Husserl and Continental Philosophers, Misc

The contribution gives an outline of spatial theory as it developed in the 20th century under a certain perspective within Phenomenology: Those approaches differed from conceptualizations of space as they focus primarily on ‘topology’. In mathematical respect topology defines space by its relational aspects and not by referring to metrics or extension. However, within Phenomenology the understanding of topology varies or is not always made explicit: It can vary from an emphasis on the topos to a description of the relation (...) between places. The aim of the contribution therefore is to also show the different understandings of topology, whereby beside central Phenomenologists like Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the work of authors like Kurt Lewin can be rediscovered as a contribution to phenomenological thinking. Finally, by taking into account the topological understanding of space, it can be demonstrated that Structuralism and Phenomenology agree on basic principles of analyzing aspects of culture, communication and consciousness. (shrink)

Husserl’s phenomenology was particularly influential for a number of French philosophers and their theories. Two of the most prominent French thinkers, Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, turned to the instruments offered by phenomenology in their attempts to understand the notions of the body, consciousness, imagination, human being, world and many others. Both philosophers also provided their definitions of perception, but they understood this notion in very different ways. The paper describes selected aspects of Husserl’s phenomenology that were adopted by Sartre (...) and Merleau-Ponty and depicts the presumptions of their respective theories of perception, as well as the differences between them. The main thesis presented here is that theories as different as those proposed by Sartre and Merleau-Ponty may, and indeed do, lead to the same conclusion, i.e. that perception represents a different form of cognition. Despite the differences between these theories, they can both be placed in the contemporary context of phenomenological research carried out by cognitive philosophers Dan Zahavi and Shaun Gallagher, as well as by the proponent of the enactive theory of perception, Alva Noë. (shrink)

This paper is about the topic of psychologism in the work of Kazimierz Twardowski and my aim is to revisit this important issue in light of recent publications from, and on Twardowski’s works. I will first examine the genesis of psychologism in the young Twardowski’s work; secondly, I will examine Twardowski’s picture theory of meaning and Husserl’s criticism in Logical Investigations; the third part is about Twardowski’s recognition and criticism of his psychologism in his lectures on the psychology of thinking; (...) the fourth and fifth parts provide an overview of Twardowski’s paper “Actions and Products” while the sixth part addresses the psychologism issue in the last part of this paper through the delineation of psychology and the humanities. I shall conclude this study with a brief assessment of Twardowski’s solution to psychologism. (shrink)

Phenomenology and structuralism are commonly understood as two opposing and largely incompatible schools of thought. Indeed, if the former is thought of as the philosophy of subjectivity par excellence, and the latter as the tradition in which the “death of man” is declared, it seems difficult to challenge the antagony between them. On closer inspection, however, it becomes clear that this picture represents an oversimplification and turns out to be, to a great extent, fallacious. The aim of this paper is (...) to show that the philosophy of the early Husserl – notably as exposed in the Logical Investigations – ought to be fully considered as both part of the wide tradition of Transcendental philosophy as well as Structuralism. To this end, the paper mainly addresses Husserl’s notion of Wissenschaftslehre and the mereology developed in the Third logical investigation and, as a result, tries to show how Husserl’s position can be defined in terms of a “phenomenological structuralism” or a “structural phenomenology” or, as I propose, a “transcendental structuralism”. (shrink)

Any effort to think passivity to some extent undoes itself by its own intentional activity. This inevitable and ambiguous paradox is explored by a reading of the allure of passivity in Husserl’s passive synthesis lectures and is paired with a reading of Merleau-Ponty’s course notes on passivity and his late course on Husserl. The uncanny fragmentation of passivity, and indeed of the efforts of any genetic phenomenology to think its own origins, brings to the forefront for thought the problematic space (...) between noema and noesis. Borrowing Merleau-Ponty’s characterization, we will suggest calling this a diaphragmatic relation of a center of egoic activity that cannot hold, that fragments. The essay concludes with a brief fragment on love that shatters in its passivity. (shrink)

Both Franz Brentano and Edmund Husserl addressed sound while trying to explain the inner consciousness of time and gave to it the status of a supporting example. Although their inquiries were not aimed at clarifying in detail the nature of the auditory experience or sounds themselves, they made some interesting observations that can contribute to the current philosophical discussion on sounds. On the other hand, in analytic philosophy, while inquiring the nature of sounds, their location, auditory experience or the audible (...) qualities and so on, the representatives of that trend of thought have remained silent about the depiction of sound and the auditory phenomena in the phenomenological tradition. The paper’s intention is to relate both endeavours, yet the perspective carried out is that of analytic philosophy and, thus, I pay special attention to conceptual analysis as a methodological framework. In this sense, I first explain what sound ontology is in the context of analytic philosophy and the views that it encompasses— namely, the Property View (PV), the Wave View (WV) and the Event View (EV)—. Secondly, I address the problems it entails, emphasising that of sound individuation. In a third section, I propose the possibly controversial conjunction of a “Brentano-Husserl Analysis of the Consciousness of Time” (for short “Brentano-Husserl analysis”) and outline the commonalities of both authors, without ignoring its discrepancies. My main focus is Husserl’s 1905 Vorlesungen zur Phänomenologie des Inneren Zeitbewusstseins. While addressing the Brentano-Husserl analysis, I elaborate on the problem of temporal and spatial extension (Raumlichkeit and Zeitlichkeit, respectively) of both consciousness and sound. Such comparison is a key one, since after these two developments, one can notice some theoretical movements concerning the shift of attention from sounds to the unity of consciousness, and how they mirror each other. After examining the controversial claims concerning the temporal and spatial extension of both consciousness and sound, I argue in the concluding paragraphs that while considering the accounts of sound ontology, the Brentano-Husserl analysis would probably endorse a Property View and that this could have interesting consequences for the issue of Sound Individuation. (shrink)

For Husserl, the phenomenological epoché is primarily methodological, allowing access to the structures of transcendental consciousness by way of suspending worldly influence. This chapter will demonstrate how this methodological principle is rethought as political in the work of Bernard Stiegler. For Stiegler the epokhé is both the suspension of existing social systems, and a moment of critical redoubling, where the source of disruption is integrated into a new ‘epoch’. In particular it will be shown how Stiegler develops this double understanding (...) of the epokhé through his reading of retentionality as found in the lectures On the Consciousness of Internal Time to develop an understanding of the epochal framing of temporality by technics. By drawing connections between this version of retentionality and the pharmacological character of technics, as simultaneously poisonous and curative, the political stakes of the epokhé lie in the need to fight the poisonous aspects of epochal suspension. (shrink)

Despite extensive discussion of naïve realism in the wider philosophical literature, those influenced by the phenomenological movement who work in the philosophy of perception have hardly weighed in on the matter. It is thus interesting to discover that Edmund Husserl’s close philosophical interlocutor and friend, the early twentieth-century phenomenologist Johannes Daubert, held the naive realist view. This article presents Daubert’s views on the fundamental nature of perceptual experience and shows how they differ radically from those of Husserl’s. The author argues, (...) in conclusion, that Daubert’s views are superior to those of Husserl’s specifically in the way that they deal with the phenomenon of perceptual constancy. (shrink)

According to some phenomenological accounts of intersubjectivity, self-awareness precedes and makes possible our understanding of others. Consequently, an "egological account of consciousness" is a precondition for a viable theory of intersubjectivity.1 While Edmund Husserl embraces this assumption of the primacy of self-awareness, Jan Patočka seems to elaborate the opposite stance. As Patočka puts it, in the "contact and in the mirror of the other we encounter ourselves, for the first time."2 Is self-awareness a precondition for an intersubjective encounter, or is (...) it the other way around? Husserl and Patočka seem to espouse exactly opposite claims.Nevertheless, the picture I draw here is more nuanced. On the one... (shrink)

We investigate the parallelism between aesthetic experience and the practice of phenomenology using Viktor Shklovsky’s theory of “estrangement”. In his letter to Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Husserl claims that aesthetic and phenomenological experiences are similar; in the perception of a work of art we change our attitude in order to concentrate on how the things appear to us instead of what they are. A work of art “forces us into” the aesthetic attitude in the same way as the phenomenological epoché drives (...) us into the phenomenological one. The change of attitudes is a condition of possibility of aesthetic and/or phenomenological experience. Estrangement is an artistic device that breaks the routinized forms of perception: one sees the thing as new and does not just “recognize” it automatically. Shklovsky insists that it is possible if one experiences or feels the form of the work of art—in an affective and even sensuous way. We claim that this is similar to the phenomenological seeing, or intuition, which, according to Husserl, should be devoid of all understanding. Phenomenological epoché can also be described as a philosophical technique that aims to arrest the “ready-made,” “taken for granted,” “pre-given” meanings in order to access a new meaning which is not yet stabilized, the “meaning-in-formation.” It is not enough to turn from what appears to how it appears; one has to oscillate between these conflicting attitudes, or rather to keep them both at the same time thus gaining a kind of a 3D-vision of meaning in its becoming. This double life in two different attitudes can be clarified in terms of Roman Jakobson’s theory of antinomic coexistence between the poetic and communicative functions of language. The notion of “double life in two attitudes” uncovers the role that ostranenie can play in the philosophical transformation of the subject based on variety and essential mobility of the affective components involved. Proposing a phenomenological interpretation of a passage from Samuel Beckett we show how the radicalization of ostranenie can lead even to “meta-estrangement”: to estrangement of the everyday “lack of estrangement.” We conclude with a remark on the productivity of this form of estrangement in the phenomenological context. (shrink)

Assuming the importance of Alfred Schutz’s “protosociology” in social theory as a given, the paper tries to explore its philosophical core, treating Schutz’s sociophenomenology as an answer to the most fundamental questions of phenomenology, such as evidence and phenomenological reduction. It analyses Schutz’s point of departure – the problematization of Max Weber’s concept of the meaning of social action and its deepening by means of Henri Bergson’s and Edmund Husserl’s notion of time – and tries to unravel the double structure (...) of consciousness, revealing increasingly its complex temporal character. Brentano’s and Husserl’s double intentionality, seeming to offer a kind of “decent realism” in modern philosophical context, in Schutz turns out to be marked by the profound pastness of reflexive consciousness, reaching the primary stream experience only by means of primary and secondary acts of remembrance, re-effectuated intersubjectively in acts of phantasying about future, thus constituting the very core of meaning, with its reference to external objects. It appears that only analysing this mode of phantasying in reference to its motives that we can solve the conundrum of realism in its modern shape. (shrink)

Traditionally, phenomenology has understood the self in light of intentionality and hence the world. However, contemporary French phenomenology—as represented here by Jean-Luc Marion—contends that this view of subjectivity is open to challenge: our mode of existence is not simply one of “being-in the-world.” I develop this claim by examining Marion’s reformulation of the reduction. Here, the phenomenon of vanity is key. I first present Husserl’s and Heidegger’s own formulations of the reduction. Following Marion, I show that the blow of vanity (...) neutralizes both, by undercutting the respective questions to which they respond. For, in response to vanity’s own question—“What’s the use?”—neither the transcendental nor ontological reductions have a reply. Vanity consequently renders the Heideggerian distinction between authenticity and inauthenticity existentially moot. To establish this, I evaluate how existing interpretations of authenticity overlook the phenomenon of vanity. Phenomenology, I urge in conclusion, should shift its attention to the horizons opened by Marion’s erotic reduction. (shrink)

The chapter contains a brief intellectual biography of Herbert Spiegelberg, building on his numerous autobiographical remarks. It provides a survey of Spiegelberg’s early life and works and his German period, focusing more extensively on his American period. The chapter considers in some detail three important themes in Spiegelberg’s works. First, Spiegelberg’s role in spreading and developing the phenomenological method in the United States through the organization of his workshops, based on ideas from his teachers Reinach and Pfänder to phenomenologize “co-subjectively”. (...) Second, his life-long concern with the development of a phenomenological ethics and the detailed development of the core notion of “deontic state of affairs” (Sollverhalt). Last but not least, his monumental contribution to the historiography of phenomenology with his The Phenomenological Movement. The chapter takes a critical look at the early controversies with Farber on the idea of a phenomenological “movement” in order to clarify and qualify Spiegelberg’s own conception of phenomenology. The chapter is meant as a companion piece to the translation of Karl Schuhmann’s unpublished article “Phenomenological Ontology in the Work of Herbert Spiegelberg: Ideas and Ontic and Deontic States of Affairs” which will appear in the second volume. (shrink)

In a discussion of the constitutive role of colour in our visual perceptual experiences, Wilhelm Schapp centrally argues that we cannot visually perceive certain distant things, like a house seen far down in the valley. My main contention is that, in cases relevantly similar to Schapp’s, we do perceptually experience distant things, viz., as drastically “decayed” things, which are part of distant scenes. In doing so, we adopt towards them a kind of conservative “attitude.” The ideas of decay and scenicness (...) will be unpacked in terms of the Husserlian ideas of fulfilment, and fulfilment conditions, capturing the idea that we perceptually experience objects in terms of anticipated possibilities for further experiences of these objects. These ideas will also be considered in relation to Herbert Leyendecker’s notion of an attitude, e.g., of observing, searching for, or working with objects. (shrink)

The “Freiburg Encounter” begins with a short history painting the picture of Aron Gurwitsch’s factual encounters during the time of his doctoral studies in 1920s Germany. These encounters included exposure to Gestalt theory as well as Husserlian phenomenology, both of which would make a major impact on him. The point is to show how such encounters can shape the thought of an individual who can then go on to shape regional movements. The bulk of the essay concentrates on Gurwitsch’s encounter (...) with Edmund Husserl, the development of his field theory of consciousness, and the manner in which such can be understood as an advancement of Husserlian phenomenology through modifications of consciousness in particular. Close attention is paid to Husserl’s texts available to Gurwitsch at the time and the ways in which Husserl had anticipated such a theory. These approaches are closely compared and it is ultimately shown how Gurwitsch’s critique of the searchlight theory of attention marks his field theory as a genuine advancement. The essay finishes with Gurwitsch emigrating to the United States, describing the encounters he has there, and outlining his tremendous impact on North American phenomenology. (shrink)

Riassunto: La fenomenologia, in virtù del suo stesso nome, pare rivendicare un diritto di prelazione sui fenomeni. È sufficiente, tuttavia, uno sguardo panoramico sulla storia della filosofia o, più generalmente, delle scienze per rilevare il vasto impiego che si va affermando, senza fenomenologia, del concetto di fenomeno. In cosa consisterebbe allora la specificità della comprensione fenomenologica dei “fenomeni”? Per rispondere a questa domanda, riconsidereremo il dibattito tra Edmund Husserl autore delle Logische Untersuchungen e Paul Natorp, filosofo neokantiano di Marburgo, le (...) cui tesi presentano un duplice interesse: l’avere, per un verso, sollecitato lo stesso Husserl a una precisazione della proposta fenomenologica; l’aver, per l’altro, anticipato alcuni tra gli argomenti di maggior rilievo nell’ambito delle scienze cognitive in merito ai vari tentativi di naturalizzazione della coscienza. Parole chiave: Fenomeno; Intenzionalità; Oggetto; Edmund Husserl; Paul Natorp Phenomena With or Without Phenomenology. An Open Dialogue: Phenomenology, by its very name, seems to invoke a priority claim on the study of phenomena. Yet a glance at the history of philosophy or, more generally, the sciences, suffices to demonstrate how widely the concept of “phenomena” has been used outside phenomenology. So, what exactly is unique to the phenomenological understanding of phenomena? In order to formulate a possible answer, we reactivate the debate between the Husserl of the Logische Untersuchungen and Paul Natorp, a neo-Kantian philosopher from Marburg. This debate is of interest on two fronts: first, because Natorp’s criticism directly forced Husserl to clarify his views on phenomenology; second, because the debate anticipated some of the most important arguments on naturalizing consciousness in the cognitive sciences. Keywords: Phenomenon; Intentionality; Object; Edmund Husserl; Paul Natorp. (shrink)

We explore the integrated structure of consciousness by examining the “phenomenological axioms” of the “integrated information theory of consciousness ” from the perspective of Husserlian phenomenology. After clarifying the notion of phenomenological axioms by drawing on resources from Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, we develop a critique of the integration axiom by drawing on phenomenological analyses developed by Aron Gurwitsch and Merleau-Ponty. This axiom is ambiguous. It can be read either atomistically as claiming that the phenomenal content of conscious experience (...) is an integrated complex and holistically as claiming that it is an integrated Gestalt. We argue that the latter reading provides a better characterization of the internal structure of the phenomenal content. Furthermore, the integrated structure of consciousness is not confined to the phenomenal content, but it also extends into the subjective attitude. Subjective attitudes and phenomenal contents are interdependent constituents that jointly make up conscious experiences. This implies a novel theoretical challenge to the scientific component of IIT, which is to explain how to accommodate the subjective dimension of consciousness into its explanatory scope. IIT can respond in a few different ways, but most importantly, it cannot just ignore it once and for all. As one possible way to address the challenge, we propose introducing a novel construct, noetic complex, to develop a fine-grained model of the neural underpinning of consciousness. (shrink)

Reinach est connu pour défendre une théorie a priori du droit civil. Cette position, qui se dit inspirée de Husserl, est usuellement qualifiée de « platonisme » dans la littérature secondaire. Elle se comprend comme intuition des essences, projet de phénoménologie eidétique que Reinach fait remonter à Platon. Une position qui est rejetée par Reinach en philosophie du droit est le « psychologisme », thèse tendant à expliquer le droit par référence à la psyché. L’hostilité de Reinach à l’égard du (...) psychologisme semble être une hostilité à l’égard de lui-même : en tant qu’élève de Lipps, Reinach avait écrit une thèse sur la notion de causalité en droit pénal, dans laquelle il faisait jouer à la psychologie un rôle fondateur pour le droit. Dans mon exposé, je retracerai l’évolution de Reinach sur ces questions, en repartant de sa thèse et des travaux de Lipps sur lesquels elle se base pour la comparer aux écrits reinachiens plus tardifs et leur rapport tant à Platon qu’à Husserl. (shrink)

This paper critically examines the philosophical foundations of Colin Wilson’s New Existentialism. I will show how Wilson’s writings promoted a phenomenological strategy for understanding states of ecstatic affirmation within so-called ‘peak experiences’. Wilson subsequently attempted to use the life affirming insights bestowed by peak states to establish an ontological ground for values to serve as a foundation for his New Existentialism. Because of its psychological focus however, I argue that Wilson’s New Existentialism contains an ambivalent framework for establishing ontological categories, (...) which leads his thought into theoretical difficulties. More precisely, Wilson’s strategy runs into problems in coherently integrating its explicitly psychological interpretation of Husserl’s theory of intentionality within a broader, and philosophically coherent, phenomenological framework. Wilson’s psychological reading of Husserl’s transcendental reduction, for example, manifests tensions in how it reconciles the empirical basis of acts of transcendence with an essentialist conception of the self as a transcendental ego. The above tensions, I argue, ultimately render the New Existentialism susceptible to criticism from a Husserlian-transcendental perspective. After outlining a Husserlian critique of Wilson’s position, I end the paper by suggesting how some of the central insights of the New Existentialism might help to bridge the gap that persists between pure phenomenological description and metaphysics. (shrink)

One of the central questions within contemporary debates about collective intentionality concerns the notion and status of the we. The question, however, is by no means new. At the beginning of the last century, it was already intensively discussed in phenomenology. Whereas Heidegger argued that a focus on empathy is detrimental to a proper understanding of the we, and that the latter is more fundamental than any dyadic interaction, other phenomenologists, such as Stein, Walther and Husserl, insisted on the importance (...) of empathy for proper we-experiences. In this paper, I will present some of the key moves in this debate and then discuss and assess Husserl’s specific proposal, according to which reciprocal empathy, second-person engagement and self-alienation are all important presuppositions for group-identification and we-identity. (shrink)

In this paper I reconstruct Adorno’s arguments against the phenomenological project as developed by Husserl in the early phase of his thought, with particular focus on the dialectical nature and meaning of such a critique. Primary references are Adorno’s article Husserl and the Problem of Idealism, published in 1940, and his book Against Epistemology: A Metacritique, published in 1956. I argue that, for Adorno, Husserl’s attempt must be understood as both logically impossible and theoretically productive. After laying down the general (...) framework of Adorno’s reading in the first three sections, I examine his criticism of Husserl’s “involuntary dialectic” in detail, also with the help of an independent analysis of some ambiguities in Husserl’s concept of “categorial intuition”. In the last section, I explain why and under what conditions, according to Adorno, the original impulse of Husserlian phenomenology toward an intact knowledge of “things themselves” needs to be maintained in spite of all. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine how Merleau-Ponty develops Husserl’s genetic phenomenology through an elaboration of language, which is largely influenced by Saussure’s linguistics. Specifically, my focus will be on the unpublished notes to the course Sur le problème de la parole. I show how Merleau-Ponty recasts Husserl’s notion of the historicity of truth by means of an inquiry into the relation between truth and its linguistic expression. The account that Merleau-Ponty offers differs from Husserl’s in two important respects. Firstly, whereas (...) Husserl describes a regressive inquiry of truth, Merleau-Ponty describes a regressive movement of truth, where every acquired truth seizes the tradition that precedes it. Secondly, this new notion of truth, and its dependency on its proper expression, opens up a new understanding of literature. (shrink)

Scholarly discussions of Merleau-Ponty’s aesthetics tend to focus on his philosophy of painting. By contrast, comparatively little attention has been paid to his philosophy of literature. However, he also draws significant conclusions from his work on literary expression. As I will argue, these reflections inform at least two important positions of his later thought. First, Merleau-Ponty’s account of “indirect” literary language led him to develop a hybrid view of phenomenological expression, on which expression is both creative and descriptive. Second, a (...) study of literature furnished him with the resources to develop a novel account of phenomenological “essences”, which holds that essences are revisable explanations of first-order experience. Both results have been overlooked by commentators. They demonstrate the systematic import of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of literature and language, and amount to a qualified extension of a basic Husserlian position. (shrink)

The paper aims to investigate the link between self-shaping and intersubjectivity from a phenomenological perspective. This means that two main topics are here at stake. On the one hand, the paper purports to argue that tackling the link between self-shaping and intersubjectivity from a phenomenological perspective is a meaningful and sound approach. On the other hand, the paper purports to argue that such an analysis enables us to bring to light an inherent linkage that tethers the topic of intersubjectivity to (...) the sway that other persons hold over one’s process of self-shaping. This influence will be gradually investigated. Firstly, Husserl’s stance on other persons as “variations of my self” will allow us to understand why other persons might hold sway over one’s process of self-shaping and self-knowledge. Secondly, exemplariness will turn out to be the way through which other persons might hold sway over one’s process of self-shaping and self-knowledge: Scheler’s stance on exemplariness will be examined since he makes us treat the question of exemplariness from the standpoint of the process of the formation of individuality: exemplars hold sway over such a process. So, we will rely upon the Husserlian thesis and the Schelerian thesis to argue for a thesis that goes beyond Husserl’s and Scheler’s perspectives: others as exemplars shed light on the eidetic possibilities of myself and others could become exemplars for me since they are variations of myself; that is, they exemplify untaken possibilities of myself. We will argue that exemplariness is the key to the link between the issue of intersubjectivity and the process of self-shaping. (shrink)

English Title: Time and scansion: rythmical meaning of Duration between Husserl and Bachelard. -/- Abstract: Inside phenomenological search, present time and instant live inside a troubled dialectic: for Husserl present runs, widening out past and future, in the same moment, like the Heraclitean bowstring which stretches between two dimensions. Gaston Bachelard, on the contrary, is the thinker of Discreteness, where temporal continuum is linked to the reciprocal differentiating of instants in the duration. So, the conceptions of time inside these philosophers (...) seem to be opposed one to the other, but inside these two modalities of scansion we meet a steady thread, which underlies both the interpretations, which precipitate one on the other. Let’s read the taking shape of the positions inside La dialectique de la durée (1936) and in Husserl’s writings on attention, linked to the rise of an aspect of the thing above the others (1904 -1905) treated in Husserliana XXXVIII (Wahrnehmung und Aufmerksamkeit, Texte aus dem Nachlass, (1893 – 1912). /// -/- Resumen: En la investigación fenomenológica los conceptos de instante y presente viven in potente una abierta tensión constitutiva: en la filosofía de Husserl es el presente el que transcurre, dilatándose conjuntamente hacia el pasado y el futuro como la heraclítea cuerda del arco, que se extiende entre los dos lados de una dirección unitaria y continua. Gaston Bachelard, por el contrario, es un pensador de la discreción, no existe un continuo temporal sino una gran sutura en la que los instantes se diferencian en la duración. Las concepciones del tiempo entre los dos filósofos parecen oponerse la una a la otra y, sin embargo, entre las dos formas de escansión, existe un hilo firme, que ciñe las dos interpretaciones, haciéndolas precipitar una dentro de la otra, en nombre del contenido perceptivo. Las dos posiciones emergen con su diferencia en La dialéctica de la duración [1936] y en los textos que Husserl ha dedicado al tema de la atención y el interés [1898; 1904; 1905]. -/- . (shrink)

One of the basic reasons for Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s critique of Edmund Husserl’s Wesenschau is represented by what has been defined as the “ambiguity” of the perceiver-perceived relationship, which is the theme of the “phenomenology of perception” developed by the French philosopher. Such ambiguity is in effect constitutive of fundamental perceptive-cognitive relationships; and—in the mature thought of Merleau-Ponty—it also extends, from an ontological point of view, to the “chair du monde” in which being and non-being, visible and invisible, are but two (...) sides of the same “reality.” In this contribution we try to highlight the ambiguous characteristics of corporeal intentionality which render it incompatible with visual perception. And we propose both the necessity and the possibility of eliminating this incompatibility with a new phenomenological approach, which is also consistent with scientific “visualisation.”. (shrink)

Brentano et Husserl reconnurent tous deux que certaines de nos intentionnalités posent des enjeux normatifs. Seulement, Brentano croyait que les intentionnalités ne peuvent être qualifiées normativement que si elles sont incompatibles avec une autre façon opposée de se rapporter intentionnellement à un même objet. Husserl insista pour sa part sur le fait qu’il n’y a des enjeux normatifs que là où il y a une relation intentionnelle et positionnelle. Malgré cette distinction, en imposant ces conditions (incompatibilité et position) pour qu’il (...) soit question de normativité intentionnelle, Brentano et Husserl se trouvèrent tous deux à favoriser un réductionnisme normatif. Je proposerai pour ma part, dans un geste rappelant celui de la pragmatique d’Austin mais sans m’y restreindre pour autant, de dépasser ce réductionnisme normatif en cessant de limiter à ces conditions l’application de normes à nos intentionnalités. (shrink)

In this work, I discuss the role of Husserl’s phenomenology in Paolo Parrini’s philosophical view. In the first section, I highlight the presence of both empiricist and constructivist elements in Parrini’s anti-foundationalist and anti-absolutist conception of knowledge. In the second section, I stress Parrini’s acknowledgement of the crucial role of phenomenology in investigating the empirical basis of knowledge, thanks to its analysis of the relationship between form and matter of cognition. In the third section, I point at some lines of (...) development of phenomenology that are revealed by Parrini’s reflection, through the comparison between Husserl’s genetic phenomenology, Mary Hesse’s network model, and the tradition of neutral monism. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore the strategy of circularity employed by Kant and Husserl in their treatment of categoriality. I focus on the relation between transcendental and metaphysical deductions in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, and on the problem of “epistemic foundationalism” and categoriality in Husserl’s Sixth Logical Investigation. I propose that the strategy of circularity is manifested through the peculiar self-enclosure of the categories of transcendental deduction vis-à-vis metaphysical deduction (Kant) and categorial intuition vis-à-vis sensuous intuition (Husserl). Although it (...) is usually regarded as a deficient and damaging occurrence in argumentation, circularity appears to be a crucial component in the analysis of both thinkers. The analytical realms recognized by both these thinkers, are acknowledged as continually dependent upon the self-evidential “contingency” of the realms they are supposed to hierarchically overarch. The strict separation between the transcendental and phenomenological realms and their addressees appears to be founded on mutual circularity, where the relation between investigator and investigated extends beyond their separation and reconciliation. Both Kant and Husserl, through the circular relationship with empiricism-rationalism and psychologism radically re-articulated the logic-ontology and founding-founded polarities. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to evaluate the possibility of noninten-tional phenomena in the contemporary phenomenology, based on the phenom-enological works of French thinker Jean-Luc Marion and the founder of phenomenology Edmund Husserl. It is shown that in determining nonintentional phenomena Marion operates with a very narrow understanding of intentionality, which he incorrectly ascribes to Husserl, and that nonintentional phenomena he is describing are in fact intentional in the broad sense of the word. It is argued that nonintentional phenomena (...) in Marion’s phenomenology are equated with non-conceptual phenomena and are possible only based on a narrow understanding of intentionality understood as conceptualization, which is not substantiated. It is demonstrated that if intentionality is understood more broadly as the constitution of any temporal unity – conceptual and nonconceptual – Marion cannot justify the possibility of nonintentional phenomena. Despite Marion’s inability to account for the possibility of nonintentional phenomena at the end of the paper the possibility of nonintentional phenomena based on the broad understanding of intentionality is suggested. (shrink)

This article compares the concept of the living body in Edmund Husserl’s Ideas II with that of the French phenomenologist Michel Henry. It locates in their descriptions of the I Can a basic difference in the way they understand the roles that impressionality, affectivity, and perception play in the phenomenological method. It then examines Henry’s concept of “auto-affection” and argues that the “strong” and “weak” senses of auto-affection must be understood in terms of what Henry, following Kierkegaard, calls the “dialectic (...) of pathos.” Henry finally distinguishes three degrees of passivity—of sensibility with regard to the world, of flesh with regard to itself, and of flesh with regard to incarnation. In the shift from the second to the third, we see a shift from a concept of givenness to a concept of “givenness from above.” It is here that the article locates the presence of a “transcendence” in Henry’s work, which in turn helps to clarify how he understands the boundary between phenomenology and theology. Keywords: phenomenology, transcendence, affectivity, body, flesh, givenness, Michel Henry, Edmund Husserl, incarnation, impressionality. (shrink)

ABSTRACTOne long-running conundrum in Husserlian phenomenology revolves around the question of the identity of what Husserl calls the transcendental ego, a mysterious figure that he identifies as the subject of a genuinely transcendental phenomenology. In dialogue with both Husserl and his assistant and collaborator Eugen Fink, I attempt in this article to give a solid account of the identity of this transcendental ego, and in particular to explain the connection between this figure and the empirical ego of the individual phenomenologist. (...) I make particular reference to Fink's depiction of a "personal union" between these two egos in his Sixth Cartesian Meditation and to certain unclear hints in Husserl's 1923/1924 lectures on First Philosophy. Ultimately, I develop my own account of such a union, which explains the transcendental ego as a certain mode in which the phenomenologist might investigate his own experiences. On this basis, I argue, the status of phenomenology as a transcendental discipline can be understood without subjecting that discipline to certain criticisms that have been levelled against it. (shrink)

There are two main approaches in the phenomenological understanding of the unconscious. The first explores the intentional theory of the unconscious, while the second develops a non-representational way of understanding consciousness and the unconscious. This paper aims to outline a general theoretical framework for the non-representational approach to the unconscious within the phenomenological tradition. In order to do so, I focus on three relevant theories: Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception, Thomas Fuchs’ phenomenology of body memory, and Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology of (...) affectivity. Both Merleau-Ponty and Fuchs understand the unconscious as a “sedimented practical schema” of subjective being in the world. This sedimented unconscious contributes to the way we implicitly interpret reality, fill in the gaps of uncertainty, and invest our social interactions with meaning. Husserl, however, approaches the unconscious in terms of affective non-vivacity, as a sphere of sedimentation and the horizon of the distant past which stays affectively connected to the living present. Drawing on these ideas, I argue that these two accounts can reinforce one another and provide the ground for a phenomenological understanding of the unconscious in terms of the horizontal dimension of subjective experience and a non-representational relation to the past. (shrink)

Although philosophers may first find it odd to speak of norms in the context of perception, the argument for normativity finds support in the writings of some of the spearheads of the phenomenological tradition, amongst them Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. As Maren Wehrle argues however, a phenomenological analysis of perception’s normative claim requires that we redefine our traditional conception of norms as authoritative standards or prescriptive moral guidelines. To this end, as she points out, the origin of the concept (...) of norm in architecture can be illuminating because it refers to a measure or guideline which emerges out of “practical motivations” and serves to “facilitate cooperative and intersubjective communication.” In her view, prior to any theoretical or moral engagement with the world, certain sets of norms already play a role at an embodied, pre-reflexive level and account for our ability to orientate ourselves in the intersubjective lifeworld. My interest in the concept of norms stems from such a comprehension, and attempts to unfold and clarify some of its implications for perception in general. My goal in this paper is thus to address one of the key interpretations of perceptual norms in Merleau-Pontian scholarship and to suggest a new reading of their role in the Phenomenology of Perception (1945), through the lense of interest and temporality. (shrink)

In his new book, Lambert Zuidervaart argues that the concept of propositional truth remains one-dimensional and needs to be extended by and embedded in several versions of what the author calls “existential truth,” which he discusses in relation to phenomenology and critical theory. Zuidervaart focuses on key figures of twentieth-century German philosophy, such as Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Theodor Adorno, Jürgen Habermas, and Max Horkheimer. According to the author, his book “does not intend to be a historical narrative” ; nor (...) does it intend to present “a few nuggets of insights from continental writings”. Instead, Zuidervaart tries to reconstruct the primary material and immanently criticizes the... (shrink)

En el siguiente articulo tomaremos los lineamientos expositivos de La memoria, la historia, el olvido, para reconstruir el dialogo que Ricoeur establece entre Heidegger y Husserl. En estas paginas descubriremos que, pese a que esta obra se publico casi veinticinco anos mas tarde que “Fenomenologia y hermeneutica”, en ella se concretizan las premisas acerca del tipo de vinculo que debe haber entre la hermeneutica y la fenomenologia, en el sentido en que, por una parte, la fenomenologia es el presupuesto de (...) la hermeneutica y, por la otra, la fenomenología no puede constituirse a si misma sin un presupuesto hermeneutico. Quisieramos tambien sostener que, pese a que, en La memoria, la historia, el olvido la fenomenologia se identifica con el plano ontico y la hermeneutica con el ontologico, las objeciones a la fenomenologia husserliana de la memoria estan basados en los planteos de Heidegger, y que la categoria con la que se pretende superar a la ontologia heideggeriana, la carne, fue originalmente elaborado por Husserl. (shrink)

Roman Ingarden, one of Husserl’s most gifted students, devoted several thousand pages to the development of an ontological, epistemological, aesthetical and even anthropological framework that would allow him to firmly reject the so-called “idealistic turn” of his master Husserl. This paper aims at reconstructing an often overlooked side of his philosophy: his theory of consciousness and his analysis of the constitutive process involved in sense perception. After emphasizing the distinctive character of Ingarden’s ontological frame and its impact on understanding concepts (...) as fundamental as consciousness or intentionality, this paper tries to sketch Ingarden’s answers to several genetic questions raised by Husserl: the relation between time and consciousness, the nature of the ultimate sense data and the question of motivation. (shrink)

Resumen El presente estudio investiga la importancia de la “experiencia originaria” husserliana para la comprensión del conflicto de las ciencias exactas con el problema de Dios, que Edith Stein califica de “angustia inconsciente de encontrarse” con Él. A través de su controversia con la Psicología del siglo XIX, la discípula de Husserl muestra en su obra Causalidad Psíquica que hace falta un adecuado conocimiento de la índole propia de la ciencia para remontar con rigor metódico a la originariedad de la (...) experiencia humana y el Dios presente allí. Esto conducirá a la ciencia al descubrimiento de su propia identidad por la superación del bloqueo consciente o inconsciente ante la revelación de Dios en el alma humana. De ahí que el presente estudio ofrezca un aporte relevante para la dilucidación filosófica de una cuestión teológica candente hoy ―aporte logrado a través de un esfuerzo interdisciplinario arduo.The present study investigates the importance of the Husserlian “originary experience” for the understanding of the conflict of the exacts sciences with the problem of God, which Edith Stein describes as “unconscious anguish of being” with Him. Through her controversy with of the 19th century Psychology, the disciple of Husserl shows in her work Psychic Causality that it is necessary to have an adequate knowledge of the nature of science to trace with methodical rigor the originarity of the human experience and the God present in there. This will conduct science to a discovery of its own proper identity by the overcoming of the unconscious or conscious blocking before the revelation of God in the human soul Hence, the present study offers a relevant contribution to the philosophical elucidation of a burning theological question today -a contribution achieved through an arduous interdisciplinary effort. (shrink)

Many genetic approaches in philosophy, psychology or sociology lead to a partially or fully deterministic understanding of the self and its position-taking. In this article, I argue that Husserl’s view of genesis differs broadly from such deterministic conceptions, as he investigates the genesis as the awakening of consciousness as consciousness or spirit as spirit. Husserl claims that the passive foundation of conscious life is the topsoil of activity and rational position-taking. But still the genetic process of the awakening of the (...) ego, far from being an automatism, demands a primary responsibility to proceed with the awakening itself. I discuss the issue of the responsibility of wakefulness in three interconnected ways. Drawing on Edith Stein, I first develop some theological implications to demonstrate how the paradox of responsibility points toward its divine ratio, because the unfounded givenness of responsibility links the awakening person to a phenomenological understanding of theosis: the more a person cultivates her responsibility the more she resembles the divine actus purus. In a second step, I show how the ethical implications of the responsibility of awakening connect it with the truth of will. The manifold obstacles that tend to undermine ethical love reveal a new level of both responsible position-taking and practical faith in the divine entelechy. Finally, the theological and ethical results motivate a social renewal, in which responsibility embraces the Other and longs for the communitization of the truth of wills. Clearly, the Husserlian view of genetic philosophy enables deep theological and ethical insights, that remain hidden from the method of static phenomenology and that are denied by most empirical genetic approaches. (shrink)

The issue of whether the phenomenology presented in Ideen I was a metaphysical realism or an idealism came to the fore almost immediately upon its publication. The present essay is an examination of the relation of Gustav Shpet, one of Husserl’s students from the Göttingen years, to this issue via his understanding of phenomenology and, particularly, of the phenomenological reduction, as shown principally in his early published writings. For Shpet, phenomenology employs essential intuition without regard to experiential intuition. If we (...) look on transcendental idealism as the label for this methodology, which disregards but does not deny either the empirical or its correlative species of intuition, then Shpet was such an idealist, all the while adhering to a metaphysical realism. In this way, Shpet could proclaim phenomenology to be the fundamental philosophical discipline without precluding the possibility of other philosophical disciplines insofar as they were conducted in relation to consciousness taken not as the “possession” of a human individual, but eidetically and thus not a “possession.”. (shrink)

Despite the recent increase of interest in the work of Merleau-Ponty there is still a persistent tendency to overlook the uniqueness of the philosophical position he advances in Phenomenology of Perception. In this article I present a reading of Merleau-Ponty’s account of the phenomenological reduction that explains how it is original. I do this by contrasting his presentation of the reduction with that of the early Husserl, highlighting how his emphasis on the phenomenology of the ‘perceived world’ leads him to (...) reject Husserl’s conception of phenomenology as a ‘philosophical science,’ and the Kantian language in which the this account is framed. I go on to critically discuss the interpretations of the reduction advanced by Stephen Priest and Joel Smith as examples of readings that fail to fully grasp Merleau-Ponty’s account of the ‘natural attitude’ as resting on the inherent objectivizing structure that is built into perception itself. The way that these authors misinterpret Merleau-Ponty helps to make maximally clear the profound philosophical significance that he places on the phenomenology of the ‘perceived world’. (shrink)

Jan Patočka’s early phenomenology, as presented in The Natural World as a Philosophical Problem, does not merely adopt Husserl’s concept of the lifeworld. The paper demonstrates the originality of Patočka’s appropriation of this concept, but also its internal tensions and difficulties. Seeking to elaborate a concept of a phenomenology allowing for a theory of the lifeworld stricto sensu, i.e. of the life of the world, Patočka’s book effectively shows that there is no ahistorical, absolute or “natural” starting point for phenomenology. (...) Truth, as approachable through phenomenology, is not given, but must rather be developed. Elaborating on the concept of transcendental idealism, Patočka’s early phenomenology thus suggests a vivid idea of “intermeshing” monads ontologically grounding the world. (shrink)

The chapter contextualizes and reconstructs Walther’s theory of social acts. In her view a given act qualifies as social if it is performed in the name of or on behalf of a community. Interestingly, Walther’s understanding of that notion is patently at odds with the idea of a social act originally propounded by Reinach. According to Reinach, an act is social if it “addresses” other persons and if it, for its success, requires them to grasp it. We claim that to (...) explain Walther’s reconfiguration of this concept, one has to look into the use that Husserl makes of it. Husserl adopts this idea from Reinach to tackle a problem that is not discussed by the latter. This is the problem of how communities, by means of social acts, are “constituted” in consciousness. Walther shares with Husserl the concern about the constitution of communities and her radical revision of Reinach’s idea is presented as an attempt to offer an alternative solution to Husserl’s problem. (shrink)

The problem of embodiment and that of the constitution of the lived body are central to the Husserlian phenomenology. Husserl’s endeavor to develop a theory of intersubjectivity and his attempt to avoid the solipsistic conundrum depend on his ability to solve the riddle of embodiment. Nevertheless, Husserl struggled until the late thirties to find an adequate account of the constitution of the body, without much success. In this paper I try to show with the help of Merleau-Ponty, Derrida and Figal (...) that in order to solve the question of embodiment, one has to transcend the boundaries of traditional Husserlian phenomenology and to go beyond the cartesian mind-body dualism, which Husserl more or less adopts. (shrink)

Horkheimer and Adorno viewed the cultural industries of their times as a technological externalization of what Kant names “schematism,” the operation by which imagination unifies perceptual sensibility and conceptual understanding in the temporal flux of consciousness. For them, such an industrialization of imagination was the new barbarity. This chapter argues that the conditions of possibility of such technological exteriorization are the conditions of constitution of all consciousness, namely the existence, beyond the primary and secondary retentions analysed by Husserl, of “tertiary” (...) retentions, that is, of a technical, prosthetic memory. Unwinding the thread of tertiary retentions, the argument flows back from cinema to Husserl’s analysis of the consciousness of time, to the invention of the phonograph, and ultimately to a thorough discussion with Kant regarding the three syntheses of apperception viewed as a true “cinema of consciousness.” In other words, if there is an “industrial schematism,” it is because schemes, as functions of tertiary retentions, are originally industrializable.This text was originally delivered as “L’imagination transcendantale en mille points,” lecture at the high school Henri IV, Paris, 2002. The original translation by George Collins has been revised by the editors. (shrink)

Alfred Schutz elaborated Edmund Husserl’s term of appresentation to a particular theory of appresentational relations comprising “marks”, “signs”, “symbols” and “indications”. Even though Schutz implied the existence of other such relations, it was Husserl who drew a line between appresentation and proof. Following this differentiation, this paper aims to constitutionally analyse the everyday life phenomenon of proof and to describe its structure by consulting William James’ term of “knowledge about” as well as by discussing Schutz’ theory of relevance. With reference (...) to Husserl’s Logical Investigation and by contrasting proof with indication it is shown that proof is appresentationally constituted through reflectively bringing the polythetical elements of clear, distinctive and consistent knowledge about, functioning as interpretational relevance, into the centre of topical awareness. (shrink)

Some Austro-German philosophers considered thoughts to be mind-dependent entities, that is, psychic products. Yet these authors also attrib- uted “objectivity” to thoughts: distinct thinking subjects can have mental acts with “qualitatively” the same content. Moreover, thoughts, once built, can exist beyond the life of their inventor, “embodied” in “documents”. At the beginning of the 20th century, the notion of “psychic product” was at the centre of the debates on psychologism; a hundred years later, it is rather at the margins of (...) the history of philosophy. While Twardowski’s theory of products has been fre- quently studied, those of Stumpf and the late Husserl have been much less dis- cussed. A presentation of the Austro-German debates about psychic products is all the more important since these discussions might be of direct interest for contemporary philosophy of mind and epistemology. This paper examines the Austro-German notion of psychic products in Stumpf, Twardowski, and the later Husserl. (shrink)

Ludwig Binswanger was one of the pioneers in the approach of the psychiatric psychopathology and the phenomenological philosophy field. A panoramic historiographical review of the author reveals the methodological development of his phenomenological work in three phases of distinct philosophical inspirations. The first one is the Husserlian phase with the application of the concept of intentionality of consciousness; the second one is the Daseinsanalytic of the Heiddeguerian inspiration phase, followed by the last phase, which is the return to Husserlian thought (...) in his late writings. The present study will focus on the analysis of dialogues and the articulations between the phases of Binswanger’s thinking, proposing the hypothesis of a continuous axis in the methodological itinerary of his work, with the objective of creating a scientific epistemological framework for the field of psychiatry. (shrink)

Theodor Adorno’s idea of truth derives in part from his critique of Husserlian phenomenology and Heideggerian ontology. This essay examines three passages from Zur Metakritik der Erkenntnistheorie and Negative Dialektik in which Adorno appears intent on wresting a viable conception of propositional truth from Husserl’s account of categorial intuition and Heidegger’s conception of Being. While agreeing with some of Adorno’s criticisms, I argue that he does not give an adequate account of how predication contributes to cognition. Consequently, he fails to (...) offer the viable conception of propositional truth required for both his critique of Heidegger and his broader idea of truth.L’idée adornienne de la vérité dérive en partie de sa critique de la phénoménologie husserlienne et de l’ontologie heideggérienne. Cet essai examine trois passages de Zur Metakritik der Erkenntnistheorie et Negative Dialektik où Adorno paraît vouloir tirer une conception viable de la vérité propositionnelle de l’explication de l’intuition catégoriale de Husserl et de la conception de l’Être d’Heidegger. Quoiqu’en accord avec certaines des critiques qu’avance Adorno, je maintiens qu’il néglige la manière dont la prédication contribue à la cognition. Par conséquence, sa conception de la vérité propositionnelle n’est pas viable étant donné sa propre critique d’Heidegger ainsi que son idée générale de la vérité. (shrink)