Ebook: The Prism of the Self: Philosophical Essays in Honor of Maurice Natanson

This volume contains sOOeen essays written by his students and colleagues in honor of Maurice Natanson. The essays explore some of the diverse themes Professor Natanson has pursued through forty years of teaching and philosophizing in the tradition of existential phenomenology. Because it also includes a lengthy biographical and philosophical interview where one can find an absorbing account of Natanson's Lebens/au/in his own words, there is no need to detail that polypragmatic career here. Suffice to say that even passing acquaintance with the man and the work will reveal that Edmund Husserl's self-description holds equally of his distinguished interpreter: "I seek not to instruct but only to lead, to point out and describe what I see. I claim no other right than that of speaking according to my best lights, principally before myself but in the same manner also before others, as one who has lived in all its seriousness the fate of a philosophical existence. "l For Natanson, as the diversity of the contributions to this volume attest, such seriousness involves something other than that narrow technical vision for which a topic is the more philosophical the less it has to do with anything else. In Natanson's pages-to say nothing of his teaching and conversation-there are no men of straw but living, breathing human beings; with hirn philosophy's tentacles are ubiquitous.

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The sixteen essays specially written for this volume focus on philosophical issues arising out of the individual and social aspects of the self. Informed by the work of Maurice Natanson in the tradition of existential and phenomenological philosophy, the papers in Part I reflect upon the psychological, methodological and ontological dimensions of the pre- social, quasi-solipsistic ego; those in Part II take up the transition to sociality in its moral, political, therapeutic and methodological aspects; while finally, the essays in Part II explore that way the self catches a glimpse of the meaning of its being, beyond the anonymity of its typified social identity, in the aesthetic realm of music and dance, literature and drama. The volume also contains a letter from Alfred Schutz to Eric Voegelin on Husserl's view of the history of philosophy, a lengthy biographical and philosophical interview with Maurice Natanson, and complete bibliography of Natanson's works.