Abstract

This work attempts to solve a central problem facing Husserl's phenomenology. The phenomenologist implements the transcendental epoche and abstains from considering whether the objects of mental processes actually exist in order to reach a clearer understanding of the nature of these processes. Among the objects of consciousness, however, are other conscious subjects. Extending the epoche to cover these other subjects appears to raise two serious problems. How can phenomenology then explain our experience of other conscious subjects as distinct from inanimate objects, since what sets the former off from the latter, the other's mind or consciousness, cannot be directly experienced, and that perceptual objects are experienced as public or there for all perceiving subjects? ;In my first chapter I analyze the solution that Husserl offered to this problem in his Cartesian Meditations and judge that it should be rejected on the basis of certain objections commentators have made against it. In the second chapter I turn to Husserl's last work, the Crisis, where, I argue, he began to take a new approach to the issue of intersubjectivity. His stress on the role of intersubjectivity in the generation of meaning, his explicit rejection of mind-body dualism and his focus on the intentionality of others instead of their physical presence in space in the Crisis represents a significant departure from his position in the Cartesian Meditations. ;The new direction that Husserl took in the Crisis provides a rationale for my subsequent attempt to craft an alternative solution to the problem. In my third chapter I extend Husserl's idea of how kinaesthesis or bodily movement is directed towards and responsive to objects in the world in order to explain how we distinguish other subjects from inanimate objects. In the fourth chapter I argue that the function of intersubjective meanings in perception accounts for the possibility of the publicity of objects of perception. Then I show how Husserl's concept of the perceptual horizon of an object already captures the sense that one has that objects can be perceived by other subjects besides oneself