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As a philosopher educated in the classics, as a crucial communicator of French thinking to the oftentimes heated German-language debates of the 1980s and 1990s, as the author of monographies on the questions of the strange, on answering and responsive rationality, on attentiveness, on “phenomenotechnology” and on problems of moral philosophy, Bernhard Waldenfels points out a direction to contemporary European philosophy that is entirely his own – all of it in the name of phenomenology, and first and foremost, the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. With a tight connection to the classical philosophical tradition as well as to contemporary scientific disciplines, literature, the arts and everyday life, Waldenfels has lent his own signature to phenomenology. In this interview, we ask Bernhard Waldenfels to situate himself with respect to the question: What is phenomenological philosophy and what does it accomplish?

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Despite the insistence in interpretive policy analysis that the discursive construction of problems must be understood in terms of their historical and spatial context, it remains an open question how cities provide such a context. We argue that cities as a distinct form of sociation enable certain (discursive) actions, while restricting others. Taking both the interest of interpretive policy analysis in the social construction of political reality and holistic concepts of approaching the distinctiveness of cities as starting points, we scrutinize how the cities of Frankfurt/Main, Dortmund, Birmingham, and Glasgow provide distinct contexts for the construction of local policy problems. Based on an inquiry into urban discourses we ask, first, how problematizations involve locally specific attributions of problem causes and responsibilities for problem solving and, second, how this is related to a locally distinct understanding of the city's past, present, and future.

ZusammenfassungGegenstand des Beitrages sind Luhmanns zeittheoretische Überlegungen, sofern sie systematisch das Problem der Gegenwart aufwerfen - ein Thema, das Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft kaum behandelt. Es lohnt sich gleichwohl, zu dem in Luhmanns früheren Texten formulierte Theorem der doppelten Gegenwart zurückzugehen. Zentral sind hier (neben der Gleichzeitigkeit) die Kategorien Reversibilität, Irreversibilität und Dauer. Der Beitrag plädiert dafür, deren praktisch-pragmatischen - und von daher auf eine Weise unverzeitlichten - Sinn des Reversibilitätsgedankens Ernst zu nehmen. Liest man Luhmanns Konzeption von Gegenwart so, ergeben sich neue Spielräume für eine phänomenologische Mikrologie der Zeit.