Structures of experience and philosophical analysis in the phenomenology of Giovanni Piana

Abstract

A contribution discussing Giovanni Piana’s phenomenology implies—for those who have been his pupils and have approached phenomenology through his teachings—a type of discourse in which biography and theoretical reflection intertwine. Why, in the early 1980s, was I struck not so much by phenomenology, of which there were a variety of versions, but by Piana’s interpretation thereof? This is a biographical question, no doubt, but one which, addressing a particular historical milieu as well as Piana’s interpretative distinctiveness, also allows us to focus on elements of some significance beyond their insignificant singularity. From this point of view, I believe that Piana embodied a powerful countertrend to what was the dominant, universally accepted, koiné. In particular, Piana’s investigations pointed to a different way to answer questions such as: ‘What does it mean to appeal to reason?’, ‘What does rational and philosophical analysis mean?’. Piana’s approach to these questions, indeed, differs from that of hermeneutics, post-structuralism, and analytic philosophy, namely from that of the so-called linguistic turn. In this paper, I sketch the general constellation of problems with which a young philosophy student was confronted in the early 1980s, and then discuss the specificity of the philosophical direction outlined by Piana.