Supervision: Claudio Majolino (MCF, Lille)
Collaboration: Groupe de Recherches en Phénoménologies (UMR 8163, STL)
Organization: Andrea Cimino (Post-Doc, ULille) Sofian Moukrim (Inspé, ULille), Axel Mahdavi Ardebili (Inspé, ULille), Margot Sonneville (Phd Candidate, ULille)
The project "Idea and Value: History, Narratives, and Theories" forms part of the International Associated Laboratory (LAI) “Idealiter: History and Prehistory of Idealism – Between Ancient Philosophy and Literature”, funded by the Université de Lille and the University of Rome La Sapienza, directed by Francesco Fronterotta (Università di Roma La Sapienza,) and Claudio Majolino (Univesité de Lille. It aims to shed light on a form of idealism that has often been overlooked in interpretations of post-Kantian philosophy, as well as in Neo-Kantian and phenomenological traditions: axiological idealism, i.e. idealism not with respect to being, but to values. A secondary objective is to explore how this form of idealism develops in close dialogue with Ancient Philosophy, most notably with Plato. We will also constantly examine the extratheoretical resources that theories of value might draw upon (such as a doctrine of aesthetic value) the sources of fiction, and literature.
Needless to say, idealism can hardly be expressed in the singular, given the diversity of its frameworks—non-transcendental, transcendental, phenomenological and non-phenomenological. Yet idealisms recurrently reflect upon, clarify, and renew a set of fundamental objects that give rise to their principal forms: knowledge (epistemic idealism), the a priori structure of possible worlds (ontological idealism), or the a priori structure of the factual world—this very world we inhabit (metaphysical idealism). In this sense, Berkeley’s famous formula esse est percipi not only encapsulates his own position but also suggests a general intuition underlying modern and post-Kantian idealisms. However, not all developments are confined to epistemology or ontology. In many contemporary forms of idealism—phenomenological and non-phenomenological alike—value plays a constitutive role. In this context, one may say, in a deliberately Berkeleyan reformulation, bonum est volitum: the good is that which is willed, chosen or desired; and similarly, pulchrum est amatum: the beautiful is that which is loved, valued or appreciated. Such formulas do not express a psychological reduction of value, but rather an intentional-transcendental claim about the mode of givenness of value itself, addressing the transcendental essences of goodness and value. Through Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason to the works of Wilhelm Windelband (1900) and Emil Lask (1911–12), and again from Plato through Johann Gottlieb Fichte to Edmund Husserl (1917), the long-term history of idealism consistently includes axiological and practical dimensions until the most important contributions by husserl to ethics. This form of idealism is primarily concerned with values and norms, and it opens a way to rethink the structure of reality itself. Beyond the conditions of love, evaluation, and action, axiology allows for a more nuanced articulation of ontological idealism and contributes to clarifying the a priori structure of the factual world.
In collaboration with the Groupe de Recherches en Phénoménologies (UMR 8163 STL) and co-financed by the Institut Eric Weil, a first workshop, which will be held on October 16, 2026, aims to introduce this work by focusing our attention on the elaboration of axiology and ethics in Husserl, so in the context of phenomenological transcendental idealism. As early as his time in Göttingen and his work on constitutive phenomenology, Husserl lamented the absence of certain ontologies, namely, those related to the dimension of value, and subsequently devoted himself to developing them before clarifiying them from a phenomenological perspective. A first task will be to reconstruct this process of explicit thematization par Husserl in order to identify the meaning and scope of the theoretical frameworks, concepts, terminology, and specific tools of axiological idealism within the context of phenomenological transcendental idealism.
