Translations and editorial activities The early writings and research of Raynova had a special impact on Bulgarian philosophy and culture, as she was the first to introduce contemporary French and German philosophers, unknown at the time in the Bulgarian academia, like
Simone Weil,
Simone de Beauvoir,
Edith Stein,
Maurice Merleau-Ponty and
Paul Ricoeur, and to translate original texts of these and other authors into Bulgarian. Among her most important translations into Bulgarian are Jean-Paul Sartre's
Being and Nothingness and Paul Ricoeur's
The Conflict of Interpretations. She was also the first to open the field of
Feminist philosophy in Bulgaria by publishing an extensive essay on
Simone de Beauvoir in 1988 and organizing ten years later the first conference on Feminist philosophy in Sofia in which took part well known Western feminists like
Alison Jaggar, Herta Nagl-Docekal, Cornelia Klinger, Hedwig Meyer-Wilmes a.o. After the fall of Communism she became chief editor of the book series "Philosophers of the 20th Century" at the publisher "Nauka I Izkustvo", and "Contemporary Philosophers" at EA, where she compiled the translation programs and edited herself some key figures of Western philosophy, including
Jean-Paul Sartre,
Hans-Georg Gadamer,
Paul Ricoeur,
Jacques Derrida,
Jean Baudrillard,
Jean-Francois Lyotard,
Simone de Beauvoir,
Richard Rorty a. o. After the foundation of the Institute for Axiological Research in Vienna in 1999, Raynova became chief editor of its book series and journals, including the Peter Lang series "Philosophie, Phänomenologie und Hermeneutik der Werte" ("Philosophy, Phenomenology and Value Hermeneutics") and
Labyrinth: An International Journal of Philosophy, Value Theory and Sociocultural Hermeneutics, as well as program director of Axia Academic Publishers.
Post-personalism, phenomenology, and comparative hermeneutics Since the beginning of her career, Raynova used the methods of comparative hermeneutics in combination with a new methodological and critical approach that she launched under the neologism of "post-personalism." This perspective was elaborated in her first monograph
From existential philosophy to post-personalism (1992) in the context of a detailed hermeneutic comparison of French personalism and existential philosophy. She explores in this book the question of
Personalism is a form of
Existentialism, as claimed
Emmanuel, or, on the contrary, of existential philosophy is a variant of personalism, as asserted by Jean Lacroix and
Nikolai Berdyaev. By the means of an analysis of their common topics Raynova shows their specific methodological differences and issues, hence she offers more exact definitions of both currents as well as a new methodology enabling clearer distinctions between the different contemporary philosophical schools. Trying to overcome some dilemmas of contemporary philosophy, she propounds in conclusion "post-personalism" as a complex methodological alternative based on the following principles: the deconstruction of the conceptions of the personal existence and impersonal being reinterpreted in direction of the
Urgrund as a supra-personal ground of being; the existence of a plurality of monadic centers; the personal evolution as a transformation through the free choice of a continuous conversion, i.e. a profound transformation of values and moral attitudes. This methodology is applied in her next book
From Husserl to Ricoeur (1993). By retracing the different stages of Husserl's work, which passes from the project of the elaboration of "philosophy as science" (egology) to philosophy as a "general science of mind" (science of the life world), Raynova recovers the critical receptions of this projects in the post-Husserlian thought and analyses the major transformations of the phenomenological approach to human being – the philosophical anthropology, the phenomenology of life, the fundamental ontology, the existential philosophy, neo-thomism and neo-Protestant phenomenology, French personalism, and hermeneutic phenomenology. Thus she shows how the transfigurations of the phenomenological approach passes from the conception of
human being as a philosophical object to the conception of
being (where
Dasein is the "privileged" being) as a fundamental question of philosophy, ending in multiple rivalizing interpretations of subjectivity and unveiling the limits of phenomenology. As a possible overcoming of this situation Raynova suggests a post-personalist deconstruction of the life world which deconstructs it not as subjectivity but as a center and as a starting point of philosophy. Some of these subjects has been subsequently discussed in interviews with eminent philosophers, published in her book
Philosophy at the End of the 20th century (1995), and were later scrutinized in the context of the social and political implications of the phenomenological movement in her book
Être et être libre: deux passions des philosophes phénoménologiques (2010). The post-personalist critical methodology was implemented also in her monograph
Jean-Paul Sartre, the philosopher without God (1995) where she proposes a reinterpretation of Sartre's philosophical evolution by revisiting the axiological effects of his radical rejection of the hypothesis about God. The question about God and hence the questions if phenomenology can be elaborated as religious philosophy or only as a hermeneutic philosophy of religion are at the core of Raynova's discussions with Paul Ricoeur in
Between the Said and the Unsaid (2009). Since 2000 Ricoeur's philosophy became the main subject-matter of her writings where she argues, in contrast to the mainstream interpretations, that there are some important differences in the perspectives of Ricoeur's early phenomenology and his later philosophical works. ==Honors and awards==