Dr. Marilena VLAD)
2013 – 2016: Theories and Practices of Prayer in Late Antiquity – 2nd-6th centuries
Since A.-J. Festugiere’s pioneering study “Proclus et la religion traditionnelle” (1966), several important researches have been devoted to the philosophical piety in Late Antiquity in the last three decades. (TE Project. Director: Dr. Andrei TIMOTIN)
2013 – 2015: Neoplatonic Heritages in the Corpus Dionysiacum
This project is placed in the context of Late Antiquity, at the crossroads of the Neoplatonic philosophical thought and of the Christian theological meditation, focusing on the writings of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. (PD Project. Director: Dr. Marilena VLAD)
2011 – 2016: Brentano’s Psychology and the Problem of Intentionality of Sensuous Acts
The project aims to develop a new interpretation of the problem of intentionality and of the relationship between Brentano’s empirical and descriptive psychology. (PCE Project. Director: Dr. Ion TĂNĂSESCU)
2011-2013: Understanding the Other and Interpreting the Self
In the 20th Century, philosophy and cultural anthropology went through a hermeneutic turn, which influenced the central debates of both disciplines. (PD Project. Director: Dr. Gabriel CERCEL)
2011-2013: The Challenges of a Phenomenology of Oblivion. Perspectives on Human Fallibility.
In order to elucidate the phenomenological complexity of the oblivion and to situate this analysis into the larger frame of a philosophy of human fallibility, I will proceed to a comparative study, taking into account three positions on forgetting and existential historicity, belonging to Paul Ricœur, Jan Patočka and Alexandru Dragomir. (PD Project. Director: Dr. Paul MARINESCU)
2011 – 2013: Moral Dilemmas in Online Journalism. Rethinking Ethical Principles for “Civic Journalism”
Ethics experts and media organizations have been concerned in the last decade with the new moral challenges coming from online journalism and the need to readjust the present deontological codes for journalists. (PD Project. Director: Dr. Victor POPESCU)
2010-2013: The Body In-Between. An Interdisciplinary Approach to an Integral Theory of Corporeal Phenomena
In this project, we envision an interdisciplinary research of human corporeality as situated within the complex psychological, social, and religious matrix of contemporary Western civilization. (TE Project. Director: Dr. Cristian CIOCAN)
2010 – 2013: Habitus, Memory, Sediment: Facets of a Phenomenological Approach to Tradition
The project deals with the problem of tradition in phenomenology. To this extent, it aims to combine the structural perspectives offered by three great areas of phenomenological research: memory, habit and sedimentation. (TE Project. Director: Dr. Christian FERENCZ-FLATZ)