Presents a new translation with commentary of chapter IV (“Self-Consciousness”) of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit.

FRANZ BRENTANO has often been considered guilty of the‘psychologism’ which Edmund Husserl, his pupil, attacked. The charge is justified in only a limited sense: Brentano is dealing not with intentional acts but rather with intentional objects. His concern is directed, among other things, to certain logical and ontological problems such as those raised by a Meinong, even if Brentano makes use of psychological insight in order to shed light on them.

To speak of emergence in nature is to test a metaphor. Its content may vary, but the challenge is unchanging: to demonstrate something like a spiritual intent in nature, and a relation of nature to spirit. We could flesh out this metaphor by speaking of “Life” as uniting the two: inanimate nature evolving toward a vitality that is fulfilled in spirit. We might use an even grander concept for this unifying purpose: nature and spirit as two aspects of “God.” Or (...) we might see nature and spirit as metaphors for one another, and unite them in that way: “nature as spirit made visible, spirit as invisible nature.”. (shrink)

JEAN-PAUL SARTRE and Maurice Merleau-Ponty share the composite position of acknowledging the influence of Husserl on their work and of claiming to fulfill Husserl’s intentions, yet of criticizing Husserl for having failed to live up to his own intentions. This is the outer form of their explicit criticism of Husserl. Their work itself constitutes an implicit criticism of Husserl, while it gives us some indication of the direction that Husserl’s continued researches might have taken.

Many of Hegel’s characteristic ideas came from the Enlightenment. We ought therefore to find much instruction from his own critique of that movement. Would such a critique of his be self-defeating? Only in the most superficial sense. Rather, it would be entirely consistent with his notion of self-consciousness : namely, that the self becomes what it is in self-awareness. Hegel’s fulfillment of his indebtedness to the Enlightenment would thus necessarily entail his thoroughgoing and self-conscious critique of it.

A ‘philosophy’ entirely incapable of being talked about is impossible, certainly unthinkable. Yet most philosophies contain one or more dark points about which all discussion is suspended.

Ever since what may be called Descartes’ ‘epistemological turn’ in the treatment of philosophic questions, philosophers who have concerned themselves with the problem of truth have had, as well, the added concern of avoiding the tendency whereby epistemology is reduced to ‘mere psychology’, or else they have themselves fallen prey to that tendency. Brentano thought he had avoided this danger in his major work, Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt. The title itself suggests that he may not have been altogether successful in (...) skirting some psycho-logistic entanglement. (shrink)