Europa und die Welt

The first of the three parts of the book introduces the 'world-citizenly' variety of phenomenology, loosely based on the work of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, and ventures an answer to the question of the conditions of intercultural communication. The middle part, the centrum of the book, contains a phenomenological analysis of the ancient Greeks' intellectual situation, in which the foundation was laid for the cultural character of Europe and the global spread of two of its achievements, science and democracy, achievements for which Europe pays with a dangerously ambivalent special status in the context of intercultural competition. In the third part of the book the relation between Europe and other cultures is explicated in an exemplary manner in three fields: the connection between human rights and the understanding of the family in the East and the West, the dependency of the ethos of cultural worlds upon religious experience and the fundamental significance of climate for the differences between cultures.