Online research in philosophy

This essay presents a phenomenological analysis of the functioning of symbols as elements of the life-world with the purpose of demonstrating the interrelationship of individual and society. On the basis of Alfred Schutz''s theory of the life-world, signs and symbols are viewed as mechanisms by means of which the individual can overcome the transcendences posed by time, space, the world of the Other, and multiple realities which confront him or her. Accordingly, the individual''s life-world divides itself into the dimensions of time, space, the social world and various reality spheres which form the boundaries or transcendences that the I has to understand and integrate. Signs and symbols are described as appresentational modes which stand for experiences originating in the different spheres of the life-world within the world of everyday life, within which they can be communicated, thereby establishing intersubjectivity. Schutz''s theory of the symbol explains how social entities – such as nations, states or religious groups – are symbolically integrated to become components of the individual''s life-world. The following paper reconstructs Schutz''s concept of the symbol as a crucial component of his theory of the life-world, which is seen as an outstanding phenomenological contribution to the theory of the sign and the symbol in general.

This collection explores the structure of consciousness and its place in the world, or inversely the structure of the world and the place of consciousness in it. Amongst the topics covered are: the phenomenological aspects of experience (inner awareness, self-awareness), dependencies between experience and the world (the role of the body in experience, the role of culturally formed background ideas) and the basic ontological categories found in the world at large (unity, state-of-affairs, connectedness, dependence and intentionality). Developing ideas drawn from historical figures such as Descartes, Husserl, Aristotle, and Whitehead, the essays together demonstrate the interdependence of ontology and phenomenology and its significance for the philosophy of mind.

Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka expands the phenomenological study of meanings (sense-bestowal) into an onto-genetic inquiry by grounding it in a phenomenology of life, including the emotional dimension. This phenomenology of life is informed by the empirical sciences and its doctrines parallel the new scientific paradigm of open dynamic systems. Embedded in the dynamics of the real individuation of life forms, human consciousness emerges at a unique station in the evolutionary process. Tymieniecka treats the constitution of sense as a function of life, and thus the transcendental constitutive function of the cognitive, objectifying intentionality of consciousness, the purview of classical phenomenology, is viewed as a project that is limited in its scope. According to the phenomenology of life, meaning-genesis is exhibited throughout the various stages of structurization in the evolution of life. This paper highlights the transformative function of the “Imaginatio Creatrix,” which is the dynamic process at the human station of evolution that accounts for humanity’s inventive capacities necessary for the construction of a human world. The Imaginatio Creatrix transforms the more primitive stirrings of the human “soul” into subliminal passions of human existential significance. The enactive theory of the mind corroborates Tymieniecka’s rejection of Husserl’s doctrine of passive synthesis. However, Tymieniecka’s study of the creative function offers a key for further advancement in enactive theory. Three sense-bestowing functions of the Imaginatio Creatrix account for the human expansion of life: the Aesthetic/Poetic sense, the Objectifying Sense, and the Moral Sense. The Moral Sense, for Tymieniecka, is not the product of reasoning powers, but rather the fruit of subliminal passions that acquire their moral aspect through trans-actions guided by the “benevolent sentiment.”.

The main endeavor of this project is to elucidate the correlation of two basic phenomenological concepts (typification and Phantasia), thereby allowing for a new discussion concerning the foundation of the life-world. While typification has been particularly developed in the social phenomenology of A. Schutz, Phantasia remains in a rather Husserlian “domain,” with regard to its phenomenological implications. In considering a new perspective, however, their discussion lends itself to a new understanding of the process of constitution. Namely, it will surpass the so-called egological sphere, by incorporating new valences for the structures of the life-world. Even if Phantasia is to be understood in terms of a subjective zone “par excellence,” its correlation to the constant realization of typification will help to circumscribe how Phantasia can condition and contribute to the realization of the life-world on a larger scale.

The present paper traces the trajectory of the development of Husserl’s phenomenology from its incipient eidetic phase over the transcendental to the lifeworld-phenomenological, and ascertains that, in spite of all their complexities, the idea of Zu den Sachen selbst is the very objective of all those ‘phenomenological’investigations. The search after the ‘immediately given’ (Vorgegebenheiten) finally discovers that the concrete cultural life-worlds are the authentically ‘immediatelypre-given’ and all kinds of knowledge and sciences (higher cultural configurations) are nothing but idealizations of those floor-like concrete life-worlds. Phenomenology previously as rigorous first science is now re-oriented as phenomenology as rigorous (i.e., transcendental) regional studies. Transcendental regional studies (i.e., life-world phenomenology), I’d like to argue, is the very key to the resolution of the ambiguities of the concept of life-world as well as the key to the understanding of the vague future direction of phenomenological philosophizing that Husserl himself left open.

In French, the verb "to live" designates both being alive and the experience of something. This ambiguity has a philosophical meaning. The task of a phenomenology of life is to describe an originary sense of living from which the very distinction between life in the intransitive sense and life in the transitive, or intentional, sense proceeds. Hans Jonas is one of those rare authors who has tried to give an account of the specificity of life instead of reducing life to categories that are foreign to it. However, the concept of metabolism, by which Jonas characterizes vital activity, attests to a presupposition as to life: life is conceived as self-preservation, that is, as negation of death, in such a way that life is, in the end, not thought on the basis of itself. The aim of this article is to show that life as such must be understood as movement in a radicalized sense, in which the living being is no more the subject than the product. All living beings are in effect characterized by a movement, which nothing can cause to cease, a movement that largely exceeds what is required by the satisfaction of needs and that, because of this, bears witness to an essential incompleteness. This incompleteness reveals that life is originarily bound to a world. Because the world to which the living being relates is essentially non-totalizable and unpresentable, living movement can not essentially complete itself. Thus, in the final analysis, life must be defined as desire, and in virtue of this view, life does not tend toward self-preservation, as we have almost always thought, but toward the manifestation of the world.

The condition of explicit theoretically discursive cognitive performance, as it culminates in scientific activity, is, I claim, the life world. I contrast life world and scientific world and argue that the latter arises from the first and that contrary to the prevailing views the scientific world (actually, worlds, since the classical world is substantially different from the quantum world) finds its completion in the life world and not the other way around. In other words: the closure we used to search in a complete and comprehensive scientific description of all aspects of experience by referring it back to underlying atoms, genes and other scientific objects and the covering laws ruling them, should be sought in a reintegrating and occasionally dissolving of the abstract scientific model in the self-organizational fluidity and superposition-like indeterminateness and non-locality of the life world: “We have to acknowledge the indeterminate as a positive phenomenon” (Merleau-Ponty in his The Phenomenology of Perception).

Mohanty, J.N. Understanding Husserl's transcendental phenomenology.--Fink, E. The problem of the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. Operative concepts in Husserl's phenomenology.--Funke, G. A transcendental-phenomenological investigation concerning universal idealism, intentional analysis, and the genesis of habitus: archē, phansis, hexis, logos.--Pentzopoulou-Valalas, T. Reflections on the foundation of the relation between the a priori and the eidos in the phenomenology of Husserl.--Landgrebe, L. Regions of being and regional ontologies in Husserl's phenomenology. The problem posed by the transcendental science of the a priori of the life world.--Wahl, J. Notes on the first part of Experience and judgment by Husserl.--Landgrebe, L. A letter from Ludwig Landgrebe to Jean Wahl.-- Wahl, J. A note on some empiricist aspects of the thought of Husserl.--Toulemont, R. The specific character of the social according to Husserl.

In his writings Alfred Schutz identifies an artificiality in the concept of life-world produced by Edmund Husserl's method of reduction. As an alternative, he proposes to assume intersubjectivity as a given of everyday life. This eradicates Husserl's distinction between life-world and natural attitude. The subsequent phenomenological project appears to center upon sociological descriptions of the structures of the life-world rather than on a search for apodictic truth. Schutz, however, actually retains Husserl's emphasis on the subject. A tension then arises between the assumption of intersubjectivity and individual experience. Rather than clarifying the concept of intersubjectivity, this further problematizes it. Drawing upon Max Weber's work, Schutz responds by developing a rigorous methodology for studying the social world. But having rejected Husserl's reduction and conflated life-world and natural attitude, Schutz's analysis moves at the level of daily life itself. Consequently, the explanatory categories he proposes appear as abstractions rather than as a way of describing lived experience. Schutz, it is concluded, initiates a scientistic sociology in which the commonsense structures of the natural attitude of everyday life are subverted and replaced by the more rigorous knowledge of the scientific attitude. Schutz's version of phenomenology is ultimately untrue to the spirit of Husserl's original project; and deploying his work as a clear-cut alternative to scientistic tendencies within sociology is not as straightforward as it might at first seem.

Husserl is the first philosopher who has managed to account for the specificity of perception, characterized as givenness by sketches (Abschattungen); but neither Husserl nor Merleau-Ponty have given a satisfying definition of the subject of perception. This article tries to show that the subject of perception must be conceived as living being and that, therefore, the phenomenology of perception must lead to a phenomenology of life. Here, life is approached from an existential point of view, that is to say, as a specific relationship to the world. However, life cannot be characterized from human existence in a privative way, as in Heidegger's philosophy: on the contrary, human existence, and particularly perception itself, must be understood from vital existence, and accordingly, an "additive" anthropology must replace the privative zoology. The hypothesis of this article is that it is by characterizing life as desire, we are able to account for perception as givenness by sketches.