Born in Essen in 1934 and trained in philosophy, psychology, classical philology, theology, and history, Waldenfels succeeded in articulating a voice of his own within the horizon opened by Husserl, Heidegger, and Schutz, while at the same time engaging in dialogue with French philosophy ¾Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Foucault, and Lévinas. Through this dual inheritance —German phenomenology and French critique— he developed a responsive phenomenology that shifted the center of gravity from intention to response, from the subject that constitutes meaning to the subject addressed by what irrupts as strange, alien, or excessive. His thinking of the «stranger» and of «response» marked an ethical, political, and aesthetic inflection within the phenomenological tradition, to the point of becoming a necessary reference for those who seek to think alterity without reducing it to the order of the same. His work Einführung in die Phänomenologie (1992) is now a classic and essential reading in the contemporary phenomenological landscape.
With his death, phenomenology and contemporary philosophy lose one of the most original interpreters of the problem of alterity and responsibility. Yet his legacy remains alive wherever experience is thought as a call and subjectivity as an always unfinished task. The texts published in Eikasía —«The Delayed Response» (no. 115, 2023), «Broken Experience» (no. 123, 2024), and «Elicited and Directed Attention» (no. 120, 2024), translated to Spanish by Bernardo Ávalos— offer a privileged gateway into this legacy and testify to how his voice continues to address us in our own language. In a time marked by new forms of estrangement, exclusion, and vulnerability, Waldenfels’ responsive phenomenology continues to remind us that every philosophy worthy of the name begins where an experience unsettles us, makes us strangers to ourselves, and demands from us a response that no one else can give in our place.
Luis Álvarez Falcón
Eikasía, Revista de Filosofía will publish a more extensive obituary in its forthcoming issue.
Image: Waldenfels in 2009 in Freiburg. Source: Husserl-Archiv Freiburg (University of Freiburg). <https://www.husserlarchiv.uni-freiburg.de/bernhard-waldenfels-archiv>, [26/01/2026].