This book presents the major philosophical doctrines of phenomenology in a clear, lively style with an abundance of examples. The book examines such phenomena as perception, pictures, imagination, memory, language, and reference, and shows how human thinking arises from experience. It also studies personal identity as established through time and discusses the nature of philosophy. In addition to providing a new interpretation of the correspondence theory of truth, the author also explains how phenomenology differs from both modern and postmodern forms (...) of thinking. (shrink)
In tracing the formation of Husserl's concept of constitution, we hope to further the understanding of what he considers a philosophical explanation. ...
In this book, Robert Sokolowski argues that being a person means to be involved with truth. He shows that human reason is established by syntactic composition in language, pictures, and actions and that we understand things when they are presented to us through syntax. Sokolowski highlights the role of the spoken word in human reason and examines the bodily and neurological basis for human experience. Drawing on Husserl and Aristotle, as well as Aquinas and Henry James, Sokolowski here employs phenomenology (...) in a highly original way in order to clarify what we are as human agents. (shrink)
In this essay, we will discuss what Husserl mean when he says that immanent objects are “constituted” by inner temporality. Our discussion will amount to a study of how sensations and intentions come to be in out subjectivity, and how we are conscious of them; Husserl’s opinion on these points will be taken from his Lectures on the Phenomenology of Inner Time Consciousness.
The author considers the phenomenon of honor by examining Aristotle’s description of it and its role in ethical and political life. His study of honor leads him to two related phenomena, anger and belittlement or contempt ; examining them helps him define honor more precisely. With his examination of honor the author shows how densely interwoven Aristotle’s ethical theory is; he illuminates such diverse things as the human good, political life and friendship, virtue, vice, incontinence, flattery, wealth and pleasure; he (...) shows how the metaphysical principles of dunamis and energeia are at work in human affairs; he treats the passion of anger as well as the moral attitude of contempt that provokes it, and he situates both within the study of rhetoric. (shrink)
Husserl’s Idea of Phenomenology is his first systematic attempt to show how phenomenology differs from natural science and in particular psychology. He does this by the phenomenological reduction. One of his achievements is to show that the formal structures of intentionality are more akin to logic than to psychology. I claim that Husserl’s argument can be made more intuitive if we consider phenomenology to be the study of truth rather than knowledge, and if we see the reduction as primarily a (...) modification in our vocabulary and discourse and not as simply a change in attitude. I briefly compare Husserl’s concept of philosophy with those of Plato and Kant. (shrink)
A fruitful way to approach The Idea of Phenomenology is through Husserl’s claim that consciousness is not a bag, box, or any other kind of container. The bag conception, which dominated much of modern philosophy, is rooted in the idea that philosophy is restricted to investigating only what is really immanent to consciousness, such as acts and sensory contents. On this view, what Husserl called “the riddle of transcendence” can never be solved. The phenomenological reduction, as Husserl develops it in (...) The Idea of Phenomenology, opened up a new and broader sense of immanence that embraces the transcendent, making it possible both to solve the riddle and to escape the bag conception once and for all. The essay will discuss ways in which this new conception of immanence is tied to the key Husserlian themes of appearance, phenomenon, essence, seeing or intuiting, and constitution. (shrink)
A plurality of axiomatic systems can be interpreted as referring to one and the same mathematical object. In this paper we examine the relationship between axiomatic systems and their models, the relationships among the various axiomatic systems that refer to the same model, and the role of an intelligent user of an axiomatic system. We ask whether these relationships and this role can themselves be formalized.
IN THIS ESSAY, WE WILL USE ARISTOTLE to bring out some important features of friendship and of moral action in general; we will show that friendship is the highest kind of moral excellence. We will then make use of phenomenology to determine the kinds of intelligence that provide the substance of both moral conduct and friendship. Moral action and friendship are defined by special kinds of rational form, and it will be our goal to describe these forms.
Distinctions are set in obscurity and imagination. Distinctions are not made anywhere and anytime, nor are they made in no place and at no time; they are made in a situation in which they are called for. Distinctions push against an obscurity that needs the distinction in question. In the story about Jack and the doctor, the obscurity against which the distinction is made is included as part of the story; in the quotation from Chaucer the obscurity that provides the (...) setting for the distinction is not mentioned—although you would find it if you were to read the Wife of Bath’s tale—but it is easy for us to imagine a setting in which the distinction between counseling and commandment ought to be made. When we entertain a distinction, such as "counseling is not commandment," "ignorance is not negligence," or "medical data is not medical care," we always experience or imagine an obscurity against which the distinction arises. When we think philosophically about executing distinctions, we must pay attention to the obscurity that lets the distinction occur. (shrink)
This is an intelligent and useful collection of works by Husserl. The editors have assembled twenty-one short works; some appeared first as essays, some are manuscripts, some are letters, some are extracts from larger works. Most important, they cover a wide range of topics and thus make up a rather colorful collection. Five are brief "introductions" to phenomenology: Husserl's inaugural lecture at Freiburg ; his introduction to the English edition of Ideas ; his Encyclopedia Britannica article ; his summary of (...) his London lectures ; and his summary of the Paris lectures. Another group is made up of papers concerning logic and mathematics: an early essay on the concept of number ; the very important essay "Psychological Studies for Elementary Logic" which contains some of the central ideas later found in Logical Investigations; a critique of psychologism entitled "On the Psychological Grounding of Logic" ; and a book review in which Husserl responds to a critic of the Logical Investigations. The issue of phenomenology as a science is developed in two works, the essay "Philosophy as Rigorous Science", in which Husserl criticized Dilthey; and an ensuing exchange of three letters between Dilthey and Husserl. Perhaps the most interesting part of the volume is made up of a series of studies of space and time. Two are manuscript essays ; one is "The Origin of Geometry" ; one is a selection from the lectures on internal time consciousness ; and one is a selection from Experience and Judgment which deals with inner time, perception, imagination, and association. The last section contains three general "humanistic" papers by Husserl, "Phenomenology and Anthropology" ; a paper on cultural and moral renewal ; and one on universal teleology which deals with sexuality. There is also a recollection Husserl wrote of Franz Brentano, letters to Munsterberg and Metzger, and short pieces on Eucken, Reinach, and George Bernard Shaw. (shrink)
QUOTATION is not merely repetition, even though it involves repeating what someone else has said. Quotation is repeating something as having been stated by another. The difference is one of presentational or intentional form. There may be no difference in the words being repeated, but they are repeated differently: it is as though we no longer saw an object directly but now only in a mirror.
The achievement of letting things appear takes place in different ways. It occurs as perceiving and as picturing, as remembering and as imagining, as naming and as articulating, as registering what is before us and as reporting what is absent. These are all forms of the "other illumination" which makes being in the light desirable for us. They are achievements or activities, what Aristotle called energeiai. They are not simply organic tensions or processes that occur in us, like pains, the (...) circulation of the blood, or electrical discharges in the nervous system. They are disclosures; they let things appear. Things could not appear unless we or someone like us permitted them to appear by serving as the datives of their manifestation; we serve in this capacity by our various activities of disclosure. (shrink)
This volume of fifteen essays plus an introduction and preface is the outcome of a conference organized by Dominik Perler at Basel in June 1999. The topic is obviously interesting and important. Intentionality has been the hallmark issue of phenomenology for over a century, and it is common knowledge that the name and concept were introduced by Franz Brentano, who said he was reviving a medieval idea that had deeper roots in antiquity. The topic has also entered into analytic philosophy (...) through the problem of representationalism, and at least some thinkers in that tradition, such as Searle and Chisholm, have formulated this problem as one of intentionality. It becomes incumbent on scholars to inquire how the modern issues of intentionality and representationalism are both similar to and different from their formulations in antiquity and the middle ages. The conference and the book have brought together some prominent authorities who can respond to these questions. (shrink)
For all these reasons, it is helpful to have a volume such as the one under review, which gives the historical and textual background for Crisis. Ably edited by Reinhold N. Smid, who has been associated with the Husserl Archives at Cologne for many years, the volume contains papers from the period 1934-37, just before Husserl's death in 1938. Crisis itself was published in its present form only posthumously in 1954, but its first two parts appeared in the journal Philosophia, (...) published in Belgrade, in 1936. The idea of composing this work came to Husserl after he gave two lectures in Prague on 14-15 November 1935. The lectures provided the nucleus for Crisis, and the typescript for them is published in thirty-three pages of this volume. It is interesting to note that the title for the typescript is "Psychology in the Crisis of European Science." Although psychology is extensively treated in Crisis, the issue of that science is not one of the themes that commentators usually discuss. It is helpful to see how central psychology was in Husserl's later thought. The point is that he must distinguish the philosophical study of man from the empirical psychological study if he is to avoid taking philosophy as merely a partial science and if he is not to betray the special mode of being of transcendental subjectivity. The study of man must not be carried out according to the "objectivist" methods of modern science. (shrink)
The title of this book speaks of the "entanglements" in Wittgenstein's thought. The author claims that most of Wittgenstein's later philosophical criticisms are really criticisms not of philosophical discourse as such but only of his own earlier conception of philosophy as expressed in the Tractatus. In particular she claims that the classical Kantian transcendental philosophy escapes Wittgensteinian criticism; indeed Wittgenstein's own early philosophy, far from being a kind of transcendental philosophy, as Stenius and others have argued, would fall into what (...) Kant would consider a precritical and dogmatic kind of thinking. Wittgenstein's early thought does not, she claims, question the possibility of our thoughts' being related truly to the objective world. It merely accepts a relationship between logic and being. (shrink)
FERDINAND DE SAUSSURE says that a word is composed of two parts, a sound-image and a concept: "The linguistic sign unites not a thing and a name, but a concept and an acoustic image." The sound-image signifies the concept: the sound-image is the signifier, the concept is the signified. De Saussure is only one of a large company of thinkers who describe words in this way. Most philosophical and semiotic analyses of words claim that words have two components, a dimension (...) of sounds and a dimension of concepts. (shrink)
