Edmund Husserl

Prolegomena to Pure Logic (1900) is the definitive statement of Husserl’s early logic. But what does it say that logic is? I argue that Husserl in the Prolegomena thinks logic is its own discipline, namely the “doctrine of science” (Wissenschaftslehre), but has two conflicting ideas of what that is. One idea—expressed by the book’s general argument, and which I call Husserl’s Austrian Semanticism about logic—is that the Wissenschaftslehre is the positive science explaining what science is (which turns out just to (...) be the study of meaning) plus the dependent art that, applying the science, teaches us how to scientifically know. The other idea—expressed by the book’s opening chapter, and which I call Husserl’s German Idealism about logic—is that the Wissenschaftslehre is the purely reflective self-knowing of science, independent of science’s positive expansion. These two ideas are incompatible. Thus, the Prolegomena is ambivalent on what logic is. But since the ambivalence only deepens the significance of Husserl’s early logic, the ambivalence should be embraced. (shrink)

This paper tackles Husserl’s early analysis of alien experience and its relation to the methodological framework of the _Logical Investigations_ (LI). Since intersubjectivity first becomes a central theme for Husserl in his writings of 1905 (_Seefeld Blätter_), less attention is usually paid to his analysis of our experience of other minds in the LI. In this context, I attempt to highlight both the fundamental insights gained by Husserl in this analysis that will also remain key for his later accounts of (...) empathy, as well as the challenges alien experiences raises for the theoretical framework of LI. I begin by discussing the main relevant traits of the phenomenological project of LI as a preparatory endeavor for the elucidation of logical objectualities, and the radical way in which Husserl defines its domain, i.e., the sphere of immanent content. Then I analyse Husserl’s understanding of alien experience in terms of an indicative unity based on associative motivations. I argue that, in doing this, Husserl accounts for a non-inferential intuitive access to other minds and, at the same time, maintains their essential alienness. Finally, I show that this account rests on what I call an “intentional contamination” of Husserl’s reductive method of LI. (shrink)

The early phenomenologist József Somogyi was one of, if not the first to write a monograph specifically dedicated to the _history_ of the nascent phenomenological philosophy. The two letters written by him during his stay in Freiburg in WS 1923/24, which are hereby published and discussed for the first time, are, similarly, of interest first due to the rare, valuable insight they can provide – when combined with a detailed microhistorical reconstruction of the surrounding constellation – into the elaborate structures (...) of mid-1920s Freiburg phenomenology around Edmund Husserl (directly after Martin Heidegger’s departure to Marburg). Ranging from Husserl’s teaching style to interactions between phenomenology and Catholic thought and to preconditions of the extraordinary philosophical creativity that distinguished early phenomenology, they offer a snapshot that differs significantly from the established narratives of subsequent privileged members of the Phenomenological Movement. Somogyi’s letters thus exemplify the possibility of reclaiming the plurivocity and philosophical richness of the early Phenomenological Movement by virtue of democratizing the historiography, i.e., giving voice to neglected historical actors (often originating from the peripheries). What is at stake is, however, not merely a more nuanced historical understanding of a particular epoch of early phenomenology. Quite the contrary, as I am finally going to argue on the basis of an adjacent short episode from the reception history of Husserl’s (or Eugen Fink’s) selfinterpretation, Somogyi’s case also exemplifies the possibility of a transformation in our understanding of the history of phenomenology (inspired by the methodological revolutions which took place in other compartments of the historiography of philosophy): namely to make the intricate, simultaneously conceptual and historical phenomena of the history of phenomenology a genuine subject matter of contemporary phenomenological research. (shrink)

Philosophers such as Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, Deleuze and Gendlin pronounce that difference must be understood as ontologically prior to identity. They teach that identity is a surface effect of difference, that to understand the basis of logico-mathematical idealities we must uncover their genesis in the fecundity of differentiation. In this paper, I contrast Heidegger’s analyses of the present to hand logico-mathematical object, which he discuses over the course of his career in terms of the ‘as’ structure, temporalization and enframing , (...) with the approaches of Gendlin and Deleuze, supplementing this discussion with Husserl’s investigations of mathematical idealities. Deleuze and Gendlin distinguish between the representational power a logical pattern has in itself, apart from its virtual generative source, to exactly repeat itself, and the way this self-same pattern is generated and changed by the larger situational texture within which it is embedded. In so doing, they misconstrue the empty, meaningless temporalization of logical calculation as the explicitly preserving carrying-through of already instituted implicit sense. For Heidegger, by contrast, logical inference is less a supplement to or development of implicit experience than a narrowing of its scope , a deficient mode of handiness. Experiencing something as present to hand extension modifies the relevant usefulness of ‘as’ structured comportment by stripping away what is meaningful in our relation with beings, and in the process stripping away its intelligibility. Thus, contrary to the assertions of Deleuze and Gendlin, extensive repetition does not carry through intelligible, relevant meaning, it dissolves understanding into the nihilism of empty calculation. (shrink)

O artigo pretende pensar o aspecto afirmativo do pensamento de Nietzsche ao propor uma “transmutação” do niilismo. Transmutação está em destaque, pois para Nietzsche o niilismo faz parte da vontade de potência, ou seja, para superar o niilismo decadente da cultura europeia e ocidental é necessário saber direcionar o aspecto negativo, ou melhor, da crítica aos valores tradicionais, para afirmar a vida, o ‘sujeito criador’ e a finitude. Ao pensar no poder do aspecto niilista presente na transmutação da cultura, poder (...) esse que destrói os valores da cultura ocidental e faz nascer uma possibilidade de superação do niilismo, pensa-se também em Edmund Husserl como um representante da filosofia nietzschiana ao fazer implodir a noção de cultura ocidental através da crítica às ciências sejam elas positivas, do espírito (história, psicologia e sociologia), ou a própria filosofia através da crítica à metafísica e sua dicotomia realismo versus idealismo como causa e fundamento da crise cultural. Para aproximar Nietzsche e Husserl deve-se entender que Husserl efetivou o principal chamado de Nietzsche, o chamado pela afirmação da vida, afirmação do mundo fenomênico e afirmação da ‘subjetividade’ criadora, o que propiciou novos rumos ao pensar contemporâneo. Husserl faz da fenomenologia uma filosofia pensante da aproximação com o mundo e com as coisas mesmas, num ato de liberdade e criação de um campo relacional de sentido, aproximando-se ao si criador, ao além-do-homem nietzschiano. (shrink)

In this paper, I focus on Edmund Husserl’s analyses of the act of approval and the role he attributes to it in his ethics. I show that we can deepen our understanding of both if we rely on his critical reflections on Shaftesbury’s theory of affections in his lecture course Einleitung in die Ethik. The sections of this course devoted to Shaftesbury are the only place in Husserl’s later philosophical production where he addresses the need to clarify the nature of (...) approval from a phenomenological point of view and provides precise indications about the role that such emotions play in our life. I thereby examine Husserl’s criticisms of Shaftesbury’s account of reflective emotions, and I compare these criticisms with Husserl’s account of approval in the texts from the Konvolut über Billigung collected in the Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins. I argue that, according to Husserl, approval is an essential but not sufficient component in the pursuit of virtue. The upshot is that crucial parts of Husserl’s ethics come from a radical and original reworking of central notions of the early modern sentimentalist tradition. (shrink)

Este artículo trata de mostrar cómo la fenomenología husserliana fue desplegando progresivamente el campo fenomenológico. Ese proceso llevó en las Investigaciones lógicas a aunar lo categorial y lo sensible. Más adelante, los análisis de la conciencia interna del tiempo llevaron tanto a abrir lo dado en la presencia a horizontes pro-re-tencionales, como a introducir la relación ego-alter ego y consciente-inconsciente en tanto que constitutivas de la trascendencia del objeto. De ese modo, el despliegue fenomenológico acabará despejando, en el marco genético (...) de una intersubjetividad intermonádica, el mundo que, en un primer momento, la epojé había puesto entre paréntesis. (shrink)

The theme of this paper is Husserl’s concept of experience, through which I hope to show that and how Husserl’s description points the way toward a more adequate account of experience than traditional ones operating within realist-idealist and rationalist-empiricist frameworks.

In this paper, I take a fresh look at Husserl's key distinction between objectifying and non‐objectifying acts, which roughly amounts to a distinction between presentational and evaluative experiences. My goal is to provide a clear and unified reconstruction of Husserl's argument for the thesis that non‐objectifying acts are necessarily founded in objectifying acts, a thesis that is highly controversial in and beyond Husserlian scholarship. In the first section, I reconstruct Husserl's view in the Logical Investigations, according to which only objectifying (...) acts establish an independent intentional relation to their objects, and argue that it is justified by the positing function of objectifying acts. In the second section, I address two problematic interpretations of this view and, after criticizing them, I present what I take to be Husserl's core argument for his position. In the third section, I turn to the revision of the view of the Logical Investigations that Husserl proposes in the wake of his transcendental turn, especially in Ideas I and II. On Husserl's revised view, all acts are objectifying, including emotional acts [Gemütsakte]. This revision has led scholars to consider Husserl's view aporetic. I propose an alternative interpretation that dispels the purported aporia. I conclude with some remarks on the costs and benefits of my reading, as well as the strengths and weaknesses of Husserl's view in general. (shrink)

In “On the Teachings of Gotama Buddha” (1925) and “Socrates-Buddha” (1926), Edmund Husserl claims that the Buddha achieves a transcendental view of consciousness by performing the epoché. Yet, states Husserl, the Buddha fails to develop a purely theoretical and universal science of consciousness, i.e., phenomenology, because his purely practical goal of Nibbāna limits knowledge of consciousness. I evaluate Husserl’s claims by examining the Buddha’s Majjhima Nikāya. I argue that Husserl correctly identifies an epoché and transcendental viewpoint in the Buddha’s teachings. (...) However, I contend that Husserl’s distinction between pure theory and pure praxis leads him to misconstrue the function of the Buddha’s epoché, the extent of knowledge that the Buddha gains from the transcendental viewpoint, and the nature of Nibbāna. I finally suggest that the Buddha presents a way of studying consciousness that is a way of life, meaning that any distinction between pure theory and pure praxis is dissolved. (shrink)

Timo Miettinen’s recent book aims to re-articulate Edmund Husserl’s whole phenomenological project by reading him as a “universalist cosmopolitan” thinker (123). Drawing on Husserl’s late works, es...

La fenomenolgía pura y el Husserl definitivo.--La disertación doctoral de Marx y las raíces de la ideología.

1. Bd. Prolegomena zur reinen Logik. - 2. Bd. 1. T. Untersuchungen zur Phänomenologie und Theorie der Erkenntnis. 2. T. Elemente einer phänomenologischen Aufklärung der Erkenntnis.

This article explores aspects of the theory of the constitution of space in the work of Edmund Husserl that appear in his late, posthumously published writings on the themes of intersubjectivity and generativity, which the article proposes imply a theory of environmental experience. It identifies and examines Husserl’s use of the locution Umweltlichkeit as it appears in these late works, proposing a rendering of this term as environmentality. This concept, the article argues, functions operatively in Husserl’s late work, indicating a (...) relationship between his descriptions of the lived bodily constitution of spatiality and his conception of the spatio-environmental nature of the intersubjective and historical becoming of human community. In this way, the article proposes that through the concept of environmentality, Husserl articulates a phenomenological conception of the generativity of space. (shrink)

This is the first book to cover Husserl’s phenomenology of existence -/- Collects the contributions of a team of internationally recognized scholars collaborating on a neglected but essential aspect of Husserl’s phenomenology -/- Remedies the widespread but misleading impression that transcendental phenomenology does not and cannot deal with existential questions.

In a 1911 research manuscript, Husserl puts forth an idea that resembles Putnam’s Twin Earth thought experiment presented in the 1970s. In this paper, I study Husserl’s “Twin Earth” passage and assess various readings of it to determine whether Husserl is better understood as an internalist or an externalist. I define internalism as the view that content depends solely on internal factors to the subject, whereas I distinguish between two versions of externalism: weak externalism, according to which content can also (...) depend on other subjects’ conceptions, and strong externalism, which maintains that content can also depend on the real world. Only strong externalism maintains what McGinn calls “the philosophical significance of externalism” because it entails realism about the world. I argue that Husserl is better understood as an externalist when it comes to the “Twin Earth” passage, but the more precise question regarding weak and strong externalism requires further evidence. This additional evidence concerns Husserl’s concepts of the identity of sense (Sinnesidentität) and worldly meaning (weltlicher Sinn). In evaluating externalist Husserl interpretations, I classify Smith’s externalist interpretation as weak, whereas I take Crowell’s externalist interpretation to be ambivalent. Crowell’s excellent but somewhat embryonic interpretation leaves the dependence relation between content and the real world ambiguous. I clarify this relation by assessing McGinn’s argument for the philosophical significance of externalism from the Husserlian viewpoint. Although this study is historical, it also serves a systematic purpose because the externalist interpretation of Husserl calls into question central issues in phenomenology and externalism. (shrink)

Avant-propos du traducteur Cet article est la deuxième (et dernière) partie de la traduction du chapitre d’ouvrage de Ullrich Melle ayant pour titre « Husserls deskriptive Erforschung der Gefühlserlebnisse », publié en 2012. Le premier volet de ce travail a paru dans le précédent numéro d’Alter, accompagné d’une introduction précisant l’intérêt majeur de ce texte pour l’étude de la phénoménologie husserlienne de l’affectivité et justifiant les traductions de quelques termes centraux. Nous y...

: Communautarisation – union intime de tous les types de personnes, empathie, amour (amitié), amour sexuel en tant que communauté pulsionnelle. La vie pulsionnelle en général : s’élever de la vie pulsionnelle inférieure jusqu’à la vie de volonté, jusqu’à la vie dans l’humanité (Humanität). Vivre – être dans le besoin. « Satisfaction primordiale » – valeur et nature primordialement réalisables. D’autres valeurs. La division correspondante de la vie agissante. Auto-conservation et vi...

Nr. 51 Le monde communautaire, le monde des personnes vivant ensemble, auquel chacune d’entre elles appartient pour les autres et d’une certaine manière aussi pour soi-même, [le monde] en tant que domaine des fins vitales, en tant que domaine de pouvoir (Herrschaftsbereich) pour « chacun », pour chaque communauté particulière – pour autant qu’elle se caractérise par l’u...

I. Le problème de Strawson et la phénoménologie Dans le deuxième chapitre de Individuals, Peter Strawson pose la question du rapport du son à l’espace, et à travers elle, celle de la cohérence de la notion kantienne de sens externe. Le son serait un objet essentiellement temporel, auquel une spatialité ne pourrait être ajoutée que par analogie ou de manière seulement synesthésique ou kinesthésique. L’analyse de Strawson repose sur l’opposition entre les représentations sonores et tactiles de...

Dans cet article, nous approcherons la notion husserlienne d’ha- bitus, en essayant de la clarifier à partir des enjeux soulevés par le rapport entre passivité et activité. Dans la phénoménologie génétique husserlienne, l’habitus joue un rôle central dans la constitution du sens, mais aussi pour la constitution de la subjectivité personnelle. Nous tenterons de montrer que la notion d’habitus chez Husserl apparaît en référence à différents niveaux de la constitution, où elle participe d’une pa...

La référence à la maternité ou à la figure de la mère, assez abondamment présente sous la plume de Husserl, ne manque pas de soulever de nombreuses questions. Bien évidemment, son élaboration ne s’appuie pas sur des expériences que Husserl décrit ou explicite en première personne, et l’on est dès lors en droit de se demander quelle est sa teneur expérientielle – et si elle a un statut proprement phénoménologique. Cette référence se réduit-elle à un exemple empirique dont le choix (...) est anodin,... (shrink)

Comment penser l’enracinement phénoménologique de l’éthique? La question demande à être posée par le sens même qu’Aristote assignait à cette articulation d’une disposition et d’un caractère qui constitue la dimension éthique de notre être au monde. Sur cette voie l’ouverture proprement phénoménologique est opérée par la cinquième Méditation cartésienne décrivant l’altération originaire dans l’auto-appréhension charnelle et le transfert analogique qu’elle autorise comme l’opération où l’ego découvre l’altérité de l’autre dans l’intercorporéité. Poursuivre au-delà, vers la signifiance éthique de ce transfert, de (...) cette méta-phore, E. Lévinas, comme on sait, s’y est d’abord engagé dans une conférence de 1962 avant d’abandonner ce thème pour une formulation plus radicale de l’injonction venue de l’autre, sans réciprocité. Mais n’était-ce pas renoncer par là même au lien unissant responsabilité et reconnaissance? C’est ce lien au contraire vers lequel l’analyse ricœurienne de la dimension ontologique de la « métaphore vive » ouvre un accès. Il s’agit de décrire la ressource de sens d’un être-comme métaphorique faisant paraître l’articulation de la sollicitude et de l’estime de soi. (shrink)

As Dieter Lohmar (Citation2002; Citation2012) has shown, in the Logical Investigation Husserl sketches a peculiar type of reduction, the so-called “Reduktion auf den reellen Bestand.” Husserl does not explicitly put this kind of reduction forward, though, and he does definitely not clarify how it works, and what its elements properly are. Lohmar proposes to understand it as a kind of empiricist reduction to mere sense-data. On the contrary, I believe that it should be considered as entailing also the apprehensional forms (...) of sense-data, though not the so-called apprehensional senses. In this article, I will offer some arguments and textual evidence in favour of this claim, and I will conclude by proposing that, despite Husserl’s unclarity on the issue, the reduction to the real components of experience, rather than being simply an ancestor of the transcendental-phenomenological reduction, should be seen as the regulative model of all later forms of reduction. (shrink)

후설은 이후 자신이 ‘환원’이라는 이름으로 수행할 관념화의 길을 『논리연구』에서 이미 언어의 분석을 통해서 잘 보여주었다. 이를테면 그는 언어를 표현과 표시로 구분하여, 표시를 기호의 물질적이고 경험적 차원으로 규정하면서 평가절하한다. 반면에 표현은 언어 나 기호에 있어 의미가 발현될 수 있는 계기로 보아서 의미의 정신성과 연결짓는다. 후설 이 표현에서 의미의 부여와 정신의 생명성을 보장함으로써, 전통철학에서 그러하듯, 언어 의 현상학은 언어의 즉자태인 표시보다 의미의 담지자인 표현은 형이상학적인 우위를 차 지한다. 현상학적 의미에서 언어의 근원은 주관이나 이념적 존재에서 기반하기 때문이다. 이런 이유로 데리다는 후설의 현상학이 전통적인 (...) 형이상학을 반복하고 있음을 지적한다. 언어의 근원을 주관이나 이념적 존재에 근거지움으로써, 후설은 언어의 경험적이고 물질 적 차원과 정신적 차원 사이에 위계질서를 공고히 한다. 또한 그는 이런 구별을 통해 의미 를 담지한 언어와 그렇지 않은 언어의 구별이 결국 정신적 생명성의 유무와 상응함을 강조 한다. 데리다가 보기에, 후설은 이와 같이 전통 형이상학이 행한 관념과 물질, 권리와 존 재, 본질과 실존의 구분을 반복하고 있다. 데리다는 현상학의 이런 위계화를 로고스중심주 의라 하여 이런 질서를 해체하면서, 결국 본질이나 순수한 관념성도 그것이 구성되기 위해 서는 경험적인 것과 물질적 계기를 필요로 함을 밝히고자 한다. 우리는 이런 데리다의 해 체적 독해를 통해 후설사유의 한계와 의의를 살펴볼 것이다. (shrink)

This chapter examines Edmund Husserl’s notion of idea in the Kantian sense with the aim of clarifying the distinction between ideas and essences. In particular, the chapter focuses on the occurrences of the notion of idea in the Kantian sense in Ideas I, identifies its core features, and explains why the notion of idea should not to be conflated with the phenomenologically relevant notion of essence. The chapter then points to doubts about the givenness of ideas in the Kantian sense (...) and argues that, once the notions of essence and of idea are disentangled, those doubts have no bearing on whether essences merit a place within phenomenology. (shrink)

Husserl and Cassirer stand, according to their own self-understanding, as key 20th century figures in the cultivation of Enlightenment’s principles and views on humanity, culture, and history. In a word, they both understand European culture and history as a story of progress (§ 1). As I see it, central in a culture and its dynamics is its system of values, and a grounded understanding of the issue of progress presupposes an adequate theory of the standing or constitution as well as (...) of the givenness and transvaluation of values. Neither Husserl nor Cassirer, however, actually advanced any such theory. We are still in need of one in order to account for culture’s formation and dynamics in history. Next, I briefly review Husserl’s and Cassirer’s available problematic views on values (§ 2). Then, in § 3, I examine some of the central problems in the traditional approaches to culture and to values. In § 4, I appeal to Köhler’s very interesting Gestalt theoretical approach to values and pinpoint some of its problems. Next, in § 5, I suggest how we could start the research from below, from the level of the organism, which could eventually shed some new light on the problem of value constitution and givenness. Finally, in § 6, I attempt to sketch an explanation for how we can use this new approach to values in order to understand actual cultural formation and its historicity, in a way that goes further than the whiggish philosophy of history. (shrink)

The book offers a systematic reconstruction of the disagreement between Husserl and Heidegger from the former's point of view, but without falling into any form of Husserlian apologetics. The main thesis is that Husserl's critique of Heidegger's existential analytics as a form of philosophical anthropology entails a deeper fundamental thesis, namely, that Heidegger confuses the subject matter of first philosophy (the transcendental subject) with metaphysics (in the Husserlian sense of the expression). At stake in Husserl's critique of Heidegger's philosophy in (...) Being and Time is the refusal to transcendentalize the irrational aspects of our human existence. This second volume focuses on the question of being, clarifying the distinction between ontology and metaphysics in Husserl's thought. In fact, contrary to a long-standing and established interpretive tradition, according to which Husserl's phenomenology is metaphysically neutral, the book shows to what extent Husserl always understood as the ultimate goal of his philosophizing the positive foundation of a metaphysics. This volume appeals to students and researchers. (shrink)

The book offers a systematic reconstruction of the disagreement between Husserl and Heidegger from the former's perspective, but without falling into any form of Husserlian apologetics. The main thesis is that Husserl's critique of Heidegger's existential analytics as a form of philosophical anthropology entails a deeper fundamental thesis, namely that Heidegger confuses the object of first philosophy (the transcendental determination of the subject) with metaphysics (in the Husserlian sense of the expression). Addressing the Husserl-Heidegger confrontation, this text provides the first (...) systematic reconstruction of Husserl's conception of the system of philosophy from the perspective of his later works, with a special focus on the Cartesian Meditations. At stake in Husserl's critique of Heidegger's philosophy in Being and Time is the refusal to transcendentalize the irrational aspects and nature of our human existence. This first volume addresses Husserl's doctrine of transcendental idealism with the aim of elucidating the distinction between first philosophy, second philosophies and what Husserl calls last philosophy. This volume appeals to students and researchers. (shrink)