The goal of this paper is to put on the map Husserl's discussion of “secondary experience” as an alternative basis for an epistemology of testimony. In current discussions about social epistemology, the majority of scholars characterize testimony as “the transfer of a belief.” On the contrary, in light of Husserl's notion of “secondary experience,” testimony is best characterized as a sharing of experience rather than a transfer of belief. Husserl discusses the notion of “secondary experience” in Appendix XII of Husserliana (...) 15. In this paper I develop a systematic analysis of “secondary experience,” and I integrate Husserl's analysis of testimony in Appendix XII with his other analyses developed in the Cartesian Meditations, manuscripts written in the same period, and Experience and Judgment. In the conclusion of the paper I very briefly argue for the superiority of Husserl's view of testimony over the majority view. (shrink)

This paper argues that Husserl’s personalist ethics provides a new way to understand the meaning of the full concretion of the transcendental ego in his mature phenomenology. Husserl’s late ethics introduces, at the core of his thinking, a notion of contingency that he associates with irrationality and facticity. This central aspect of human life, namely that contingency traverses it through and through and which ethics makes painfully visible, is usually obscured by the phenomenological attitude, insofar as the phenomenological reduction brackets (...) all matters of fact. Yet the concrete is not the same as the factual, for Husserl. This paper shows that, when fully concretely understood, the transcendental ego is a person who is correlated to a practical world, whose life as a whole has a personal style, and who struggles against what Husserl calls the contingency of destiny. (shrink)

In this paper, I suggest an ethical reading of Husserl’s theory of primordial reduction, which has been criticized for excluding the other from the outset and not doing justice to genuine alterity. I propose to interpret primordial reduction as a “putting into question” not only the intentional relatedness with the other but also transcendental ego’s activity that confers meaning upon the other, so as to understand the other’s primordial givenness that precedes egoic act. I argue that this reading can reveal (...) two correlated issues: first, primordial reduction essentially alters the transcendental sphere by decentralizing the transcendental ego; second, primordial reduction is radical only to the extent that it is existentially motivated by a transcendental other. I suggest that Husserl’s theory of primordial reduction implicitly comprises of an ethical aspect that is of fundamental affinity with Levinas’s methodic operation in Totality and Infinity. (shrink)

The paper attempts to provide an answer to the question of the semantic compulsion exerted by language on its speakers. It does so via an analysis of Husserl’s extended meaning chain and his comments in his Nachlass on language as Zumutung (imposition). The central thrust of the paper is the question of how the linguistic linkage compulsion (LLC) affects the components of Husserl’s language meaning paradigm, consisting of Bedeutungsintention (meaning intention), the minimal sense of Bedeutung, and Sinn as saturating meaning (...) fulfilment. As to its methodological commitment, the paper employs a Husserlian description of the intentional acts of active and passive syntheses which we cannot but perform when we engage in natural language as communication. The paper concludes with a review of its findings from the perspective of Husserl’s key concept of intentionality. (shrink)

Drawing on Merleau-Ponty, I contend that emotions should be regarded as emerging from our “vital communication” with the solicitations of our physical and social surroundings. My intention is to present emotions as unitary phenomena arising from an incessant flow of motivations that can be later articulated in terms of reasons (in cognitive theories of emotions) or in terms of causes (in affective neuroscience). I further suggest that emotions should be considered a specific kind of conducts, since the way in which (...) a person acts out her emotions shapes their content, regulates their intensity and transforms the amorphous flow of felt motivations into a recognizable emotional stance for which she is held accountable. In conclusion, I put forward a series of arguments explaining why emotion tends toward its expression in conduct as if towards its completion. (shrink)

In this paper, I explicate twentieth-century French philosopher, Gilles Deleuze’s paper, “What is the Creative Act?” as a response to the “crisis of creativity” in the Age of Information. I contend that for him, the creative act does not consist of circulating information, but of eliciting the experience of “defamiliarization”. This thesis will be developed over the course of five sections: first, on Deleuze’s lecture, “What is the Creative Act?”, second on the “act of communication”, third and fourth on, respectively, (...) “space–time(s)” and the “Idea”, and fifth, on a synthesis of the paper’s overall account of the creative act, along with a discussion of its role in transcendental empiricism. I draw from “What is the Creative Act?”, texts from throughout Deleuze’s oeuvre as well as the secondary literature. This paper aims to contribute to ongoing discussions in Deleuze Studies and the Philosophy of Creativity. (shrink)