A Husserlian phenomenology of responsibility

The A. proposes a phenomenological reflection on responsibility and its ethical dimension, making use of both the method and reflections introduced by Edmund Husserl. Responsibility is here approached not only as an essential element of the vita activa, in Hannah Arendt's sense as belonging to the ethical or political domain of human praxis, but as a core element of all adult human life in general, thus including the so-called vita contemplativa or theoretical life. Hence, following Husserl's belief that the subject's rational life must be understood as the «interweaving of all kinds of reason», it is argued that all cognitive activity (including the highest level of theoretical abstraction) is a cognitive praxis wherein voluntary decisions and axiological motivations (that emerge from the sphere of feelings and emotions) are also necessarily included.