In his early essay on transcendence of the ego, Sartre attempted to follow Husserl’s Logical Investigations and to draw the consequences of his phenomenological criticism of subjectivity. Both authors have emphasized the elusiveness of the self as a result of intentionality of consciousness. However, Sartre’s analysis of ego led him quite far from Husserl’s philosophical project, insofar as it was somehow already raising the question about the moral nature of the self, and was thus establishing the basis of the conception (...) of moral consciousness that has been displayed later in Being and Nothingness. This article stresses the importance of such a turn in Sartre’s philosophy, which reorients him from a strict description of consciousness toward a moral assessment of the structure of the self. (shrink)

This article focuses on the analysis of the highly problematic relationship between Psychology and Phenomenology in Husserl’s Crisis of European Sciences, in order to show that this last writing allows us to reconsider the criticisms addressed to descriptive psychology since the first breakthrough of phenomenology. Husserl not only tries to bring psychology back into phenomenological field by describing it as a privileged “way to reduction”, but he more fundamentally shows that the closest examination of the crisis-structure of psychology is essential (...) to the understanding of subjectivity. The psychological dimension of subjectivity is neither a mere difficulty of transcendental philosophy, nor an accident in the history of subjectivity, but it discloses the problem upon which lays the transcendental meaning of subjectivity. According to this point of view, Psychology has to deliver its fullness of content and its empirical richness to subjectivity, and so to give phenomenology back its descriptive dimension. (shrink)

According to Jacques Derrida, the tradition of metaphysics is dominated by a basic distinction between presence and absence that plays a fundamental role in Husserl’s theory of meaning and contaminates the core of his phenomenological project. If Husserl’s distinction between indication and expression in the 1st Logical Investigation is credited for opening a ‘phenomenological breakthrough’, his account of the entwinement between the indicative and expressive functions of linguistic signs is accused of restoring and maintaining the metaphysical primacy of presence. In (...) the last chapters of Voice and Phenomenon, Derrida focuses especially on the cases of indexical or ‘essentially occasional’ expressions, whose concrete meaning is a function of the occasion of their use and which rely on the indicative function of meaning. According to Derrida’s reading, Husserl holds that such indexical meanings like ‘I’, ‘here’ or ‘now’, are necessarily always fulfilled and cannot lack of intuitive fulfilment. Consequently Derrida takes Husserl’s account of the meaning of ‘I’ as an obvious symptom of his inability to move away from the myth of pure expressivity, bringing phenomenology back into the history of metaphysics. Husserl would have failed to acknowledge that indexical meanings, like ideal or objective meanings, can remain unfulfilled and deprived of intuition. This article demonstrates that Derrida’s critique misses the most important point in Husserl’s analysis of the meaning of ‘I’, and argues that indexical or subjective expressions are somehow insensitive to the prospect of intuitive presencing and fulfilment. (shrink)

The purpose of this book is to investigate the roots of phenomenology and to analyse, from a historical and systematic point of view, the reasons that enabled Husserl to set down in his Logical Investigations the conditions of a strictly descriptive philosophy. The ‘breakthrough’ of phenomenology was made possible by Husserl’s investigations on the specificity of logical forms, and was grounded upon his ability to establish in the Logical Investigations a descriptive distinction between sensitive and categorial forms. Such distinction allows (...) Husserl to account for the possibility of a certain kind of adequacy between speech and perception that is necessarily involved in phenomenological description. Indeed, as a descriptive activity, phenomenology entails the opposition between two fundamentally different modalities of intentionality that both take part in description: intuition on the one hand and signification on the other. By making the adequacy between signification and intuition possible, ‘categorial intuition’ not only sheds new light on the relations between thought and perception, or between seeing and thinking, it also legitimates phenomenological description as a philosophical method. This book proposes a new and revisited reading of the Logical Investigations by examining Husserl’s reform of the theory of categories and its relation to the phenomenological method of description. (shrink)

Les remarques qui vont suivre n?ont pas pour objectif de dire positive­ment ce qu? est l?intentionnalité, et nous voudrions seulement, de façon plus modeste, contribuer à l?examen d?un des problèmes fondamentaux que sou­lève cette notion, en posant la question de savoir ce que l?intentionnalité doit être pour que nous puissions en parler, c?est-à-dire pour qu?un discours descriptif puisse se donner une prise sur elle. Cette question, nous l?emprun­tons de façon un peu détournée à un livre récent de John McDowell, Having (...) the world in view , dans le contexte duquel il nous faut d?abord essayer de la resituer. Dans le dernier texte de cet ouvrage 1 , McDowell commente la lecture que Wilfrid Sellars avait proposée de la Critique de la raison pure , et il revient significativement à cette occasion sur les reproches que lui-même avait adressés à Kant quelques années plus tôt, dans Mind and World . McDowell en vient alors à opposer, sur un modèle qui rappelle très fortement la distinction classique entre oratio recta et oratio obliqua , notre façon habi­tuelle de parler du monde d?un côté, et, de l?autre, une façon proprement philosophique (que McDowell nomme également « transcendantale ») de faire usage du discours pour analyser ce rapport au monde qui se noue dans notre pratique ordinaire du langage. Lorsque nous affirmons quelque chose du monde, que nous discutons de tel ou tel sujet, que nous nous. (shrink)

À l’occasion de la publication en 1939 d’une critique particulièrement virulente du roman de François Mauriac La fin de la nuit, Sartre élabore une théorie de l’usage littéraire des pronoms de la première et de la troisième personne lui permettant de stigmatiser les ambiguïtés inhérentes au style littéraire de Mauriac. Établissant les fondements de son réalisme littéraire, Sartre s’attache à critiquer l’omniscience accordée par Mauriac à son narrateur au nom d’une fidélité d’inspiration phénoménologique à l’expérience de la liberté et à (...) la description minutieuse de la vie de la conscience. Cet article propose une étude des racines philosophiques de la théorie sartrienne de l’usage littéraire légitime de la troisième personne en analysant les raisons pour lesquelles l’opacité de la conscience de soi, bien qu’elle compromette la possibilité de la connaissance de soi, est non seulement inéluctable mais nécessaire à l’expérience de la liberté humaine. On entend ainsi montrer que la cohérence extrêmement forte qui rattache la théorie du roman de Sartre à ses positions philosophiques fondamentales ne justifie pas seulement ses choix littéraires, mais permet d’éclairer la teneur de sa philosophie de l’esprit. (shrink)

Née sous le signe d'une exigence descriptive radicale, la phénoménologie ne pouvait éviter cette confrontation entre langage et perception que toute description met en jeu. Cet article se propose d'examiner les ressources dont disposent les Recherches logiques de Husserl pour répondre aux difficultés que cette tension entre intuition et signification impose à toute phénoménologie. L'analyse de la "grammaire" propre à la description phénoménologique des vécus rend problématique l'opposition entre exprimer et décrire, et elle engage ainsi une réévaluation de la fonction (...) méthodologique de l' expression dans les Recherches . Loin d'être simplement une partie de la théorie husserlienne de la signification, la théorie de l'expression doit nous donner la mesure des possibilités descriptives de la phénoménologie, dans la mesure où c'est à elle qu'il revient de définir l'accès que nous pouvons avoir à nos propres vécus, ainsi que le "format" sous lequel ils pourront seulement être décrits. (shrink)

This chapter looks to a “Husserlian-influenced” phenomenology to augment our understanding of one of the most significant—and open-ended—categories of theatre to emerge in the past century: the so-called Theatre of the Absurd. Here, Jodie McNeilly-Renaudie and Pierre-Jean Renaudie examine Beckett, SamuelEndgame to make an argument that the standing definitions of “absurdityabsurdity—grounded in Martin Esslin’s genesis of the term—are incomplete. The authors here argue that a consideration Husserl, Edmund differentiation between “two possible ways for meaning to be missing” demonstrates that the (...) very essence of theatrical absurdity involves not only a loss of meaning and the distress and fragmentation that such loss invokes, but, crucially, and in equal measure, the experience of such meaninglessness in terms of human endeavour to overcome it. (shrink)

In spite of Brentano’s considerable influence on Husserl’s Logical Investigations, their analysis of intentionality is significatively different regarding some fundamental points, such as the status of reality, the nature of intentional acts, and their relation to the world. The core of the opposition between Brentano and Husserl is to be found in the ontological background of their theories, as a result of which they hold two different approaches of the existential import of intentionality. This paper investigates those differences in order (...) to ask whether a relational understanding of intentionality is likely to give a satisfying account of reality. Both Brentano and Husserl’s analyses provide important clues regarding this issue and stress the main difficulties of the question, even if their theories fail to take into consideration the actual insertion of intentional acts within the world. (shrink)

Although Husserl is known for having developed a substantial theory of subjectivity across his transcendental phenomenology, he explicitly and purposefully left aside the question of the subject in his early groundwork, the Logical Investigations. This article investigates the reasons for this philosophical decision and claims that the theory of indexical meanings developed in the first and sixth Logical Investigations provides a sophisticated analysis of the first-person pronoun that legitimates Husserl’s choice: in the absence of a fully-fledged concept of subjectivity in (...) Husserl’s early works, the theory of “occasional expressions” addresses the question of the subject by examining the phenomenological conditions of one’s ability to meaningfully make use of the pronoun “I”. The article argues against Derrida’s reading of the first Logical Investigation that the expression of the first-person is somehow insensitive to the prospect of intuitive presencing and epistemic fulfilment. (shrink)