This chapter offers a reassessment of the relationship between Kant, the Kantian tradition, and phenomenology, here focusing mainly on Husserl and Heidegger. Part of this reassessment concerns those philosophers who, during the lives of Husserl and Heidegger, sought to defend an updated version of Kant’s philosophy, the neo-Kantians. The chapter shows where the phenomenologists were able to benefit from some of the insights on the part of Kant and the neo-Kantians, but also clearly points to the differences. The aim of (...) this chapter is to offer a fair evaluation of the relation of the main phenomenologists to Kant and to what was at the time the most powerful philosophical movement in Europe. (shrink)

Even a cursory glance in Die Bernauer Manuskripte über das Zeitbewusstsein makes it evident that one of Husserl’s major concerns in his 1917-18 reflections on time-consciousness was how to account for the constitution of time without giving rise to an infinite regress. Not only does Husserl constantly refer to this problem in Husserliana XXXIII – as he characteristically writes at one point “Überall drohen, scheint es, unendliche Regresse” – but he also takes care to distinguish between several different regresses. One (...) of the more troubling ones is the one that might be called the regress of foundation. It concerns the problem of how to avoid always having to presuppose yet another underlying constituting consciousness. As we will soon see, the attempt to avoid this specific regress is closely linked to the problem of how to come up with a satisfactory account of self-awareness. That Husserl himself was well aware of this link can be inferred from some of his reflections in the beginning of Husserliana XXXIII. As he writes at one point, consciousness exists, it exists as a stream, and it appears to itself as a stream. But how the stream of consciousness is capable of being conscious of itself, how it is possible and comprehensible that the very being of the stream is a form of self-consciousness, is the enduring problem of the entire treatise. In this article, I wish to take a closer look at some of Husserl’s attempts in the Bernau Manuscripts to account for time-consciousness without giving rise to an infinite regress. (shrink)

A point made repeatedly over the last few years is that the Locked-in Syndrome offers unique real-life material for revisiting and challenging certain ingrained philosophical assumptions about the nature of personhood and personal identity. Indeed, the claim has been made that a closer study of LIS will call into question some of the traditional conceptions of personhood that primarily highlight the significance of consciousness, self-consciousness and autonomy and suggest the need for a more interpersonal account of the person. I am (...) skeptical about these claims and will in the following argue that the theoretical relevance of LIS for an understanding of selfhood and personhood has been exaggerated. (shrink)

La présente étude vise à identifier et à clarifier quelques aspects centraux de la critique de la psychologie de Natorp dans la VeRecherche logique de Husserl. Après avoir ramené l’argumentation de Husserl à quatre objections principales, nous montrons qu’elles ont toutes pour enjeu l’idée d’une psychologie empirique de style brentanien. Nous commentons sur cette base deux questions parmi les plus significatives soulevées par la controverse Husserl-Natorp : la nature de la différence entre le psychique et le physique et la possibilité (...) d’objectiver les contenus phénoménaux — en clarifiant en quel sens les deux auteurs y apportent des réponses diamétralement opposées. L’article s’achève par quelques remarques sur les faiblesses de la conception de Natorp.The aim of this essay is to identify and to analyze some key aspects of Husserl’s critique of Natorp’s psychology in the fifth Logical Investigation. After dividing Husserl’s argumentation into four main objections, we show that what is at stake in all of them is the idea of an empirical psychology in Brentano’s style. From that perspective we comment two of the most significant questions raised by the Husserl-Natorp debate : the nature of the difference between psychical and physical, the possibility of objectifying phenomenal contents. We then attempt to clarify in what sense Husserl’s and Natorp’s answers to these two questions are diametrically opposed. We conclude by some remarks on the intrinsic weaknesses of Natorp’s approach. (shrink)

Phenomenology as Qualitative Research: A Critical Analysis of Meaning Attribution has attracted the attention of Max van Manen, who has published a highly critical review article. Anyone reading this article, but unfamiliar with the book, will get a distorted view of what it is about, whom it is addressed to, what it tries to achieve, and how it goes about presenting its arguments. Not mildly distorted, in need of the odd correction here and there, but systematically misrepresented. One problem is (...) that van Manen appears to have an idée fixe which prevents him from recognizing that the book is not about a certain philosophical tradition (known as “phenomenology”), but about a particular type of qualitative research (also known, unfortunately and confusingly, as “phenomenology”). A second idée fixe disposes him to misread an earlier article of mine and (much more seriously) three works by Heidegger. My aim in this article is to describe these two idées fixes, and exhibit their consequences. In doing so, I will examine what van Manen has to say on four crucial topics: meaning, lived experience, empathy, and Heidegger's analysis of boredom in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. (shrink)

In spite of Ernst Cassirer’s criticisms of psychologism throughout Substance and Function, in the final chapter he issues a demand for a “psychology of relations” that can do justice to the subjective dimensions of mathematics and natural science. Although these remarks remain somewhat promissory, the fact that this is how Cassirer chooses to conclude Substance and Function recommends it as a topic worthy of serious consideration. In this paper, I argue that in order to work out the details of Cassirer’s (...) psychology of relations in Substance and Function, we need to situate it within two broader frameworks. First, I position Cassirer’s view in relation to the view of psychology and logic endorsed by his Marburg Neo-Kantian predecessors, Hermann Cohen and Paul Natorp. Second, I augment Cassirer’s early account of the psychology of relations in Substance and Function with the more mature view of psychology that he presents in The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. By placing Cassirer’s account within these contexts, I claim that we gain insight into his psychology of relations, not just as it pertains to mathematics and natural science, but to culture as a whole. Moreover, I maintain that pursuing this strategy helps shed light on one of the most controversial features of his philosophy of mathematics and natural science, viz., his theory of the a priori. (shrink)

(2005). Frameworks & foundations. Angelaki: Vol. 10, continental philosophy and the sciences the german traditionissue editor: damian veal, pp. 201-218.

European Journal of Philosophy, Volume 29, Issue 1, Page 74-89, March 2021.

El objetivo del siguiente artículo consiste en aclarar el rechazo heideggeriano de la idea de reflexión como método del filosofar. La necesidad de tal elucidación radica en lo contraintuitivo de esta tesis y en los problemas interpretativos que esta crítica presenta en Ser y tiempo. Para resolverlos el artículo realiza un breve examen histórico-conceptual de la reflexión mediante el cual se diferencian dos sentidos del concepto: el sentido psicológico y trascendental. Gracias a esta distinción se confía exponer sistemáticamente la doble (...) crítica de Ser y tiempo a este concepto, aclarando así los motivos que articulan el rechazo heideggeriano de la misma idea de reflexión. (shrink)

La idea de que la fenomenología de Husserl representa una suerte de filosofía reflexiva, basada en una metodología que desarrolla la tradición cartesiana, se ha convertido en una creencia ampliamente difundida en la literatura filosófica. Este énfasis puesto por Husserl en la reflexión fue arduamente criticado por Heidegger. Desde entonces resulta frecuente encontrarse con la afirmación de que Husserl y Heidegger desarrollan dos conceptos de fenomenología diferentes, incluso antagónicos. No se trata de seguir alimentando esta discusión historiográfica. Aquí, por una (...) parte, se muestra el complejo proceso de desarrollo de la fenomenología hermenéutica de Heidegger en el transcurso de sus primeras lecciones de Friburgo (1919-1923) y Marburgo (1924-1928) y, por otra, se sopesan algunas de las observaciones críticas de Heidegger a Husserl a la luz de evidencias textuales de la fenomenología husserliana, ignoradas no sólo por Heidegger, sino también por un sorprendente número de reconocidos especialistas en el campo de la filosofía, de las ciencias cognitivas y de la filosofía de la mente. (shrink)

: This article contributes to the contemporary debate regarding the young Heidegger’s method of formal indication. Theodore Kisiel argues that this method constitutes a radical break with Husserl---a rejection of phenomenological reflection that paves the way to the non-reflective approach of the Beiträge. Against this view, Steven Crowell argues that formal indication is continuous with Husserlian phenomenology---a refinement of phenomenological reflection that reveals its existential sources. I evaluate this debate and adduce further considerations in favor of Crowell’s view. To do (...) so, I analyze the young Heidegger’s account of phenomenological communication and argue that it further reflects the continuity that Crowell identifies: as he does with reflection, Heidegger refines Husserl’s account of phenomenological communication and sheds light on its existential sources. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss Eugene Gendlin’s contribution to radically temporal discourse , situating it in relation to Husserl and Heidegger’s analyses of time, and contrasting it with a range of interlinked approaches in philosophy and psychology that draw inspiration from, but fall short in their interpretation of the phenomenological work of Husserl and Heidegger. Gendlin reveals the shortcomings of these approaches with regard to the understanding of the relation between affect, motivation and intention, intersubjectivity, attention , reflective and pre-reflective (...) self-consciousness, the basis of mathematical naturalism and sensori-motor models of behavior. Gendlin traces the weaknesses of these approaches in the above areas to the way these perspectives construe time. (shrink)

This PhD thesis concerns introspective approaches to the study of the mind. Across three standalone papers, I examine the significance of introspective data and advise on appropriate kinds of training for the production of such data. An overview document first introduces major themes, methods and arguments of the thesis. Paper 1 then begins the argumentative work, interrogating the constraining function of introspection in cognitive science. Here, I evaluate “enactivist” claims about the significance of introspection, clarifying central enactivist suggestions to draw (...) out the broader importance of introspection in science and philosophy. Paper 2 then examines the proposed employment of Buddhist meditation practices in the production of rigorous introspective data. I defend such proposals against concerns that meditators yield ungeneralizable data, given the transformative character of these attention-training techniques. I argue that some meditation-trained transformations are actually epistemically-beneficial, undermining popular associations between transformation and “distortion”. Paper 3 then reviews difficulties involved in integrating meditative training into research. I emphasise the importance of specific contextual supports to meditation as critical ingredients of introspective proficiency, showing how difficulties replicating these threaten to limit the scope of meditation’s scientific benefits. I layout methodological responses to this that can maximise meditation’s positive impact going forwards. (shrink)

My discussion will focus on what is arguable the main claim of Being No One: That no such things as selves exist in the world and that nobody ever was or had a self. In discussing to what extent Metzinger can be said to argue convincingly for this claim, I will also comment on his methodological use of pathology and briefly make some remarks vis-à-vis his understanding and criticism of phenomenology.

Contemporary studies of the phenomenon of attention uncritically suppose that the only way to go about observing attention is as a modification of consciousness. Consciousness is taken to be always intentional, i.e., distinguished by reference to an object-whether physical or not-toward which it is directed. Observers of attention therefore assume that attention is an intentional modification of consciousness. Such practices of observation, in virtue of the kinds of practices that they are, take for granted that the fundamental constituents of reality (...) are subjects and objects. Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger discovered that belief in the world as divided into subjects and objects is merely a convenience designed for the purpose of making a certain kind of sense of experience intelligible-a belief that operates as a controlling assumption which forces the world, if it is to be intelligible, to show up under the oppressively confined ontology that was originally introduced merely as an observational convenience. My work contributes to the prevalent literature an examination of these presuppositions by reconsidering what the landscape of attention studies would look like without the importation of the confinement of a world reduced to subjects in interaction with objects. I do this first by returning to the fundamental and yet strangely forgotten insights into the question that Husserl and Heidegger provided. Then I explore through some of the autobiographical work of Virginia Woolf, Simone Weil, and Pascal a pathway by which we might think differently about what it is to pay attention. I conclude that attention might also be understood as a kind of waiting that does not specify an object, but rather a posture, a way of being that necessarily manifests itself prior to any sort of prejudged or anticipated object. The contribution of my work will serve the community of observers of attention by forcing them to explain what it is to pay attention without reliance on the subject-object distinction. (shrink)

In Moran, D. (ed.): Routledge Companion to Twentieth-Century Philosophy. Routledge, 2008.