Astray sons of time. Identity and temporality in Gurwitsch

Abstract

The article deals with the split proposed by Gurwitsch between temporality and identity in the constitution of the thing according to his phenomenology. It recovers the notion of thing as noema, already developed by Husserl, and investigates to what extent his successor is able to reformulate it in one of its fundamental aspects: that it has a timeless and, neverthe-less, phenomenological dimension. It evaluates the controversial thesis that time is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the description of the relationship between the one and the multiple, culminating in a primitive and irreducible idea of identity that must be conceived by itself and constitutes both the originality and one of the greatest advances of Gurwitsch’s thought.