Husserl, Miscellaneous

Leonard Nelson is known primarily as a critic of epistemology in the Neo-Kantian meaning of the term. The aim of this paper is to investigate the presuppositions and consequences of his critique. I claim that what has rarely been discussed in this context is the problem of the possibility of metaphysics. By the impossibility of epistemology Nelson means the possibility of metaphysical knowledge. I intend to devote this paper to the analysis of this problem in relation to the Neo-Kantian background.

The paper develops the argument presented in my earlier article, Intentional Reference and Its Object in Husserl’s Transcendental Idealism. It contains further considerations on the proper understanding of Husserl’s notion of noema. My aim is not only to present an interpretation of Husserl’s text, but primarily to understand what constitutes an intentional reference of an act of consciousness. I agree with some of Husserl’s claims in Ideas, Book I, that noema, sense and intentional object are basically the same. This standpoint (...) implies, however, a drastic reinterpretation of the notion of an object. I refer to Ingarden’s conception of a purely intentional object to show the difficulties connected with regarding noema as an object separate from consciousness but still existentially dependent on it. Analyzing Husserlian notion of a noematic core I emphasize the relevance of universals for Husserl’s theory of consciousness. (shrink)

Remarks on Barbara Tuchańska’s “Cultural Ontology” , Diametros – An Online Journal of Philosophy, no. 41 , B. Tuchańska, “ Cultural Ontology: the Cultural Constitution of Being ” , Diametros – An Online Journal of Philosophy, no. 42 ).

Cet article vise tout d’abord à manifester la profondeur phénoménologique d’une expérience proustienne, celle des demi-réveils dans l’obscurité, en engageant un dialogue entre l’artiste et le philosophe – Husserl, mais aussi Levinas – autour de la notion de souvenir. Il s’agit de montrer que l’expérience dont il est fait part dans l’œuvre littéraire, inenvisagée par la phénoménologie, vient questionner les descriptions existantes du phénomène de souvenir et exige dès lors de penser le sens de celui-ci à nouveaux frais. Notre propos (...) est le suivant : l’œuvre d’art, en particulier l’œuvre littéraire, doit être un milieu de recherche privilégié pour le phénoménologue. Elle fait renaître les énigmes et, ce faisant, remet la recherche en mouvement, en la forçant à un question­nement plus approfondi. (shrink)

The London and Bauer monograph occupies a central place in the debate concerning the quantum measurement problem. Gavroglu has previously noted the influence of Husserlian phenomenology on London's scientific work. However, he has not explored the full extent of this influence in the monograph itself. I begin this paper by outlining the important role played by the monograph in the debate. In effect, it acted as a kind of 'lens' through which the standard, or Copenhagen, 'solution' to the measurement problem (...) came to be perceived and, as such, it was robustly criticized, most notably by Putnam and Shimony. I then spell out the Husserlian understanding of consciousness in order to illuminate the traces of this understanding within the London and Bauer text. This, in turn, yields a new perspective on this 'solution' to the measurement problem, one that I believe has not been articulated before and, furthermore, which is immune to the criticisms of Putnam and Shimony. (shrink)

The article approaches the work of Van Breda and De Waelhens with respect to the question of how philosophical thought relates to the problems arising in natural life. Van Breda’s main contribution to philosophy is related to the exceptional natural skills he showed in his rescuing of E. Husserl’s Nachlass and his founding of the Husserl Archives in Leuven. It is lesser known that he also brought E. Husserrs widow to Leuven and rescued her from deportation by the German occupation (...) of Belgium during World War II. Extensive excerpts from Malvine Husserl’s private correspondence demonstrate her admiration for and gratitude towards Van Breda. This correspondence also gives us a good idea of her daily life during the seven years that she spent in Leuven, her strong character, and the reasons behind her conversion to Catholicism. Less anchored in natural life than Van Breda, De Waelhens nevertheless claimed that philosophy’s main task is to shed light on the problems of bodily human existence in its social dimensions and its relation to a linguistically-structured world. This led De Waelhens into a study first of Heidegger, then to Merleau-Ponty, Hegel and Marx and, finally, to psychoanalysis. But his entire work remained dedicated to a reflection on the relation between “philosophy and natural experiences‘. He understood this relation in strongly dialectical terms: philosophy must give natural life a better understanding of itself in order to allow it to play the role of a critical counter-balance to philosophical speculation. The article concludes with some of the author’s personal reflections on what philosophy can and cannot do in order to improve natural human life. (shrink)

In this paper the complex phenomenon of pain is discussed and analysed along different theoretical paths: cognitivism, hermeneutics, phenomenology. The neuro-cognitive approach is exemplified through Paul and Patricia Churchland’s writings; then H.-G. Gadamer’s hermeneutical approach is evaluated. While apparently opposite, they share a common assumption, namely that the body is basically to be conceived of as not really different from the Cartesian Res extensa. Some problems thus arise: in particular, the aspect of reflexivity implied in any experience of pain is (...) overlooked. Accordingly, an adequate approach to feeling pain must take the phenomenological path. This means to discuss Husserl’s but also Scheler’s and Heidegger’s contributions, in order to bring to the fore the complexity of the phenomenon of pain, which shows a particular and paradoxical structure: exposing the subject feeling pain to its own internal exteriority. (shrink)

Ïntroductory remarks to the Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology Special Issue "Phenomenology and the Idea of Europe".

In the second edition of the Logische Untersuchungen Husserl claims to have investigated higher order objects and Gestalt qualities before anyone else in the School of Brentano. Indeed, in the Philosophie der Arithmetik we find a discussion of figural moments and fusion that could lend some support to such a claim. By considering the concepts of Gestalt and Verschmelzung in their relevant historical context, the latter especially in connection to Stumpf, we find that Husserl indeed gave a quite original and (...) interesting account of such higher order phenomena. (shrink)

I argue that Husserl’s concept of position-taking, Stellungnahme, is adequate to understand the idea of second nature as an issue of philosophical anthropology. I claim that the methodological focus must be the living subject that acts and lives among others, and that the notion of second nature must respond to precisely this fundamental active character of subjectivity. The appropriate concept should satisfy two additional desiderata. First, it should be able to develop alongside the biological, psychological, and social individual development. Second, (...) it should be able to underlie the vast diversity of human beings within and across communities. As possible candidates, I contrast position-taking with two types of habit-like concepts: instinct and habitus, on the one hand, and customary habits, on the other. I argue that position-taking represents the active aspect of the subject while the habit-like concepts are passive. A subject’s position-takings and ensuing comportments are tied together by motivations, which evince a certain consistency, and for this reason are expression of the subject’s identity. I conclude by nuancing the relation between Stellungnahme and passivity. Passivity is deemed necessary to action but subservient to it; position-taking is thought to be prior to passivity. (shrink)

Relation of science and religion has been at the centre of many discourses in the past as well as in the recent times. Some of these were meant to refute religious claims in the light of scientific truths about the world, while others took the pain of explaining the essential compatibility between the two. The former subjects religion to the scrutiny of science while the latter reads science in religion or religion in science.Both these attempts are ill-conceived as they conflate (...) the logic of one with the other.In what follows, we attempt to understand the nature of the interaction of these two, science and religion, from a phenomenological perspective. In order to do that, we have to look into the ‘life-world’ (Lebenswelt) that engenders science and houses religious experiences. (shrink)

Hume propounds the aporetic principle of correspondence betwen impres-sions and ideas, in order to solve the problem of the genesis of the ideas. This principle, which lacks universal validity, reduces the idea to image and deprives it of universality. In this way is postulated a rigorous and uni-versal nominalism, which converts the ideas into non referential unities the same as the Urimpressions (Husserl) and sets aside the possibility of metaphysics.

A common approach to movement creation amongst contemporary choreographers involves dancers being asked to create movement in response to instructions that require them to form mental images, and then to make decisions in response to the internal feedback loops these images generate. The formation of these images is also facilitated in many cases by the use of digital technologies, via data representation and visualization. This article explores connections between technology, choreographic praxis, cognitive science and related topics in the philosophy of (...) perception, all of which concern the content of mental imagery, and the ways in which it is formed. In particular, we focus on how choreographers have exploited dancers’ innate ability to form kinesthetic images, which are derived from the qualitative dynamics of both actual and imagined bodily movement. We also propose that such images are historically classifiable in terms of their intrinsic geometries. (shrink)

This paper is a reflection on the boundaries of academic discourse as I came to be acutely aware of them while attempting to teach a graduate seminar in qualitative research methods. The purpose of the readings in Husserl and Schutz and the writing exercises was to assist students trained in quantitative methods and steeped in positivistic assumptions about research to write phenomenological descriptions of lived experience. Paul could not write the assigned papers due to a diagnosed writing disability but he (...) did submit fictional stories and sketches which beautifully illustrated the concepts of Husserl and Schutz. Paul's disability presented a natural bracketing experiment which brought the positivistic assumptions surrounding academic research and writing to the forefront. I engaged in verbal dialogues with Paul, in which he discussed the philosophical ideas. My work with Paul highlighted the extent to which the academic lifeworld marginalizes those who seek to write from the heart, disguising even the work of those philosophers who wish to uncover direct experiences.The crisis of the sciences is the loss of meaning for life. (Husserl, 1970: 5). (shrink)

Husserl and Sartre’s analyses of mental imagery and some of the latest cognitive research on vision provide a framework for understanding a number of films by Hitchcock (Psycho and Rear Window) and Buñuel (Un Chien Andalou), films which similarly probe the subtleties and uses of mental imagery. One of the many ways to enjoy these films is to see them as explorations of visual phenomenology; they allow us to enact, as well as reflect upon, mental images as part of the (...) film experience.<br><br><br><br><br><br>. (shrink)

This essay is concerned with an initial mapping out of a model of intersubjectivity that, viewed within the context of education, breaks with the hegemonic dialogics of current pedagogies. Intent on rethinking the (so-called)problem of solipsism for phenomenology in terms of a pedagogy that situates itself within solitude and the alterity of self and other, Maurice Blanchot and Emmanuel Levinas will here speak as the voices of this other mode of teaching. Beginning with the problematization of intersubjectivity in romantic aesthetics (...) and hermeneutics, I introduce the concept of irony as a crucial element in the conceptualization of this other pedagogical model, one that requires, initially, a discussion of Husserl''s response to the charge of solipsism in the 5th Cartesian Meditation. As a starting point I introduce his symmetrical notion of bodily pairing into a consideration of rhetoric, understood here as an integral part of teaching, thus forging links with phenomenology via the work of Merleau-Ponty. The above provides a context for an extended discussion of pedagogy as it appears in the work of Blanchot and Levinas. Although similar in many respects, on closer inspection it will emerge that important differences are evident in the dissymmetrical and asymmetrical models suggested by the two thinkers respectively. These differences, I will argue, begin to open up a critical perspective on Levinas'' height model of teaching in the name of the more radical configuration of phenomenology and rhetoric to be found in Blanchot. (shrink)

Ce livre apporte un nouvel eclairage sur ce qu'il conviendrait d'appeler les commencements de la phenomenologie en France et donc, plus particulierement, sur la ...

In his Ideas II , Husserl interprets the apprehension of cultural objects by comparing it to that of the human “flesh“ and “spirit.“ Such objects are not just “bodies“ ( Körper ) to which a sense is exteriorly added, but instead they are, similarly to human bodies ( Leiber ), entirely “animated“ by a cultural meaning. In fact, this is not just an analogy for Husserl, since, in several of his later notations, he comes to show that cultural objects are (...) actually understood as such by means of an apperception employing empathy, as sediments of subjective acts and performances. Understood as cultural objects, images also point towards a previous subjective doing, and it is precisely by grasping this “pointing“ that we comprehend them in their proper significance as artifacts. In my paper, I would like to explore the nature and forms of this empathic “pointing,“ focusing on the possible use of Husserl's conception for an interpretation of non-figurative art. (shrink)

In Husserls Auseinandersetzung mit dem Buddhismus in der Rezension ,,Über die Reden Gotamo Buddhas (1925) sowie in dem Manuskript ,,Sokrates-Buddha (1926) lassen sich wesentliche Eigenarten feststellen, die ihn von anderen wichtigen abendländischen Denkern der Gegenwart unterscheiden. Zwar verfügte Husserl sicher über eine eingeschränkte Kenntnis des Buddhismus und steht in dieser Hinsicht wahrscheinlich hinter Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Bergson, Russell, Jaspers, Heidegger und Scheler zurück, welche dem orientalischen Denken durchaus näher stehen. Dennoch zeugt Husserls Bemühen umso mehr von einer respektvollen Haltung gegenüber dem (...) buddhistischen Denken, als seine Untersuchung frei vom Hochmut der wissenschaftlichen Vernunft bleibt und ganz von dem echten Willen zu einem besseren Verständnis der fremden Tradition getragen ist. (shrink)

A particular subject-matter in Franz Brentano's philosophy is his approach to the history of philosophy. I shall consider the evolution of his concept of the history of philosophy, the sources of this concept, and, finally, its relationship to Edmund Husserl's understanding of the history of philosophy. Brentano's scheme of the four phases of the history of philosophy can serve as a principle of evaluation of what comes after Brentano's era in the history of philosophy.

In this article, an analysis is given of some aspects of Husserl's semiotics. The article consists of three parts, corresponding to the main periods in Husserl's thought. In the first period, signs primarily function as substitutes, based on a „Zuordnung” between sign and referent. For mathematics, this correspondence has the character of mirroring (a conception which can also be found in Hilbert). In the second period, the idea of a sign is more complex. There are two kinds of signs, the (...) idea of a sign as a substitute moves to the background and its epistemological function is connected with intentionality and ideality without communication being involved. This gives rise to several problems. In the third period of his thought, Husserl relates ideality to the constitutive activity of consciousness (in intersubjectivity). The problems mentioned earlier seem to remain. (shrink)