Yvanka B. Raynova

Yvanka B. Raynova

Yvanka B. Raynova in 2014
Born Yvanka B. Raynova
(1959-10-16) 16 October 1959
Sofia
Era Contemporary philosophy
Region Western Philosophy
School Phenomenology, Hermeneutics
Institutions Sorbonne, Sofia University, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences
Main interests
 Contemporary philosophy, value philosophy, gender studies, religious studies, intercultural philosophy

Yvanka B. Raynova (Bulgarian: Иванка Б. Райнова) is a Bulgarian philosopher, feminist, editor, translator, and publisher. She is full professor of contemporary philosophy at the Institute for the Study of Societies and Knowledge of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences and director of the Institute for Axiological Research in Vienna. Her research interests include western philosophy, continental philosophy, phenomenology, hermeneutics, philosophical anthropology, axiology, value theory, feminist philosophy, gender studies, intercultural philosophy, religious studies, translation studies and the work of Jean-Paul Sartre and Paul Ricoeur. She has translated into Bulgarian Sartre's Being and Nothingness and Ricoeur's The Conflict of Interpretations. She is chief editor of various book series and journals, including the Peter Lang series "Philosophie, Phänomenologie und Hermeneutik der Werte" ("Philosophy, Phenomenology and Value Hermeneutics") and Labyrinth: An International Journal of Philosophy, Value Theory and Sociocultural Hermeneutics, as well as program director of the Austrian publishing company Axia Academic Publishers.

Education and career

Raynova studied Germanic Languages and Literature at the Sorbonne and Philosophy at Humboldt University and Sofia University, where she earned in 1984 her master's degrees in Philosophy and in French Studies. From 1984 to 1989 she was Assistant Professor in French Studies in charge of the Philosophy Translation Program at the Department of Foreign Languages of Sofia University. In 1989 she earned a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the Institute of Philosophy at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, where she became Junior research fellow. The same year she founded the Bulgarian Society for French Philosophy and Culture - Société Bulgare de Philosophie et de Culture de Langue Française.

After her habilitation in 1996, she was appointed senior research fellow and became Chair of the Department for Contemporary European Philosophy and Gender Studies and head of the Bulgarian Phenomenological Center. She was scientific secretary of the Institute of Philosophy from 1995 to 1997. After fellowships at Vienna University and the Austrian Academy of Sciences, she became in 1999 co-founder and director of the Institut für Axiologische Forschungen (Institute of Axiological Research). In 2006 she got a second doctoral title - Dr. phil. - from Vienna University. Since 2009 she has participated in the Austrian academic program "University meets Public", teaching philosophy courses in different high schools in Vienna. In 2013 she earned the highest doctoral degree - Sc.D., Doctor of Sciences in Philosophy - from the newly founded Institute for the Study of Societies and Knowledge of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, where she was appointed full professor.

Work

Translations and articles

The early writings and research of Raynova had a special impact on Bulgarian philosophy and culture, as she was the first to introduce contemporary French and German philosophers, unknown at the time in the Bulgarian academia, like Simone Weil, Simone de Beauvoir, Edith Stein, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Paul Ricoeur, and to translate original texts of these and other authors into Bulgarian. She was also the first to open the field of Feminist philosophy in Bulgaria by publishing an extensive essay on Beauvoir in 1988 and organizing ten years later the first conference on Feminist philosophy in Sofia in which took part well known feminists like Alison Jaggar, Herta Nagl-Docekal, Cornelia Klinger, Hedwig Meyer-Wilmes a.o.

After the fall of Communism she became chief editor of the book series "Philosophers of the 20th Century" at the publisher "Nauka I Izkustvo", and "Contemporary Philosophers" at EA, where she compiled the translation programs and edited herself some key figures of Western philosophy, including Jean-Paul Sartre, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Paul Ricoeur, Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Richard Rorty a. o. In addition to her Phenomenology courses at Sofia University, she set up in 1995 a seminar and invited lecturer program on "Phenomenology and Post-Phenomenology" of the Institute of Philosophy, and organized in 2004 the first International Conference on Phenomenology and Hermeneutics at Goethe Institut – Sofia.

Post-personalism, phenomenology, and comparative hermeneutics

Since the beginning of her career, Raynova used the methods of comparative hermeneutics in combination with a new methodological and critical approach that she launched under the neologism of "post-personalism." This perspective was elaborated in her first monograph From existential philosophy to post-personalism (1992) in the context of a detailed hermeneutic comparison of French personalism and existential philosophy. She explores in this book the question if Personalism is a form of Existentialism, as claimed Emmanuel Mounier, or, on the contrary, if existential philosophy is a variant of personalism, as asserted Jean Lacroix and Nikolai Berdyaev. By the means of an analysis of their common topics Raynova shows their specific methodological differences and issues, hence she offers more exact definitions of both currents as well as a new methodology enabling clearer distinctions between the different contemporary philosophical schools.

Trying to overcome some dilemmas of contemporary philosophy, she propounds in conclusion "post-personalism" as a complex methodological alternative based on the following principles: the deconstruction of the conceptions of the personal existence and impersonal being reinterpreted in direction of the Urgrund as a supra-personal ground of being; the existence of a plurality of monadic centers; the personal evolution as a transformation through the free choice of a continuous conversion, i.e. a profound transformation of values and moral attitudes. This methodology is applied in her next book From Husserl to Ricoeur (1993). By retracing the different stages of Husserl's work, which passes from the project of the elaboration of "philosophy as science" (egology) to philosophy as a "general science of mind" (science of the life world), Raynova recovers the critical receptions of this projects in the post-husserlian thought and analyses the major transformations of the phenomenological approach to human being - the philosophical anthropology, the phenomenology of life, the fundamental ontology, the existential philosophy, neo-thomism and neo-Protestant phenomenology, French personalism, and hermeneutic phenomenology. Thus she shows how the transfigurations of the phenomenological approach passes from the conception of human being as a philosophical object to the conception of being (where Dasein is the "privileged" being) as a fundamental question of philosophy, ending in multiple rivalizing interpretations of subjectivity and unveiling the limits of phenomenology.

As a possible overcome of this situation Raynova suggests a post-personalist deconstruction of the life world which deconstructs it not as subjectivity but as a center and as a starting point of philosophy. Some of these subjects has been subsequently discussed in interviews with eminent philosophers, published in her book Philosophy at the End of the 20th century (1995), and were later scrutinized in the context of the social and political implications of the phenomenological movement in her book Être et être libre: deux passions des philosophes phénoménologiques (2010). The post-personalist critical methodology was implemented also in her monograph Jean-Paul Sartre, the philosopher without God (1995) where she proposes a reinterpretation of Sartre's philosophical evolution by revisiting the axiological effects of his radical rejection of the hypothesis about God. The question about God and hence the questions if phenomenology can be elaborated as religious philosophy or only as a hermeneutic philosophy of religion are at the core of Raynova's discussions with Paul Ricoeur in Between the Said and the Unsaid (2009). Since 2000 Ricoeur's philosophy became the main subject-matter of her writings where she argues, in contrast to the mainstream interpretations, that there are some important differences in the perspectives of Ricoeur's early phenomenology and his later philosophical works.

Honors and awards

In 1983 Raynova became the First Prize in the National Philosophy Competition from the Bulgarian Ministry of Education and the Council of Higher Education. She was granted in 1996 the Paul Celan Fellowship at the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna. In 1997 she has been Visiting Scholar at Vienna University and from 1998 to 1999 Visiting Fellow at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. For her translations of Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness and Paul Ricoeur's The Conflict of Interpretations she was awarded the Bulgarian Union of Translators and the National Publishing Center's Translation Award in the field of Humanities.

Selected bibliography

Books

Edited books

Studies and articles in English

References

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