Edmund Husserl

One of the great intellectual problems of modern times has been the end of philosophy, especially metaphysics, in its traditional role as the unifying source of ultimate meaning for the various sciences. Perhaps the last arduous attempt to weld rational science and philosophy into a unity was realized in Hegel's The Phenomenology of Mind; the rupture of metaphysics and science has since been a pernicious legacy of the nineteenth century. Thus in modern culture, the individual sciences have assumed the universal (...) task once left to philosophy as the queen of the sciences; to investigate the ontological question of Being itself. However, modern sciences investigate only specific regions of beings, thereby fragmenting knowledge and subsequently life itself. Metaphysical and other questions of a universal nature are suspended or even dismissed as of dubious character. Recent history has shown that, unfortunately, such problems have been delegated to the machinations of irrational or pseudo-scientific systemizations which in practice develop into final forms of cynical nihilism. ;In spite of the failure of philosophy to provide the absolute and integrating basis for epistemology, there was an urgent desire across diverse intellectual disciplines for the development of a rigorous universal science in modern European culture. The history of the search for the universal science is an attempt to fulfill the serious need for a more general analysis of such desires, and in doing so, to hopefully build greater cohesion among the over-burdening number of specialized studies. The development of Edmund Husserl's phenomenology with its breakthrough into transcendental subjectivity rested precisely upon the loss of a rational metaphysic which Husserl perceived as a loss of faith in reason itself. C.G. Jung's concept of synchronicity was also an attempt to transcend the limitations of one-sided causal pronouncements upon universal questions. Finally, the most radical of such desires was the attempt at a "remythologization" of the world. Martin Heidegger, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and J. R. R. Tolkien endeavored, from fundamentally distinct precincts of thought, to reform the Western method of thinking itself. ;The so-called antagonism between religion and science arises not from scientific edicts, but from the refusal of strict scientific reasoning to investigate and to take seriously the existence of ultimate questions. Modern science and traditional philosophy have a common ancestry, and although these branches have grown apart, the main body of the tree of knowledge yet demands attention. In other words, this is a history of the "idea of science," the underlying essence which makes every science a science. The term, "universal science," has therefore a unique meaning, most nearly approximated by the German Wissenschaftslehre . As such, it is not only an examination of the historical content of this problem, it is also a rigorous inquiry into historical-mindedness--the pure theoretical basis of how it is we are even able to "think" about the past. ;Rational science has deliberately moved away from attempts to expand human consciousness beyond anything except science's own self-imposed limitations. The history of the universal science is a critique of such arrogance, and suggests by extension the existence of unknown faculties of perception. Thus it is also a revolution in consciousness. (shrink)

The notion of ‘phenomenotechnique’ which Gaston Bachelard introduced in the 1930’s has enjoyed popularity among historians of science who used it in order to insist upon the technical and social mediateness of scientific facts. In the wake of the current triumphal return to epistemological ‘realism,’ the idea of phenomenotechnique has been dismissed as an alleged relic of ‘constructivism.’ The article advocates for a different reading of ‘phenomenotechnique,’ which, rather than insisting on the fabrication of the scientific fact, highlights the intrinsic (...) connection of phenomenality and technicality. Phenomena are not simply given, they must be brought to visibility. While philosophies of technique have mostly stressed that technicity consists in overlooking the process (the ‘anesthesia’ of the medium), the paper argues for a conception of technicity that makes space for its productive, aestheticizing capacity. Finally, the article gestures towards parameters of what a ‘techno-aesthetics’ could look like. (shrink)

Volume 3 covers the period between the 1890s and 1930s, a period that witnessed revolutions in the arts and society which set the agenda for the rest of the century. In philosophy, the period saw the birth of analytic philosophy, the development of new programmes and new modes of inquiry, the emergence of phenomenology as a new rigorous science, the birth of Freudian psychoanalysis, and the maturing of the discipline of sociology. This period saw the most influential work of a (...) remarkable series of thinkers who reviewed, evaluated and transformed 19th-century thought. A generation of thinkers - among them, Henri Bergson, Émile Durkheim, Sigmund Freud, Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl, Karl Jaspers, Max Scheler, and Ludwig Wittgenstein - completed the disenchantment of the world and sought a new re-enchantment. (shrink)

This volume covers the period between the 1890s and 1930s, a period that witnessed revolutions in the arts and society which set the agenda for the rest of the century. In philosophy, the period saw the birth of analytic philosophy, the development of new programmes and new modes of inquiry, the emergence of phenomenology as a new rigorous science, the birth of Freudian psychoanalysis, and the maturing of the discipline of sociology. This period saw the most influential work of a (...) remarkable series of thinkers who reviewed, evaluated and transformed 19th-century thought. A generation of thinkers - among them, Henri Bergson, Emile Durkheim, Sigmund Freud, Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl, Karl Jaspers, Max Scheler, and Ludwig Wittgenstein - completed the disenchantment of the world and sought a new re-enchantment. (shrink)

There are several paradigms of 'first philosophy' (e.g. Aristotle, Descartes). A third paradigm of first philosophy is transcendental pragmatics or transcendental semiotics (exemplified by Peirce and Wittgenstein). Husserl correctly grasped that Descartes inaugurated first philosophy in the sense of a transcendental inquiry into the foundations of absolute knowledge. But Husserl's retrieval of Descartes remains within the second paradigm in that it ignores the role of language as a condition of the possibility of objectively constituted knowledge. I propose to re-examine Descartes's (...) conception of first philosophy to see if it can be read in the light of the third paradigm of transcendental philosophy, namely transcendental semiotics. I argue that Cartesian methodic doubt can be rehabilitated (against Wittgenstein's critique) as a kind of 'fallibilistic' approach to knowledge of a Peircean kind, and that the Cartesian cogito can be read (following Hintikka) as recognition of performative contradiction and of the necessity of speech acts, and hence of the transcendental communication community. (shrink)

Este repertorio registra información de Husserl en la Internet, una breve historia sobre los Nachlaß, el índice de la Husserliana, un listado de las publicaciones de y sobre Husserl disponibles en la Biblioteca Central de la Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, y los artículos sobre Husserl que se encuentran en la Hemeroteca. El listado abarca las publicaciones existentes hasta el año 1997.

In this essay, the author tries to decipher the linguistics usages of gestaltic therapy, through a mixed analysis from both a perspective of the theory of talking acts (Searle) and the perspective of the phenomenological dimension of the project of Schutz.

Hegels Phänomenologie beruht auf der Einsicht in die geschichtliche Existenz des Geistes und die geschichtliche Konstitution der Wahrheit. Die „Arbeit der Weltgeschichte” ist jedoch selbst nicht Thema der Phänomenologie, sondern die Aneignung ihrer Resultate im Wissen des Geistes um sich. Hegels Text verweist deshalb nicht unmittelbar auf historische Erfahrungen, sondern ist als systematisches Arrangement historisch identifizierbarer Positionen zu verstehen.

Phenomenological studies of human experience are a vital component of caring professions such as counseling and nursing, and qualitative research has had increasing acceptance in American psychology. At the same time, the debate continues over whether phenomenology is legitimate science, and whether qualitative approaches carry any empirical validity. Ashworth and Chung’s Phenomenology and Psychological Science places phenomenology firmly in the context of psychological tradition. And to dispel the basic misconceptions surrounding this field, the editors and their seven collaborators trace the (...) evolution of phenomenological philosophy (including the work of Sartre and Heidegger) and its parallel impact on psychological science, revealing key points of compatibility: -The phenomenological roots of mainstream psychology -Controversies within phenomenology on the nature of consciousness -Existentialist currents in contemporary psychology -The value of qualitative methods in science-based practice -Applications of phenomenology in case conceptualization and therapy -Possibilities for qualitative-based research. The unique presentation of its subject makes this volume a source of considerable interest for readers involved in theoretical and historical psychology. It will also prove to be important reading for the professional or advanced student concerned with the search for meaning that unites philosophy and psychology. (shrink)