Anna Jani’s The Ontological Roots of Phenomenology: Rethinking the History of Phenomenology and Its Religious Turn is a synthesis of traditional scholarship, contemporary philosophy of religion, and open-minded philosophical reasoning. On the complex scene of contemporary phenomenological trends, Anna Jani focuses on the ontological question before and after Edmund Husserl’s philosophy. She points out that phenomenologies of religion—from Adolf Reinach through Edith Stein to Paul Ricœur—underpinned various efforts to reestablish the ontological commitment of phenomenology. Hermeneutics appears in this context as the method of finding the ontological roots of phenomenology from Dilthey to Dan Zahavi. With her fresh and deep work Anna Jani continues her explorations of the varieties of religious experience and assists the reader with new motivations to continue this path of research. Her overarching understanding of the history and the problems of phenomenology and hermeneutics helps the readers understand the contemporary philosophical situation in and beyond Continental Thought.

Balázs M. Mezei, Corvinus University

This book begins with Paul Ricouer’s hermeneutics and has its conclusion in it. In the middle we find a description of the main thinkers in early phenomenology: Edmund Husserl, Edith Stein, and Hedwig Conrad-Martius on one side, and Martin Heidegger on the other side. To the latter, the author dedicates her major reflections, her pivotal argument being the question of ontology.
In this way a path is sketched that leads from the 'classic' phenomenology to hermeneutics. Along this path many important aspects of the thinkers are pinpointed; the book is useful to understand the different senses in which phenomenology can be considered.

Angela Ales Bello, Pontifical Lateran University

This book discusses the relationship between phenomenology and the question of being as it unfolded among the protagonists of the early phenomenological movement. By doing so three thinkers become visible as important for understanding the polarization between Husserlian and Heideggerian versions, namely Hedwig Conrad-Martius, Roman Ingarden, and Edith Stein. The upshot is a much better grasp of what the question of being in fact involves and thus also of phenomenology and of the phenomenological tradition. It is a very intelligent book bound to mark the debate in coming years.

Mette Lebech, Maynooth University

In this richly textured work, Anna Jani advances an original and compelling argument to re-assess the ontological impulse animating the development of phenomenological thinking, beginning with, but not exhausted by, its Husserlian inauguration. With a sweeping view of diverse phenomenological thinkers— Husserl, Heidegger, Stein, Ricoeur, Conrad-Martius and others—Jani demonstrates the centrality of the question of reality, and hence, an ontological field of concern, for the methodological conception of phenomenology. From this perspective, Jani deftly reconstructs the conceptual itinerary from Husserl’s earliest interest in ontology through Heidegger’s radical transformation of ontological thinking into a historical adventure to Ricoeur’s attempt at a hermeneutical reconciliation of the divergent tendencies animating phenomenological philosophy. Through-out this work, lesser known thinkers, most notably Edith Stein and Hedwig Conrad-Martius, are rightly given their due in the phenomenological battle of the giants on the sense of what it is to be.

Nicolas de Warren