Rationality in its various expressions and innumerable applications sustains understanding and our sense of reality. It is traditionally differentiated according to its sources in the soul: in consciousness, in reason, in experience, and in elevation. Such a functional approach, however, leaves us searching for the common foundation harmonizing these rationalities. The perennial quest to resolve the aporias of rationality is finding in contemporary science’s focus on origins, on the generative roots of reality, tantalizing hints as to how this may be accomplished. This project is enhanced by the wave of recent phenomenology/ontopoiesis of life, which reveals/expresses the workings of the logos at the root of beingness and all rationality, whereby we gaze upon the prospect of a New Enlightenment. In the rays of this vision the revival of the intuitions of classical Islamic metaphysics, particularly intuition of the continuity of beingness in the gradations of life, receive fresh confirmation.

"Can there be a more flagrant challenge to the recent - and classic - relativisms, scepticisms and 'deconstructivisms' toward reason, rationality, logos than the Vision of the Manifestation of Life?" As Tymieniecka writes in the introduction to this second book on the constructive appreciation of reason (first book: Analecta Husserliana, Vol. XXXIX), the works of the logos manifest themselves indubitably in the edifice of life. Among perspectives in the compass of reason of this collection: individualisation of life, human existence, reason and doxa (studies by Tymieniecka, Kelkel, Schrag, Buscaroli, Kelly, Laycock, and others) the emphasis falls upon 'inner rationalities' of the spirit, creativity, culture (Bosio, D'Ippolito, Delle Site, Barral, Wittkowski, Regina, Haney, Ales Bello, Sivak, Elosequi), culminating in the issues of historiography and history by Mario Sancipriano, to whom the book is dedicated. This collection stems from the work of The World Phenomenology Institute, mainly its two congresses held in Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia, and Verona, Italy.

The societal web of life is underpinned by one concept - that of Self and Other - which emerged earlier in this century. The concept has received a new formulation within the field of the phenomenology of life and the human creative condition, finding a foothold, a point of reference that radiates novel, seminal insights. It is nothing other than the creative fulcrum of human functioning. The self-individualisation of the human being, as revealed in the present collection, is existentially and vitally intertwined with that of the Other. Tymieniecka's seminal idea of the `trans-actional' is explored in this collection of essays, which reveals a variety of significant perspectives, weaving the cycles of the human universe of existence in an essential oscillation between the Self and the Other. In this oscillation we throw out our existential tentacles, trying to gain a living space with respect to each other, all the while engaging in a mutual creative prompting and attunement.