Husserl and Other Philosophers

Both Schelling and Husserl reveal that any attempt to ground objective cognition in subjectivity would encounter the problem of constitution of original experience. They also endorse similar solutions to this very problem. The constitution of original experience is depicted as passive synthesis, i. e., it is the pre-conscious activity of the original ‘I’ (Ur-Ich). However, unlike Schelling’s interpretation of passive synthesis, understood as a theory of quasi-conscious willing (Wollen), Husserl relocates passive synthesis in the transition from instinct to habituality. The (...) constitution of original experience, as well as the activity of the original ‘I’, uncovers the dynamic structure of Being. Owing to this, transcendental philosophy must become a transcendental ontology. (shrink)

Cognitive psychology is one of the most significant areas of modern science related to the creation of artificial intelligence. The multifactorial conditionality of cognition is captured in variety of philosophical concepts, some of which can have applied meaning, including for cognitive psychology. The article considers two approaches that address diametrically opposite factors affecting cognitive activity. On the one hand, the diversity of cognition phenomena – from simple to the most complex – depends on the psycho-physiological processes associated ultimately with physical (...) energy. E. Mach based his concept on the ontology of psychophysiological parallelism. Back in the early 20th century, he designed the possibility of technical embodying of the results of his research on various phenomena and mechanisms of human cognitive activity. On the other hand, in the first decades of the 20th century, Husserl claims to create his own methodology for psychological science, which simultaneously appears as the theoretical level of this field of science due to the fact that it explores the essence of the entire variety of cognitive phenomena, such as consciousness in its various variations, mental states, values and logical structure. Ideas/meanings peculiar only to human cognition acquire the character of “ideal objectivity” through written language. Written language, according to Husserl, is a way of virtual timeless storage and increment of ideas and meanings. At the same time, it can also become a means of their material, including technical, implementation. Mach in his methodology focuses on the physical, physiological, and biological aspects of the process of cognition; Husserl focused on existential and humanitarian factors that give cognitive activity a proper human character. This is the alternative of these approaches, which does not exclude the possibility of their mutual complementarity. (shrink)

This paper proposes a parallel between the theories of pictorial representation put forward by Edmund Husserl and Richard Wollheim. By doing so, it aims to facilitate a dialogue that can provide some new elements for an appropriate understanding of threefold seeing-in. The first section offers a comprehensive interpretation of Husserl’s theory of image-consciousness. This experience is considered a threefold perceptual phantasy, different from perception and sign-consciousness. The second section presents a review of Wollheim’s theory of twofold seeing-in and addresses a (...) possible ambiguity in his notion of thing represented. Finally, the third section discusses two topics that result from this parallel: first, the characteristics of the configurational and recognitional folds in a seeing-in experience, and second, the possibility of their ‘mixture’ with phantasy. As a result, I propose a different account of threefold seeing-in: I suggest that the configurational and the recognitional folds should be considered aspects or intentions of seeing-in, and that the configurational aspect corresponds to the intention to the image-object. (shrink)

In this essay, we explore the possibility to find affinities, parallelisms and analogue functions in some aspects of the philosophies of Edmund Husserl and Arthur Schopenhauer. In order to achieve this, we begin taking into consideration the question about Husserl’s relation with Schopenhauer’s works by the means of some biographical facts on the first one; then we analyze the similarities between the concept of “better consciousness” and the liberation from the principle of sufficient reason through “aesthetic contemplation” in the philosophy (...) of Schopenhauer, and Husserlian “phenomenological attitude” and “ἐποχή”. Finally, we show the differences between both authors concerning the ultimate goal pursued with such concepts. (shrink)

This dissertation engages critically with the metaphysical implications of the respective transcendentalisms of Husserl, Deleuze, and Kant in an attempt to disclose their largely untapped resources for a renewed consideration of the ability of science to grasp reality as it is in-itself. Chapter 1 examines the metaphysical implications of Husserl’s critique of natural scientific objectivity in his later transcendental philosophy in connection to his early formulations of phenomenological objectivity around the axis of the distinction between metaphysics as the science of (...) real Being and formal ontology as the science of Being in the most universal sense. I argue that Husserl’s phenomenological metaphysics constitutes a framework in which the ideal Being of the transcendental dimension of experience operates as the condition for the possibility of natural scientific objectivity. Chapter 2 scrutinizes Deleuze’s characterization of intensity as a transcendental concept rather than a scientific one against the background of his metaphysics of difference and his critique of the shortcomings of Kant’s transcendental idealism for addressing the transcendental conditions for the genesis of real experience. Through a reading of Deleuze’s metaphysics of difference and intensity in connection to his confinement of the creative productivity of scientific thought to a plane of reference, I argue that the creativity apropos to the scientific engagement with material reality necessitates that such creativity is conditioned by the same transcendental considerations operative in a metaphysics of difference at a broad scale. Against the backdrop of Husserl’s and Deleuze’s respective criticisms of the inadequacy of Kant’s transcendental idealism for articulating the material component of experience, Chapter 3 studies Kant’s later iv conception of ether as the simultaneously empirical and transcendental condition for the possibility and unity of experience. Through an examination of Kant’s renewed understanding of materiality as the necessary and sufficient condition for scientific objectivity in connection with the problematic objectivity of the transcendental ideas created by pure reason in Kant’s Critical philosophy, I suggest that Kant’s later articulation of materiality on transcendental grounds simultaneously addresses the objectivity and the creativity pertinent to the encounter of scientific Thought with material/physical reality. (shrink)

The transcendental turn of Husserl's phenomenology has challenged philosophers and scholars from the beginning. This volume inquires into the profound meaning of this turn by contrasting its Kantian and its phenomenological versions. Examining controversies surrounding subjectivity, idealism, aesthetics, logic, the foundation of sciences, and practical philosophy, the chapters provide a helpful guide for facing current debates.

The paper deals with the notion of synthesis and transcendental ego in Kant and Husserl. It will argue that the actual difference between Kant and Husserl’s notion of transcendental ego can be understood through their conception of time. Kant accepts transcendental ego as the kind of logical necessity for synthesizing the various temporal units which provides unity to the consciousness. However, Husserl discards the necessity of transcendental ego by giving the phenomenological interpretation of time as internal time consciousness. The interpretation (...) of time as the flow of protention and retention synthesizes the time without invoking the necessity of Kantian transcendental ego outside the flow. Husserl’s analysis of internal time consciousness will also help us in understanding the methodological differences between Kant’s transcendental philosophy and phenomenology. (shrink)

In this work, I discuss the role of Husserl’s phenomenology in Paolo Parrini’s positive philosophy. In the first section, I highlight the presence of both empiricist and constructivist elements in Parrini’s anti-foundationalist and anti-absolutist conception of knowledge. In the second section, I stress Parrini’s acknowledgement of the crucial role of phenomenology in investigating the empirical basis of knowledge, thanks to its analysis of the relationship between form and matter of cognition. In the third section, I point out some lines of (...) development of the phenomenological form of empirical realism as revealed in Parrini’s reflection, through a comparison of Husserl’s genetic phenomenology, Mary Hesse’s network model and the tradition of neutral monism. (shrink)

In the present essay, I will compare Hegel’s and Husserl’s conceptions of the history of philosophy. I will show how Hegel and Husserl recast Kant’s idea of a philosophizing history of philosophy in two different ways. Both Hegel and Husserl share the conviction that reason unfolds itself in history. Nonetheless, whereas Hegel identifies the history of philosophy with the contingent manifestation of the self-actualization of the Idea, Husserl develops a critical history of ideas. On the one hand, Hegel conceives of (...) the history of philosophy as a complex whole and each determinate philosophy as interpreting a specific articulation of the logical deduction of thought-determinations. On the other hand, perhaps influenced by Windelband, Husserl appropriates the Kantian thesis according to which the objects of the history of reason represent specific constellations of problems. (shrink)

One reason for the renewed interest in Austrian philosophy, and especially in the work of Brentano and his followers, turns on the fact that analytic philosophers have become once again interested in the traditional problems of metaphysics. It was Brentano, Husserl, and the philosophers and psychologists whom they influenced, who drew attention to the thorny problem of intentionality, the problem of giving an account of the relation between acts and objects or, more generally, between the psychological environments of cognitive subjects (...) and the different sorts of external (physical, geographical, social) environments which they inhabit. The present essay addresses this environmental version of the problem of intentionality. It draws not only on the work of Husserl and Scheler but also on the Gestalt psychological writings of Kurt Koffka and Kurt Lewin. It considers the influential subjective idealist theory of animal environments put forward by J. von Uexküll and contrasts this with a realist theory of organism-environment interaction based on the work of the ecological psychologists J. J. Gibson and Roger Barker. This realist theory is then exploited as a basis for an ontology of social objects of a range of different sorts. (This is the English original of the French translation.). (shrink)

How do such normative affectivities as 'unconditionally intrinsic goodness', 'spontaneous compassion', 'luminosity', 'blissfulness', ' a calm and peaceful life guided by the fundamental value of nonviolence' emerge as ultimate outcomes of a philosophy of groundlessness? Aren't they motivated by a sort of 'will to goodness', a preferencing of one affective dimension over others? It would seem that groundlessness for Francisco Varela and Evan Thompson doesn't apply to the thinking of affect and desire. Despite their claim that nihilism cannot be overcome (...) by assimilating groundlessness to a notion of the will, they appear not to recognize that the positive affectivities they associate with meditative practice are, as dispositions of feeling opposed to other dispositions, themselves forms of willing. In The Embodied Mind, Varela and Thompson assert that Husserl, Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger’s phenomenologies produce ‘after the fact’ theoretical reflections that miss the richness of immediate concrete pre-reflective experience as present in the here-and-now. But Varela and Thompson’s separating of being and becoming in their empirical approach leads them to misread these phenomenologists, and as a result to mistakenly give preference to mindfulness approaches which fall short of the radicality of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. Varela and Thompson follow Husserl’s method of reduction up to a point, stripping away acquired concepts associated with a naive belief in the independence of subject and object. They don’t complete the reduction though, allowing subject and object to occupy separate moments. Varela and Thompson succeed in reducing materialist physicalism to fundamental co-dependency, but still find it necessary to ground intentional processes in a foundation of temporary self-inhering objectivities (the “arising and subsiding, emergence and decay” of transitional forms which inhere in themselves for a moment before relating to an outside). Varela and Thompson found the affectively, valuatively felt contingency of particular acts of other-relatedness in what they presume to be a primordial neutral point of pre-reflective conscious auto-affective awareness. But the phenomenologists show that attention, as a species of intention, is sense-making, which means it is sense-changing. Attention is affectively, valuatively and meaningfully implicated in what it attends to as co-participant in the synthesis, creation, constitution of objects of regard. As auto-affection turns reflexively back toward itself, what it finds is not the normative sameness and constancy of a neutral positivity( blissful, self-less compassion and benevolence toward all phenomena) but a newly sensing being. Mindful self-reflexivity, expecting to find only what it put there, instead is confronted with the self-displacement of its being exposed to and affected by an other. The basis of our awareness of a world isn’t simply compassionate, empathic relational co-determinacy, but the motivated experience of disturbing CHANGE in relational co-determinacy. (shrink)

Die geistige Gestalt Europas - was ist das? Die der Geschichte Europas immanente philosophische Idee" [E. Husserl]. Fur die Entstehung eines neuen Europa und einer neuen "europaischen Menschheit" spielt nach Ansicht Husserls das Aufzeigen der inneren Verbindung zwischen Europa und der Philosophie eine wesentliche Rolle, die Rolle einer neuen Urstiftung. Eine solche Urstiftung lasst notwendigerweise die Frage aufkommen, welche Traditionen und welche Motive des Philosophierens darin angenommen werden konnen. Husserls Erkenntnis, dass der ursprungliche Entwurf der Phanomenologie als Mathesis universalis und (...) als strenge Wissenschaft zur Erneuerung des Menscheitsideals nur durch eine Konvergenz mit dem im Deutschen Idealismus waltenden Geist der Grundlichkeit vollendet werden konne, erscheint schon 1918 in seinem Werk und vertieft sich weiter bis zur Verfassung der Krisis-Schrift. Nach der Uberwindung des naturalistischen Objektivismus sowie der rechnerischen Vernunft verbinden sich Phanomenologie und Deutscher Idealismus, um den Weg zu jener Urstiftung zu eroffnen. Im vorliegenden Band wird die problematische Konvergenz zweier philosophischer Traditionen der Neuzeit, von denen die Idee der Vernunft bestimmt wird, untersucht: die Tradition einer analytisch-logischen Rationalitat, die als Mathesis universalis bezeichnet wird, und die Tradition der spekulativen Philosophie als Letztbegrundung des Wissens. Mit Beitragen von G. Bensussan, Ch. Bermes, H. Blomme, M. Cavallaro, S. Centrone, I. Chiaravalli, D. D'Angelo, F. De Buzon, A. Ferrarin, F. Fischbach, F. Forestier, F. Fraisopi, N. Grouls, C. Ierna, L. Ionel, D. Manca, I. Rogozinski, A. Schnell, A. Schuller, Ph. Schwab, S. Schwenzfeuer. (shrink)

Resumen: En este artículo presentamos a san Agustín como punto de partida de la reflexión de Husserl respecto del tiempo y la correlación entre memoria y Erinnerung. La investigación fenomenológica de Husserl acerca de la conciencia interna del tiempo parte de la reflexión de san Agustín por el mismo problema. En estas obras, el tiempo se puede medir porque hay una distentio animi. En Husserl, Die Erinnerung nos coloca ante una conexión infinita de “antes”, pues toda percepción se encuentra en (...) una relación de multiplicidad de percepciones. Ambos pensadores están unidos por la vocación de dar cuenta de la propia inmanencia.: This article presents Saint Agustin as a starting point for Husserl’s reflection on time and the correlation between memory and Erinnerung. Husserl’s phenomenological research on the internal consciousness of time starts from the reflection of St. Augustine on the same problem. In this works, time can be measured because there is distentio animi. In Husserl, Die Erinnerung places us in the face of an infinite “before” connection, because all perceptions are to be found on a relationship of multiplicity of perceptions. Both thinkers are united by the vocation to account for their own immanence. (shrink)

En este artículo me propongo mostrar ciertos aspectos de la filosofía de Kant que podrían haber servido como antecedente a la elaboración de la fenomenología por parte de Husserl. Se toma para este respecto la Deducción de los conceptos puros del entendimiento como sistematización del criticismo kantiano, pero, además, por la controversia que las dos ediciones de la Crítica de la razón pura suscitan en torno a la imaginación en esta sección. Una vez expuesta esta parte de la Crítica en (...) su generalidad, estaremos en condiciones de comprender las insuficiencias que Husserl advierte en ella en relación con su proyecto fenomenológico, especialmente en lo concerniente al análisis eidético, ausente en el pensamiento de Kant. Husserl va a retomar ciertos aspectos, específicamente el de síntesis, que va a aparecer como el concepto más amplio de constitución entendido desde Ideas I. (shrink)

The term “clear and distinct” is used by both Descartes and Husserl when they talk about the truth of an idea and the evidence of judgment. Although the words “clear” and “distinct” are juxtaposed with the conjunction “and,” this does not mean that their status is equal. If the concept of “evidence” can be used to characterize the hierarchical relationship between them, then we can say that, for Descartes, distinct evidence is higher than clear evidence. For Husserl, on the contrary, (...) clear evidence is higher than distinct evidence. Their opposing views concerning the hierarchy between clarity and distinctness is symptomatic of the differences between their two understandings of the epistemological relationship between intellect and sensibility, as well as of their respective ontological reach. (shrink)

Husserl’s lifelong interest in Kant eventually becomes a preoccupation in his later years when he finds his phenomenology in competition with Neokantianism for the title of transcendental philosophy. Some issues that Husserl is concerned with in Kant are bound up with the works of Lambert. Kant believed that the role played by principles of sensibility in metaphysics should be determined by a “general phenomenology” on which Lambert had written. Kant initially believed that man is capable only of symbolic cognition, not (...) intellectual intuition. Lambert saw an increasing need in mathematics for symbolic cognition as exemplified in his proofs of the irrationality of π and e. Kant takes from Leibniz and Lambert an unrestricted notion of construction, allowing him to view mathematics as constructing its concepts in intuition, while Lambert’s proofs convince him that all mathematical problems are eventually solvable. Husserl criticizes Kant’s intuitionism for its inadequate accommodation of meaning to intuition, which he redresses with his theory of categorial intuition. This may improve on Kant’s intuition of the axiom of parallels but not so clearly on his spatial intuition. Husserl opposes Kant’s view of space as the form of outer intuition with his own view of it as the form of things. Husserl’s exploration of the geometry of visual space, which involves his earliest uses of epoché and reduction, converges however with Hilbert’s logical analysis of Kantian spatial intuition in leading to Euclidean spatial judgments. Hilbert’s analysis leads him to affirm the solvability of all well posed mathematical problems, a thesis complicated by the outbreak of logical paradoxes. Untroubled by such paradoxes, Husserl develops a supramathematics of all possible deductive systems whose completeness implicitly would also provide solutions of all such problems. Husserl’s full transcendental turn coincides with his realization that in effecting his Copernican turn, Kant was really the first to detect the “secret longing” of modern philosophy for a phenomenological clarification of being. Husserl now finds that Kant’s transcendental deductions presuppose a pure ego not adequately analyzed by Kant that survives the phenomenological reduction. Husserl’s idealism leads him to develop his own intuitionism, which adds to Kant’s, a “method of clarification” of mathematical concepts intended to clarify difficult impossibility proofs, but neither Husserl nor Kant base arithmetic on time. Husserl’s critique of the room left in Kant’s idealism, for things in themselves, leads to his own monadological solution of the problem of intersubjectivity. Husserl’s final judgment on Kant is that his form of transcendental idealism did not enable him to achieve absolute subjectivity through a genuine transcendental reduction. (shrink)

This paper critically evaluates Amie Thomasson’s (2003; 2005; 2006) view of the conscious mind and the interpretation of Husserl’s phenomenological reduction that it adopts. In Thomasson’s view, the phenomenological method is not an introspectionist method, but rather a “transparent” or “extrospectionist” method for acquiring epistemically privileged self-knowledge. I argue that Thomasson’s reading of Husserl’s phenomenological reduction is correct. But the view of consciousness that she pairs with it—a view of consciousness as “transparent” in the sense that first-order, world-oriented experience is (...) in no way given to itself—is not compatible with it. Rather, Thomasson’s view is, from a Husserlian vantage point, self-undermining in the same way that any genuinely skeptical view is self-undermining: it undermines the conditions of its own possibility. This is one of the motives Husserl has for developing a same-order view of self-consciousness as the complement to his transparent method for self-knowledge acquisition. (shrink)

This article offers a contribution to the topic of the relationship between Kant and Husserl’s transcendental philosophies from the point of view of the transcendental aesthetic. Its phenomenological conception is rebuilt by studying the relationship between transcendental aesthetic and analytic, then between transcendental aesthetic and logic. The first perspective shows not only that Husserl’s concept of a transcendental aesthetic aims at a double-leveled task, but that the second level implies an non-kantian integration of causality along with time and space in (...) the aesthetic frame. On this basis, it’s possible to see Husserl as a heir to Schopenhauer’s critique of the Kantian philosophy. The second perspective shows that Husserl has always seen the transcendental aesthetic as a the first step of a new type of logic, defined at first as a “real logic” then as a “world-logic”, which is the transcendental logic itself in a genetic point of view, describing the world’s “history” in the subject’s intentional life. (shrink)

In this paper we want to focus on Husserl’s critique of Kantian ethics and to develop the following questions. Against the merely empiristic orientation of Hume’s ethics, the Kantian foundation of ethics has an aprioristic character; but does this aprioristic character have to be identified with the origin of ethical principles in the pure subjectivity, and if not, which is its phenomenological signification? The sense of the Copernican revolution is that the structures of the objects are in accordance with the (...) universal structures of the finite subject; a contrario, Husserl refuses this Copernican principle and assumes that every sort of object determines a regulative structure in the subject; is it possible to apply this anticopernican principle to the ethical sphere? As opposed to the Kantian principle of the supremacy of practical reason, we find in Husserl’s thought a supremacy of the theoretical reason; but which is the sense of this inversion? The concept of foundation has in Husserlian phenomenology a cardinal importance: all sorts of truth of superior degree are founded on the inferior level of sensible truth; is it possible to apply this principle of foundation to the ethical sphere, so that ethical consciousness would be founded on feelings? At last the Kantian concept of liberty is not an empirical one, but a cosmological and practical idea; which is the phenomenological sense of liberty? (shrink)

In Critics of pure reason the notion of affection appears at first in the "Transcendental Aesthetic" and is unfolded on the notion of self-affection in the "Transcendental Analytic". Husserl, in manuscripts written from 1918, presents some developments of these Kantian notions. If by affection Kant explains that something can be given to the subject from the sensibility, that is, something that affects oneself from the external and the internal sense, however, Husserl extends the analysis of affection toward a broad spectrum (...) of underlying phenomena, such as volitive acts, imaginative acts, drives and affects. Husserl also analyzes from a phenomenological point of view the Kantian implicit condition that, if anything is given to the subject in the internal consciousness of time, the relationship to itself must be thought as a temporal process. I intend to show that Husserl’s analysis of affection and its modulations unveil possible theoretical directions departing from Kant, but in this step, involving a change of focus on the transcendental field, more specifically on the transcendental foundation of temporality. (shrink)

The paper analyses Husserl’s critique of Kant’s regressive transcendental method while trying to show that at the basis of it is an opposite conception of the conditions of possibility of experience: whereas for Kant experience is structured by the subject through intellectual forms, for Husserl it has a structure before the intervention of the subject. Therefore–contrary to Iso Kern’s opinion–the contrast between Kant and Husserl cannot be traced back to mere methodical divergences.

The idea that subjectivity makes up the foundation or source of all objectivity applies to all transcendental idealists. Nevertheless, Husserl conceives of this relationship between subjectivity and objectivity in a radically different fashion than Kant. Husserl’s conception leads to a primacy of the noetic dimension of sense at the expense of the noematic dimension. In order to render this explicit, not only a closer look at Kant’s transcendental deduction is illuminating but also taking into account neo-Kantianism. In contrast to Husserl, (...) Kant and the neo-Kantians grant primacy to the objective or noematic within the correlation between subject and object or noesis and noema. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that Husserl received important cues from Natorp and his project of a transcendental psychology. I also trace the entire relationship both thinkers had over the course of their lifetime and show how there were important cross-fertilizations on both sides. In particular, Natorp’s project of a reconstructive psychology proved crucial, I argue, for Husserl’s development of genetic phenomenology. Allowing for a reconstruction of subjective-intentional processes makes Husserl see the possibility of breaking with the paradigm of direct (...) intuition as the sole method of phenomenology. However, Natorp’s psychology was also seriously flawed, to Husserl. While exploiting the fruitful elements of Natorp’s reconstructive psychology, Husserl maintained that they could only come to actual fruition in a transcendental phenomenology. (shrink)

Basing on the Michel Foucault’s description of the philosophical modernity given by him in his famous book Words and Things, I found that there is the compliance between the beginning of the Modern philosophy and the Kant’s discovery of the a priori synthesis. It is also well known that Husserl uses the term “synthesis” in his phenomenology. Thus, the Husserl’s phenomenology could belong to the same branch of philosophy as the Kant’s philosophy. To verify this hypothesis, I analyze the views (...) on synthesis a priori of both thinkers, Kant and Husserl, and then I compare them. One ought to say that Husserl widens the Kant’s view of the synthesis a priori through his notion of material a priori as well as through his differentiation of active and passive kinds of synthesis. As conclusion, I pose the question of the possibility of a priori synthesis after Kant and Husserl, taking into account the Moritz Schlick’s criticism of the synthetic propositions a priori. (shrink)

There is today much debate about the contents of perceptual experience relative to our capacity to make them figure in judgments. There is considerably less interest, however, in how we subsume perceptual contents in judgments, that is, what judging about a perception is like for us. For Kant and Husserl, this second question is as important as the first. Whereas Kant tries to answer it in the schematism section of the first Critique, Husserl addresses it at length in Experience and (...) Judgment. This paper draws new attention to this ‘forgotten’ transcendental problem by comparing both accounts of it. I will first discuss Kantian conceptualism in section two and schematization in section three. In section four I then turn to the Husserlian notion of type, which is today often juxtaposed to Kant’s schema. After rejecting one commonly held view that they are functionally identical, I turn to Husserl’s work on active synthesis, where I distinguish three different acts of judgment and their respective contents. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article investigates the genuinely philosophical engagement with the idea of Europe twentieth century philosophy. Here, especially phenomenology has developed a distinct tradition of conceiving Europe not as a geographical and political entity but rather as a ‘spiritual shape.’ Husserl, as the originator of this thought, traces this spiritual Europe back to Ancient Greece of the 7/6 century B.C. in which an unprecedented ‘theoretical attitude’ towards the world originated. Hence, Europe is conceived as a project of reason, of pure rationality (...) while at the same time leaving out the constitutive dimension of religion. Furthermore, this non-historical philosophical genealogy proves itself to be an arbitrary but intentional genealogy whose intentions have to be put into critical reconsideration. In this article, I will introduce Patočka and Zambrano as important critiques of Husserl’s genealogy, or even potentially violent mono-genealogy, as Derrida has emphasized. Following Foucault, it is the aim of this article to put into question the myth of a single historical-political origin of Europe’s spiritual heritage and furthermore to pay attention to the transformations and conflictual relations between Europe’s different forms of reason and religion. (shrink)

Martin Heidegger closes his Winter Semester 1927–28 lectures by claiming that Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, read through the lens of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology, confirmed the accuracy of his philosophical path culminating in Being and Time. A notable interpretation of Heidegger’s debt to Kant, advanced by William Blattner, presents Heidegger as a temporal idealist. I argue that attention to Husserl’s adaptation of Kant’s critical philosophy shows that both Husserl and Heidegger are realists. I make my case by tracing a unified (...) philosophical problematic through three puzzling passages: the Schematism chapter of the first Critique, Husserl’s thought experiment of the destruction of the world in Ideas, and the passage in Being and Time that motivates Blattner’s idealist reading. Husserl and Heidegger give accounts, derived from Kant, of how the consciousness of time makes it possible for objects to be perceived as enduring unities, as well as ‘genealogies of logic’ that show how a priori knowledge, including ontology, is possible. These accounts are idealistic only in the sense that they concern the ideal or essential features of intentionality in virtue of which it puts us in touch with things as they are independently of the contributions of any mind of any type. -/- . (shrink)

Mikhail Bakhtin aimed to invent a phenomenology of the self-experience and of the experience of the other in his early work. In order to realize such a phenomenology he combined different approaches he called idealism and materialism / naturalism. The first one he linked to Edmund Husserl, but did hardly name him directly concerning his phenomenology. Does this intersubjective phenomenology give a hint that Bakhtin used Husserlian ideas more than considered yet? Or did they both invent similar ideas independently from (...) each other? Both thinkers dealt with the issue of intersubjectivity. Husserl judged statements on other psycho-physical realities as metaphysics in the Logical Investigations II, but in his Ideas I he described the others as enhancing one’s experience through their “experiential surpluses”. In the same way Bakhtin described the unique perspective of the other as a mandatory and valuable part of the world of the act in his Philosophy of the Act and his investigations on Author and Hero. In order to understand the influence of Husserl’s phenomenology for Bakhtin’s early philosophy we need to take a look closer at those contentual parallels as well as some paraphrases yet unnoticed. This gives hint for the question if for Bakhtin Husserl was more than just a name dropped. In this article I reconstructed the relations between both thinkers and answered the question if the dating of Bakhtin’s early work until 1928 has to be re-considered. (shrink)

In the final book of Logical Investigations from 1901, Husserl develops a theory of knowledge based on the intentional structure of consciousness. While there is some textual evidence that Husserl considered this to entail a critique of Kantian philosophy, he did not elaborate substantially on this. This paper reconstructs the covert critique of Kant’s theory of knowledge which LI contains. With respect to Kant, I discuss three core aspects of his theory of knowledge which, as Husserl’s reflections on Kant indicate, (...) Husserl was familiar with. These are the cooperation of two faculties for the justification of beliefs; the concept of a priori structures of knowledge Kant operated with; and the delivered transcendental proof of these structures. Regarding Logical Investigations, I first briefly outline the intentional structure of consciousness as presented in the fifth book and then turn to the theory of knowledge in the sixth book. I then clarify, partially on the basis of manuscripts and lecture notes, the covert critique of the three core aspects of Kant’s theory which the sixth book contains. (shrink)

In this article I propose to read the Husserlian notion of ‘motivation’ by comparison with the Kantian Schematism, in order to understand its peculiar status and time frame. I maintain that motivations – like a third synthesis in addition to retention and recollection – mediate and organize the flux of retentions and protentions by intercession of external supports. Thus, they offer the means to thematize history and, consequently, to recast the transcendental basis of Phenomenology taking the opacity of consciousness into (...) serious account. (shrink)

Cet article a pour objet l’analyse de trois types de théorisations de la signification basées sur un modèle binaire du signe. Celles de Frege, Husserl et Saussure. Relevant d’un même paradigme, les deux premières sont confrontées en tant que s’y développent deux conceptions opposées de la signification – extensionnelle chez Frege, intensionnelle chez Husserl – contribuant à la mise en place, selon des perspectives opposées, de la dualisation de la syntaxe et de la sémantique. Relativement à cette conséquence, leur paradigme (...) est ensuite opposé à celui de la sémiologie structurale de Saussure dans laquelle l’interaction de la syntaxe et de la sémantique est internalisée au niveau du système qu’intègrent les signes comme éléments. De sorte que ce que l’on vise au terme de cet article, c’est à mettre au jour une explication possible de la raison de la divergence entre deux types de conceptions de la sémantique qui organiseront le développement de courants concurrents tout au long de l’histoire de la linguistique du 20e siècle, l’une formelle et mathématisée, l’autre structurale. (shrink)

The double expansion that Husserl’s phenomenology imposed on subjective experience posed, among other difficulties, a new and particularly difficult problem for Husserl; that of the trans-temporal identity of the transcendental subject, the “ego.” This problem involves also, and still more fundamentally, the question of the ontological status of the ego. Beginning with his descriptivepsychological understanding of consciousness and its intentional acts in the 1901 Logical Investigations, Husserl had first identified the subjective ego with the empirical person, and considered it sufficient (...) to determine the flow of acts experienced by consciousness as a “bundle” of subjective phenomena devoid of altogether devoid of any internal principle of unity, except a mere formal synthesis. (shrink)

This paper re-examines the egos of Edmund Husserl and Max Scheler with reference to Friedrich Nietzsche and the psychologist, James Hillman, and in the process also confronts the ego in other of its many manifestations, misappropriations, and mystifications.The ego is a multi-headed enigma which defies phenomenological description, and only reaches the status of concept by virtue of the gropings of an epistemology which is not up to the task. The goal of this paper is twofold: firstly, to come to terms (...) with what is commonly spoken of as ego, and secondly, to devise a scheme which does justice to it as phenomenon. (shrink)

Amidst Nazi persecution, Edith Stein discovered in the biblical images of God a mystical path of identity formation leading to a transformative union with Christ.

This paper examines the status of naturalism in the philosophies of Edmund Husserl and John Dewey. Despite the many points of overlap and agreement between Husserl’s and Dewey’s philosophical projects, there remains one glaring difference, namely, the place and status of naturalism in their approaches. For Husserl, naturalism is an enemy to be vanquished. For Dewey, naturalism is the only method that can put philosophy back in touch with the concerns of human beings. This paper will demonstrate the remarkable similarities (...) between Husserl’s and Dewey’s thought before contending that Dewey’s “naturalistic humanism” offers a conception of naturalism which is compatible with Husserlian phenomenology. Furthermore, reading these two philosophers together, this paper argues, can point the way forward to a naturalism which avoids the dismissal of the contributions made by knowing subjects carried out by dominant contemporary strains of reductive naturalism. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper reconstructs and defends a Husserlian transcendental conception of intentionality. Initially, naturalistic conception of intentionality seems attractive, however, a naturalistic understanding conceals the true meaning of the puzzle and the nature of intentionality. Following Kant and primarily Husserl, this paper tries to determine the conditions a transcendental conception of intentionality must satisfy in order to be qualified as “transcendental”. Additionally, following Husserl, this paper argues that the alternative transcendental conception is not only possible, hence plausible; but also necessary, in (...) the sense that a thorough understanding of intentionality can only be achieved if a transcendental conception is adopted. (shrink)

The influence of Franz Brentano in twentieth century philosophy has been extensive. His two most famous and outstanding pupils were Alexius Meinong and Edmund Husserl. These two are closely related not only regarding their common background in the school of Brentano, but also in their common concern with problems arising from British empiricism. Such a problem is to be found in the nominalist views of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume and their concomitant theories of general ideas. While Meinong's early work continues (...) in the empiricist tradition by characterizing general ideas in terms of abstraction and not in terms of general objects as their correlates, Husserl's _Logical Investigations_ are committed to the claim that general ideas can be described only as ideas which refer to general objects. In _Meinong and Husserl onion and Universals_ the epistemological, psychological, and ontological aspects of these theories are examined and compared. Included is also a translation of _Abstraction and Comparing_ by Meinong. (shrink)

Recently, a number of neuroscientists and philosophers have taken the so-called predictive coding approach to support a form of radical neuro-representationalism, according to which the content of our conscious experiences is a neural construct, a brain-generated simulation. There is remarkable similarity between this account and ideas found in and developed by German neo-Kantians in the mid-nineteenth century. Some of the neo-Kantians eventually came to have doubts about the cogency and internal consistency of the representationalist framework they were operating within. In (...) this paper, I will first argue that some of these concerns ought to be taken seriously by contemporary proponents of predictive coding. After having done so, I will turn to phenomenology. As we shall see, Husserl’s endorsement of transcendental idealism was partially motivated by his rejection of representationalism and phenomenalism and by his attempt to safeguard the objectivity of the world of experience. This confronts us with an intriguing question. Which position is best able to accommodate our natural inclination for realism: Contemporary neuro-representationalism or Husserl’s transcendental idealism? (shrink)

The article presents two conceptions of "a priori" cognition, i.e. that of Kant and Husserl. Kant’s and Husserl’s positions differ as to the basis of importance of "a priori". Kant conducts subjectivisation of "a priori" because, in his opinion, a priori criteria, such as generalization and necessity, have their basis in the recognising object, and, at the same time, express a subjective inability to present them in other way. Husserl, on the other hand, ontologises "a priori", saying that aprioriness is (...) grounded in the essence, and, as such, expresses an objective deriving from the essence’s inability to be in a different way. However, a consequence of a phenomenological ontologization of "a priori" is a discovery of a material "a priori". The aritcle shows that it is possible to see an analogy between Kant’s and Husserl’s standpoints in terms of the scope of aprioriness. Kant’s subjectivisation of "a priori", though, does not imply a total formalization of what is a priori because Kant is a creator of an idea of an un-clear synthetic "a priori", where one can find similarities to Husserl’s material "a priori". (shrink)

The paper discusses Tischner’s interpretation of Husserl’s conception of consciousness in two aspects: egologic and subjective. In his notion of transcendental consciousness Husserl equates the transcendental ego with the subject of consciousness. However, in the course of development of his theory, he supplements the theory of ego with so-called habitual properties theory. Tischner stresses and characterises the difference between the transcendental ego and the subject of consciousness in his doctoral thesis Ja transcendentalne w filozofii E. Husserla. According to Tischner, Husserl, (...) by recognising the habitual properties of transcendental ego blurs the difference between the transcendental ego and a person. Hence, Tischner claims, two levels of consciousness need to be recognised: the subjective level, which determines the subject as indispensable element of consciousness, and the egologic level, which refers to self-contained element of consciousness, which function as the transcendental ego. Setting apart heterogenic levels of analysis, as emphasised by Tischner, appears to be the key factor of development of his own work. (shrink)

Este artículo revisa el diálogo que Husserl establece con Humemientras reconstruye la génesis de la filosofía. Lo discutiréen dos partes: la primera se refiere a la “verdadera filosofía”y, la segunda, desarrolla una lectura fenomenológica delmétodo experimental de Hume. Intento explicar la evaluaciónambivalente que hace Husserl del proyecto de Hume, yproponer una manera en la que Hume pueda responder a suscríticas. Concluyo, más allá de Husserl, que Hume abrió uncamino promisorio para la fenomenología, que yo llamo una“fenomenología detrascendentalizada”.