This dissertation seeks answers to two questions: “What is the event in phenomenology today?” and “Who experiences the event?” These questions are addressed by examining the phenomenology of the event of two significant thinkers of our time, Jean-Luc Marion and Claude Romano. In the history of philosophy, the concept of the event has mostly been understood to be either beyond philosophical interest or reduced to a mere occurrence. In my research, I engage with two contemporary philosophers who discuss the event as a central theme of phenomenology.
In the first part, I discuss why, for Marion and Romano, the event has a different phenomenological status than objects and facts. This part of the dissertation describes the phenomenon of the event by showing its unique mode of appearing. This reconceptualization of phenomenality also necessitates a rethinking of subjectivity, the understanding of human being in phenomenology. In this regard, in the second part of the dissertation, I investigate the question of “Who experiences the event?” Both philosophers offer a new phenomenological notion of the human, replacing that of the subject.
I conclude this study by showing how Marion’s and Romano’s accounts of the event and subjectivity also promise a revised and renewed way of understanding reality and rationality.
Abdulkadir (Kadir) Filiz was born in 1986 in Malatya, Turkey. He received a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Boğaziçi University, Turkey, in 2012 and a master’s degree in Philosophy and Social Thought department from Istanbul Bilgi University, Turkey, in 2014. He started work on his dissertation in 2014 at Istanbul 29 Mayıs University. In 2016, he began his dissertation at Radboud University, Nijmegen. He was a visiting scholar at Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany, in 2016 and at Boston College, USA, in 2020. He translated several books and articles into Turkish.