Husserl: Philosophy of Social Science

This volume features fourteen essays that examine the works of key figures within the phenomenological movement in a clear and accessible way. It presents the fertile, groundbreaking, and unique aspects of phenomenological theorizing against the background of contemporary debate about social ontology and collective intentionality. The expert contributors explore the insights of such thinkers as Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl, Adolf Reinach, and Max Scheler. Readers will also learn about other sources that, although almost wholly neglected by historians of philosophy, testify (...) to the vitality of the phenomenological tradition. In addition, the contributions highlight the systematic relevance of phenomenological research by pinpointing its position on social ontology and collective intentionality within the history of philosophy. By presenting phenomenological contributions in a scholarly yet accessible way, this volume introduces an interesting and important perspective into contemporary debate insofar as it bridges the gap between the analytical and the continental traditions in social philosophy. The volume provides readers with a deep understanding into such questions as: What does it mean to share experiences with others? What does it mean to share emotions with friends or to share intentions with partners in a joint endeavor? What are groups? What are institutional facts like money, universities, and cocktail parties? What are values and what role do values play in social reality? (shrink)

For more than a century, phenomenology’s relation to history has remained a problem for phenomenological analysis. This can in part be attributed to the circumstances surrounding the beginnings of phenomenology. As Europe moved increasingly toward world war at the turn of the 20th century, a growing consciousness of the historical relativity of all values and knowledge spread throughout the continent, leading Ernst Troeltsch to speak of the “crisis of historicism”. In this same context, Edmund Husserl framed phenomenological analysis in opposition (...) to history. While Husserl recognized the “tremendous value” that history has to offer philosophical thinking, he believed that a purely historical reduction of consciousness necessarily results in the relativity of historical understanding itself, like a serpent that bites its own tail. If phenomenology was to be a genuine science, it had to attempt a phenomenological reduction which would seize upon the essence of our historical being, i.e., our essence as beings that exist within history and are inseparable from it. What was required over and beyond a historical understanding of lived experience was an analysis of the structure of historicity itself. (shrink)

En este ensayo su autor revisita el tópico fenomenología trascendental e historia 12 años después de la publicación de un trabajo amplio sobre el tema. El escrito esta dividido en tres partes donde se muestras acuerdos y discrepancias con esa interpretación inicial. En la primera se rebate la tesis tan extendida de que la fenomenología de Husserl es alérgica a la historia y se establece una conjetura razonable sobre por qué, y a pesar de la evidencias en contra, sigue todavía (...) bastante vigente esa idea entre los no versados en su obra. En la segunda parte, se muestra en positivo la articulación entre fenomenología e historia y se concluye que la manera quizá más adecuada de entender el sentido último del pensamiento de Husserl es comprenderlo como una teoría transcendental de la historia. Para mostrar esto se expondrá, en primer lugar, el hecho crucial del paso de la fenomenología estática a la fenomenología genética. En segundo lugar, se incidirá en la mutua interconexión entre historia intencional, a priori de la historia y filosofía o teleología de la historia. Por fin, en una tercera y última parte, se realizan algunas valoraciones críticas de las ideas husserlianas. También una autocrítica de algunas partes del mencionado trabajo publicado hace 12 años. Todas tienen que ver, en última instancia, con lo que hoy entiendo como excesiva potencia de la teleología de la historia y la idea de racionalidad y fundamento que la animan.In this essay, the author revisits the topic transcendental phenomenology and history 12 years after the publication of a book on the subject. The paper is divided into three parts and shows agreements and discrepancies with that initial interpretation. The first part contradicts the widespread thesis that Husserl's phenomenology is allergic to history, and develops a conjecture about why, despite the evidence to the contrary, this thesis is still quite common among those not strictly versed in Husserl’s work. The second part shows the positive articulation among phenomenology and history. It concludes that the best way to understand the ultimate meaning of Husserl's thought is considering it as a transcendental theory of history. In order to show the plausibility of this reading, this part of the essay will expose, first, the step from static to genetic phenomenology, and secondly, the mutual interconnection between intentional history, a priori of history, and philosophy or teleology of history. Finally, in a third and final part, some critical assessments of Husserl's ideas are made, also a criticism of the mentioned book of the author of the paper published 12 years ago. They are concerned, ultimately, with what I now understand as an excessive power of teleology of history and the idea of rationality and foundation that animates it. (shrink)

In this paper, I use Husserl’s phenomenological analyses of noesis and noema to investigate the connection between experience and place, a relation which I call “geographical experience,” using a term coined by Edward Relph. Following the correlative structure of lived experience, geographical experience is enabled by the lived body as the noetic part and place as the respective noematic part. Both parts belong together necessarily. However, in this experiential field, distortions and an eluding aspect of place appear in the relationship (...) between body and place. These distortions point to an aspect of geographical experience that cannot be fully grasped by the noetic-noematic structure of experience. They indicate that the reality of place is not completely constituted by this correlative structure but nevertheless becomes apparent in and through it. (shrink)

The main aim of this paper is to show that the idea of rigorous science, elaborated by Edmund Husserl, makes a fundamental contribution to the understanding, clarification, and development of the idea of science in general, and especially to the structuring of the character of science itself for social and human sciences. The first step of my approach is to outline a general theoretical framework for discussing the thorny issues of methodology and epistemology in the social and human sciences. I (...) shall start by probing the way in which Husserl tried to give a philosophical clarification of the sciences and sought to ground them through transcendental phenomenology. Husserl’s idea of rigorous science proposed a new understanding of the way science is constituted in general and led to important developments which determined a re-evaluation of the scientific character of other sciences, and in particular, the social sciences. The rich programme of grounding the social sciences and the rigorous reconfiguring of their scientific character that was developed by the Austrian phenomenologist and sociologist, Alfred Schutz, is just one major exemplification of Husserl’s idea of rigorous science. In the second part of my paper I shall show how the Husserlian idea of rigorous science influenced the scientific understanding of, and approach towards social life. In this sense, I shall direct my analysis towards the way Schutz understands and elaborates the idea of social relations in a phenomenological manner, by which he tries to account for the phenomenological constitution of the meaning of social action and the possibility of knowledge in social sciences. When shaping his programme, Schutz begins with the Husserlian phenomenological reduction and theory of constitution of meaning. But both the theory of the constitution of meaning, and the idea of the phenomenological reduction itself, are made possible for Husserl precisely through his idea of rigorous science. (shrink)

This paper makes a phenomenological contribution to the distinction between personal and subpersonal types of explanation. I expound the little-known fact that Husserl gives an account of personal level explanation via his exposition of our capacity to express the understanding of another’s motivational nexus when we are in the personalistic attitude. I show that Husserl’s unique exposition of the motivational nexus conveys its concrete, internally coherent, and intentional nature, involving relationships amongst the sense contents of acts of consciousness. Moreover, the (...) motivational nexus is a generative space of possibility and choice. I show that, for these reasons, motivational explanation is not causal, nor deductive nomological, nor does it reduce to subpersonal explanation. I finish with the comment that the uniqueness of personal level explanation points towards the possibility that the human sciences ought also employ types of explanations not found in natural sciences. (shrink)

Analytical jurisprudence and the legal mainstream perceive legal rights in an interactionist fashion, pursuant to a right-obligation duality. The Paper suggests that this is principally because legal positivism and the analytical Anglo-Saxon legal tradition ground their theories on logical positivism and the Wittgensteinian premise that meaning is produced and asserted in social use, i.e. both consensually and contextually. The paper suggests that there is a surplus of meaning which exists beyond social use and which cannot be conceptualized within the sociolinguistic (...) confines of Wittgenstein’s logic of language. This surplus of meaning corresponds to the essential core of legal rights, which, following Aristotle’s induction and philosophy of the essences, constitutes a necessary property and τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι of legal rights, namely a state of affairs or a state of being that cannot be altered without their necessary breach or, indeed, the negation of their very meaning. The Paper discusses the shortcomings of the Wittgensteinian approach and revisits the philosophical foundations of legal rights by employing Aristotle’s induction and theory of the essences, which the Paper connects to the phenomenological method and particularly Ricoeur’s hermeneutics and Husserl’s transcedental phenomenology. This is a process of abstraction and insight, which aspires to induce a rational revisiting of the general theory of legal rights and address the surplus of meaning that Wittgensteinian logic leaves semantically uncovered. (shrink)

This book approaches the topic of the subjective, lived experience of hate crime from the perspective of Husserlian phenomenology. It provides an experientially well-grounded account of how and what is experienced as a hate crime, and what this reveals about ourselves as the continually reconstituted “subject” of such experiences. The book shows how qualitative social science methods can be better grounded in philosophically informed theory and methodological practices to add greater depth and explanatory power to experiential approaches to social sciences (...) topics. The Authors also highlight several gaps and contradictions within Husserlian analyses of prejudice, which are exposed by attempts to concretely apply this approach to the field of hate crimes. Coverage includes the difficulties in providing an empathetic understanding of expressions of harmful forms of prejudice underlying hate crimes, including hate speech, arising from our own and others’ ‘life worlds’. The Authors describe a ‘Husserlian-based’ view of hate crime as well as a novel interpretation of the value of the comprehensive methodological stages pioneered by Husserl. The intended readership includes those concerned with discrimination and hate crime, as well as those involved in qualitative research into social topics in general. The broader content level makes this work suitable for undergraduate and postgraduate students, even professionals within law enforcement. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss the possibility of reading the description of promise presented by Reinach in The Apriori Foundations of the Civil Law under the light of Husserl’s Ideas I. In order to present my argument, first, I briefly present the phenomenological method proposed by Husserl in Ideas I highlighting eidetic reduction. Second, I present the Reinachian description of social acts emphasizing the act of promising. Third, and finally, I try to demonstrate that the Reinachian description of the social (...) act of promising is the description of a universal and necessary relation, a synthetic and a priori statement and corresponds to the idea of promise. (shrink)

Problem setting. The modern understanding of law implies the need of new methods, which could correlate theoretical models of legal regulation and changes in the sociocultural context. Reference to the theoretical opportunities of phenomenology enables, in particular, to study the nature of the legal life procedural features, and the conditions of forming the image of atemporal legal structure. Recent research and publications analysis. Currently humanitarian knowledge includes a significant number of papers, devoted to the theoretical problems of studying the phenomenon (...) of law. First of all, the authors emphasize that the field of philosophical-legal and legal studies is in the methodological crisis, determined by the uncertainty of the scientific status of the philosophy of law, one-sidedness of classical types of the law understanding, the incoherence of legal language and thinking styles etc. In addition, despite quite common use of the phenomenological methodology, the philosophy of law still lacks integrated concepts, enabling, inter alia, to find out ontological bases of legal life as a meaningful law configurate. Paper objective. The objective of the study is the analysis of the existing opinions on the problem of the process and structural nature in social cognition to explain the nature of the law process, as well as further search for the ontological grounds of legal life. Paper main body. Phenomenological methods applied in studying legal life enable to suggest that law is of process nature, which is, in turn, comparable to the process nature of sensemaking. The search for the ontological grounds of legal life implies retrospective analysis of the issues, related to the research into structural and process properties in philosophy and phenomenology of law. The study of the works by E. Husserl shows that the philosopher confirmed the inner time of consciousness, but avoided considering reality itself from the standpoint of temporality, changeability and process. E. Husserl’s followers believed that the legal meaning existed beyond the time context, but could be found within time when it was analyzed as a social phenomenon. The structural-functional approach and the systems theory show a number of difficulties, related to the conventionalism of the synchrony - diachrony dichotomy, the lack of considering the activity level of the subject of cognition, the openness of identifying the nature and mechanism of actual social changes, eclectics of cognition methods etc. The analysis of the process philosophy tradition does not reveal clear arguments for the statement of the process nature of legal life either. It is due to the fact that process ontology is theoretically supported, on the one hand, by indestructibility of duration as an immanent property of the material world and the world of consciousness, on the other – by the need of elements beyond the time. Alternative approaches to solving the problem of the ontology of social phenomena demonstrate the transition from the basic image of the structural nature to the process nature as the essential subject of practical and pure problems of social reality consciousness. They try to integrate structural and process nature as the modes of social reality ontology. The analysis of theoretical and methodological arguments for the statement of the process nature of legal life enables to confirm that process is not its absolute substance. The phenomenon of legal life also shows structural properties, which, however, exist only within the process dimension. The availability of process-structure ontological dichotomy in the descriptions of legal life is determined by the fragmentariness of social existence. Legal structure is a virtual image, which is implemented as a process in the practices carried out by the subject of law. In turn, the description of legal processes suggests the “inclusion” of intentional structures, being in charge of articulation and sustainability of their perception. Conclusions of the research. The solution to the problem of searching legal life ontological grounds consists in generating integrative experience of law description and singling out two interrelated grounds: “law-structure” and “law-process” within the integrity of legal life. (shrink)

In this brief essay, I defend my original analysis of competition and respond to a number of recent criticisms. In this process, I extend my analysis by showing the cogency and value of the kinds of metaphysical analyses recommended by Husserl. Specifically, I discuss utility of descriptive precision related to clear thinking, improved communication, and a more robust normative appreciation of competitive acts. Of particular importance in this discussion is the distinction between literal and metaphorical uses of language.

My contribution tries to outline some of the motives that lead Husserl to genetic phenomenology. The starting point are the analyses he wrote to include in Ideas I and Ideas II, which are dedicated to the founding of human sciences during the period 1910–1916. Here we find an intertwinement of investigations concerned with an understanding of others and their contribution to the constitution of objectivity, and new research of the genesis of the way in which individual experience shapes our access (...) to the world. My main interest is to point out systematic connections between these two directions of research which are general characteristics of genetic phenomenology. (shrink)

Dieses Buch bietet die erste systematische Interpretation von Husserls Ideen für eine reine Phänomenologie und phänomenologische Philosophie anhand der neuen kritischen Edition von Ideen II. Es ermöglicht eine phänomenologische Auslegung des allgemein-metaphysischen Problems, wie physische, mentale und soziale Tatsachen zusammenhängen. Das Buch diskutiert und interpretiert detailliert einige von Husserls zentralen Konzeptionen und zeigt die Konsequenzen seines Denkansatzes und seiner Theorieentwicklung. Natur und Gemeingeist sind Husserl zufolge die Grundbegriffe der naturalistischen und der personalistischen Einstellungen und dienen als Leitfaden der Unterscheidung zwischen (...) Natur- und Geisteswissenschaften. In der kritischen Auseinandersetzung mit diesem wissenschaftstheoretischen Dualismus führt Husserl den Habitus-Begriff methodisch ein, um das Verhältnis von Natur- und Sozialontologie aus der konkreten Erfahrung heraus phänomenologisch neu zu deuten, womit der spätere, anti-dualistische Weg der Lebensweltphänomenologie vorbereitet wird. In Husserls Studien zur Regionalontologie des Gemeingeistes rückt das konkrete Subjekt in den Vordergrund der Intentionalitätsanalyse, indem die sinntragenden Elemente der Inaktualitität auf Habitualisierungsprozesse und die Intersubjektivität auf Sozialisierungsstufen zurückgeführt werden. Dank der durch den Habitus-Begriff ermöglichten klaren Unterscheidung zwischen konstituierender Aktualität und konstitutiver Relevanz des inaktuellen Horizonts kann Husserls Philosophie des Geistes als individualistisch und holistisch zugleich gelten. Dieser ontologischen Position entspricht auch Husserls sozialepistemologische Ansicht, dass sich Wissenschaften erst im Rahmen idealisierter Sozialstrukturen entfalten können. Durch diese idealisierenden Operationen wird die Konstitution der Objektivität möglich, welche die Wissenschaften anstreben. Deren Rationalität ist deshalb in ihren konkreten und idealisierten Sozialitätsstufen und Habitualitäten zu befragen. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIf we take Heidegger's ontology to be a philosophy of history, then, for Husserl, the problem of history is only one among the three major directions of his thoughts. After Husserl met Dilthey in 1905, he more and more attended to the problem of history and reflected upon the longitudinal intentionality of time-genesis-history. His basic idea is to grasp the condition of possibility of history by means of an eidetic intuition upon the longitudinal intentionality. However, because Husserl never explicates his (...) thoughts on history in his published works, he is often regarded as a “non-historical” philosopher. In fact, like Dilthey, Husserl purports to combine historical enlightenment with critique of knowledge. It is hence Dilthey-Yorck, Husserl, Heidegger and Gadamer who established together the most important tradition of history of philosophy in the twentieth century, namely, phenomenological-ontological philosophy of history. (shrink)

The current literature suggests that the use of Husserl’s and Heidegger’s approaches to phenomenology is still practiced. However, a clear gap exists on how these approaches are viewed in the context of constructivism, particularly with non-traditional female students’ study of mathematics. The dissertation attempts to clarify the constructivist role of phenomenology within a transcendental framework from the first-hand meanings associated with the expression of the relevancy as expressed by interviews of six nontraditional female students who have studied undergraduate mathematics. Comparisons (...) also illustrate how the views associated with Husserl’s stance on phenomenology inadvertently relate to the stances of the participants interviewed as part of the study. The research questions focus on the emotional association with studying mathematics and how pre-conceived opinions regarding the study of mathematics may have influenced the essences of the experiences of the participants who have studied collegiate-level mathematics. The essences of the experiences of the participants are analyzed using bracketing and epoché to ensure personal biases of the researcher do not affect the interpretation of the expressed essences of the participants. Data collection is accomplished through two series of qualitative interviews seeking the participants’ firsthand impressions of how they view the way instructional design is oriented with regard to mathematics. Additional questions seek to illuminate the participants’ point of view regarding their emotional association with mathematics as well as their opinions and theoretical perspectives on the study of mathematics. (shrink)

This essay claims that a rupture between two languages permeates human rights discourse in contemporary Anglo-American legal thought. Human rights law is no exception. The one language is written in the sense that a signifying relation inscribed by institutional authors represents concepts. Theories of law have shared such a preoccupation with concepts. Legal rules, doctrines, principles, rights and duties exemplify legal concepts. One is mindful of the dominant tradition of Anglo-American conceptual jurisprudence in this regard. Words have been thought to (...) copy ready-made concepts. Acts of intellectualisation and the accompanying analytic technique have excluded a consideration of a very different sense of legal language. The second sense of a language concentrates upon unwritten acts of meaning which lack a discrete and assignable author. This essay aims to unconceal the importance of an unauthored language. Drawing from Edmund Husserl’s early writings, particularly his Logical Investigations, I shall argue that an unwritten language embodies the written language with acts of meaning. An act of meaning confers one’s experiential body into the content of a concept signified in a written language. In order to understand the importance of such pre-legal acts of meaning in human rights laws, I begin by outlining how universal human rights have been signified as universal by virtue of their content-independence. I then raise the problem of the exclusion of social-cultural phenomena as elements of human rights laws. The clue to this exclusionary character of human rights law rests in the analytic leap from an unwritten to a written legal language. The essay then addresses the effort to link legality with the social world: namely, the effort of grounding legality in a social convention. I examine how a social convention itself is conceptualized, leaving the remainder of acts of meaning. This failure of social conventions to access social-cultural phenomena encourages me to turn to acts of meaning as such acts were understood by Edmund Husserl in his earlier works. Meaning-constituting acts exist prior to intuitions and prior to social conventions. This priority exists analytically as well as phenomenologically. In order to exemplify this prior character of acts of meaning, I retrieve Antigone’s experiential knowledge in Sophocles’ Antigone. Antigone’s unwritten laws are characterized by an absence of mediating concepts. I then identify several elements of an act of meaning in an unwritten language: the experiential body as the source of the acts of meaning, praeiudicia (prejudgements), collective memories, the act character of meaning, and the act of interpretation of social behaviour. My final section raises the prospect of whether human rights can be considered universal if acts of meaning are that important in the identity of a law. (shrink)

The aim of the present paper is to advance some considerations on the question of animism from a phenomenological perspective. Firstly, we deal with the problems of the access to the phenomenon, and of its interpretation on the part of contemporary anthropology. Both problems are connected with the gap which seems to exist between so-called primitive, animistic societies, and so-called civilized, scientific cultures. Secondly, since Husserl does not devote specific analyses to this issue, we address Dorion Cairns’ methodology and concrete (...) investigations. Our major claim is that his reflections, largely inspired by Husserl’s notion of sense-transfer, may provide a better understanding of the gap mentioned above and perhaps a way to overcome it by disclosing a genetic common root not only of animistic and modern mentalities, but also of pantheism and theism. A final section is devoted to Husserl’s scattered considerations on the subject which might throw additional light on Cairns’ claims. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article deals with the topic of production in the framework of Husserlian phenomenology. It argues for the centrality of the often-neglected thematic of production for Husserl's late phenomenology of generativity and its broadened understanding of human subjectivity as “poietic being.” As the article shows, this understanding had significant consequences for Husserl's understanding of philosophy not so much as an individualistic attitude but as the creation of a new type of communal accomplishment, the ideas, and a new type of (...) producing community. (shrink)

Recently Kretchmar attempted to apply and to explore Husserl’s transcendental phenomenological method in relation to clarifying, in the context of sport particularly, the main features of competition. He concludes with the strong claim that competition is unintelligible unless understood in relation to the four elements of plurality, comparison, normativity, and disputation. Roughly, the idea is that competition needs to be understood as a context in which more than one competitor is involved; where competitors are compared; that comparisons are evaluations of (...) their performance/entry in the competition; and that the expected result of the latter is a matter of dispute between or among contestants. In investigating these points some refinement of this basic outline is attempted against occasional reference to others who in the past made similar claims about the conditions of competition. I conclude that Kretchmar’s claims are mistaken. (shrink)

Some decades before Umberto Eco refounded semiotics in the sixties, Alfred Schutz had already elaborated a theory on signs and symbols. Moreover, as Schutz himself affirms, neither was he the first to do so. The thoughts of Charles Sanders Peirce had already clearly influenced American pragmatism, and thinkers like George Herbert Mead and Ernst Cassirer had developed a theory of symbols, both referred to by Schutz in his later works. Nonetheless, sign theory was already present in his first book, Der (...) sinnhafte Aufbau der sozialen Welt, and can be traced to the influence of Edmund Husserl. Schutz’s focus on the analysis of the relationship between individual and society fomented his perception of the importance of intermediary communication and sign processes as the setting and interpretation of signs, “Zeichensetzung und Zeichendeutung”, reflections that in his later working phase resulted in a proper sign theory, which is analyzed in the following article. Based on Husserl’s concept of pairing, Schutz here develops his theory of appresentational references, comprising a subdivision of: marks, indications, signs and symbols. This involves the concept of representation, a relationship between the signifier and the signified, and a subjective as well as constructive interpretation by actors. Consequently, this concept involves an objective sign system, a social situation and, as inserted into a process of communication, complementary producers and receptors of signs and symbols. In the final comments the question is addressed whether, and in what sense, given the preceding theory of appresentational references, Schutz would hold that reality is a symbolic construction, as proposes the title of the 2016 conference on Schutz in Tokyo, The Symbolic Construction of Reality. (shrink)

Politics presupposes an understanding of meaning in history, according to which it manages the actions that accord with or serve this meaning (as an ultimate good). The aim of this paper is to examine the process by which meaning in history is formed, as well as its character. To do this, I employ suitably modified phenomenological analyses of intentional consciousness to bring them as close as possible to the thematic of the psychoanalytic unconscious. I first try to sketch the basis (...) on which the modern problem of meaning in history arises and the fundamental responses produced by modern philosophy. Then, I delineate two basic understandings of meaning in history as developed by the founders of Phenomenology, Husserl and Heidegger, which are surprisingly close to those of modern metaphysics. Next, I draft the process by which the topic of the unconscious surfaces in the context of difficulties faced by critical epistemology in its effort to penetrate the unperceivable folds of reality, which should be acknowledged as a precondition of experience but also of action and ethics. After this, a brief phenomenological account regarding action and praxis in response to evil is presented as a specific concretization of this philosophy after its vaccination with the thematic of the unconscious. Next, I examine MerleauPonty’s final, although ultimately failed, attempt to construct a phenomenological proof of the possibility of objective knowledge regarding historical meaning. In addition, I consider how persistent maintenance of the ideologically optimistic reading of history simply concocts political action that crucially exposes humanity to the danger of perpetrating what Arendt called “banal evil.” The question, then, is whether Phenomenology can offer a non-nihilistic understanding of existence, action, and events in history. I argue that a cautious non-Marxist and de-Messianized reinterpretation of Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1940), in tandem with an Aristotelian analysis of praxis and Kantian-Arendtian “common sense,” offers a sober, perspectivist, realistic understanding of the place of humans in the cosmos and of the historical course we happen to take in it. (shrink)

This article examines Bourdieu’s adoption of Husserl’s concept of ‘doxa’ and argues that Bourdieu’s reading of Husserl overpolarizes doxa and reflexivity. The article argues that there is a need for Bourdieusian sociology to adopt a more complex interpretation of Husserlian phenomenology in order to understand the potential range of states of consciousness between doxa and reflexivity. In contrast to Bourdieu’s reading of Husserl, this article argues that the philosophical underlabouring for an adequate understanding of doxa is now available within recent (...) Husserlian studies which marks a radical development from earlier readings in the ‘sociology of consciousness’. (shrink)

This article presents a phenomenological perspective on the “virtual organisation” where people are obliged to work at a distance and where contact with others is limited to that of an electronic network. Drawing on Husserl, we see that when the “as-if ” presence is contrived in such a way, the organisation obstructs the life of consciousness. Furthermore, relying on Michel Henry’s writings, we explain how removing the parameter of “flesh” as a factor structuring encounters, this organizational form profoundly restricts the (...) dynamism of the acting, subjective life. (shrink)

A frequent accusation directed at phenomenology and phenomenologically oriented sociology is that of power oblivion. Edmund Husserl’s phenomenologyis accused of not considering the social conditions of the possibility of the doxic experience of the world, and Alfred Schutz’s social phenomenology is blamed for neglecting the social structural preconditions of the experience of everyday reality. Based on this criticism, it is argued that the objectively given power structures, which influence the subjective experience, are not considered in Schutz’s social phenomenological reflections. Bourdieu (...) proclaims that the experience of the social world as being self-evident, as “taken for granted” in Schutz’s words, is taken into consideration without a reference to social conditions such as hierarchies of power. I will reject this reproach by demonstrating the specific potential of Schutz’s theory of the life-world and especially his theory of relevance to conceptualize the phenomenon of power with reference to the subjectivity of the individual actor. The theory of life-world offers a conceptual scheme with a specific capacity to capture theoretically the interrelation of subjective constitution and objective construction of power. (shrink)

Husserl’s theories, which systematise the role of reflection and consciousness, can be used to give an alternative view of organisational evolution as the flow of presence punctuated by absence. This perspective adopts a contrasting approach to that of the poststructuralist. A synthesis of the Identity metaphor with the theory of strategy allows us to contextualise an application of Husserl’s theory of the epoche and link both ontological and epistemic dimensions in a theory of organisation. The firm is seen as acquiring (...) a temporal dimension through the consciousness of strategic policy and its successive images are modelled as analogous with the epoche. This modelling process also links in with the collective belief system of the organisational paradigm, which is represented to the organisation and unfolded extrinsically as a series of images which are the discernible face of Strategic policy. This facilitates a modified social-constructivism which is better able to accommodate the actuality of organisational development than more extreme process-orientated accounts of organisation. A debate is re-opened on these themes which have influenced organisation studies from a philosophical slant. (shrink)

Alfred Schütz is often credited with providing sociology with a firm ground derived from phenomenology of science and justifying it as a science operating within natural attitude. Although his project of social science draws extensively on Edmund Husserl’s theory of attitudes, it would be incorrect to assume that Schütz shares with the founder of phenomenology his conception of science. This paper compares Husserl’s and Schütz’s views on the structure and meaning of science and traces the roots of their radical divergence. (...) Whereas Husserl increasingly emphasises the importance of phenomenological reduction for the genuine human science, Schütz eventually rejects reduction and restricts the social science to a specific system of relevancies within the reality of the lifeworld. This paper presents the argument that Schütz’s conception eliminates the possibility of a phenomenological justification of social science, as it implies that there are no rationally justifiable grounds to pursue science. In this way, Schütz’s views substantially differ from the phenomenological theory of science and become open to the phenomenological critique of naivety. (shrink)

This essay makes two claims. The first, exegetical, point shows that there are Husserlian elements in Gadamer’s hermeneutics that are usually overlooked. The second, systematic, claim takes issue with the fact that Gadamer saw himself in alliance with the project of the later Heidegger. It would have been more fruitful had Gadamer aligned himself with Husserl and the enlightenment tradition. following Heidegger in his concept of “effective history,” Gadamer risks betraying the main tenets of the enlightenment by shifting the weight (...) from subjectivity to effective history as the “agent” in history. This is not a wholesale dismissal of Gadamer’s project, however. The problem in Gadamer’s effective history can be remedied by insisting, with Husserl, on the subjective character of effective history. Gadamer was right to criticize Husserl’s idea of a transcendental genesis, but went too far in giving up the idea of human subjectivity as the agent in history. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper presents Husserl’s concept of Europe as a postulate of phenomenological reason. I begin by showing that a certain interpretation of history is necessary in order for phenomenology to be possible as science. I then show how Husserl’s concept of Europe enables this interpretation. Working with a general definition of postulation that brings Husserl into conversation with Kant, I examine the motives and truth conditions for asserting that Europe is what Husserl claims it to be. I highlight the critical (...) import of Husserl’s concept by identifying three criteria it establishes for authentically European history: denationalization, renaissance and Europeanization. I conclude by considering the inherently controversial nature of “Europe” and outline the space for a contest of concepts that would serve the same theoretical–practical function. (shrink)

It is well known that Husserl and Foucault use the striking phrase “the historical apriori” at certain key points in their work. Yet most commentators agree that the two thinkers mean very different things by this expression, and the question is why these two authors would employ the same terms for such different purposes. Instead of pursuing this question directly I want to look from a broader perspective at the views of history that are reflected in the different uses of (...) this expression. Husserl and Foucault may be said to represent teleological and anti-teleological views of history respectively. Foucault often says that phenomenology represents the view to which he is most opposed, and in most of these remarks it is the subject-centered character of phenomenology to which he most objects. But I think he also sees Husserl as the latest representative of a teleological view of history and of knowledge that descends from Hegel and the enlightenment and is characteristic of modernity as a whole. Foucault’s work mounts a full-scale attack on this view of history, and this is one of the ways in which Foucault’s thought contrasts with Husserl’s. I argue that Foucault’s view is anti-teleological rather than simply non-teleological, since almost invariably he develops his view by uprooting the assumptions of his opponents. At the end of the paper I come back to the expression “historical apriori,” as used by Husserl and Foucault, and discuss it briefly in light of what I have said. (shrink)

This paper outlines an approach for comparing Edmund Husserl’s late historical-teleological reflections in the Crisis of the European Sciences with Michel Foucault’s archaeology of discursive formations in his Archaeology of Knowledge, with a particular emphasis on the notion of an “historical apriori.” The argument is that each conception of historical reflection complements the other by opening up a depth dimension that moves beyond the traditional limits of the philosophy of history. In Husserl, the concept of the lifeworld fixes the parameters (...) of a “deep history” as the horizon of anonymous subjective comportment, while in Foucault the concept of the archive delimits an alternative deep history of the anonymous production of discursive formations. Together, Husserl and Foucault represent two important moments of the radicalization of the theme of history in twentieth century philosophy, one seeking to extend the limits of transcendental philosophy, the other contesting the domain of the transcendental altogether. (shrink)

I defend three claims regarding Foucault’s historical a priori and the intelligibility of history that counter commonly received accounts of Husserl’s approach to the same. First, Foucault is not a transcendental thinker in the Kantian sense of the term. His use of the HP is contingent, postdictive, regional and hypothetical. Second, the three “axes” of the dyads knowledge/truth, power/government, and subjectivation/ethics along with Foucault’s “history of the present” enclose a space called “experience” Erfahrung as nonreflective and “freed from inner life.” (...) At this point, “experience” and “multiplicity” coalesce to confirm Foucault’s anti-phenomenological bias and nominalist commitment. Finally, the relations of transformation and displacement that define archaeological change support a “fittingness” between the epistemes in question. Neither necessitating nor aleatory, their relation could be called “aesthetic” in a broad sense. I conclude by listing ways Husserl’s approach to historical intelligibility is the inverse of Foucault’s. (shrink)

In this paper I explore Husserl’s and Foucault’s approaches to the historical a priori and defend Husserl’s richer notion. Foucault borrows the expression ‘historical a priori’ from Husserl and there are continuities, but also significant and ultimately irreconcilable differences, between their conceptions. Both are looking for ‘conditions of possibility,’ forms of ‘institution’ or instauration, and patterns of transformation, for scientific knowledge. Husserl identifies the ‘a priori of history’ with the ‘historical a priori’ and believes that the ‘invariant essential structures of (...) the historical world’ can be identified. Foucault, on the other hand, is less interested in the Kantian inquiry into the limits or legitimization of knowledge than in the relation between knowledge and power. Foucault rejects the idea of universal and necessary a priori structures and denies that the structure of the conceptual framework governing an era can be fully determined. Both Foucault and Husserl contrast ‘inner’ history with external history, but, I argue, Foucault misconstrues Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology as a form of ‘absolute subjectivity’ against which his ‘archaeological’ method reacts. In fact, Foucault’s own conception of the historical a priori is ambiguous and fails to have explanatory value precisely because it misunderstands the need for the a priori to be both universal and necessary, and offers no account of the ‘a priori of historicity’ which, for Husserl, is essential to human cultural life. (shrink)

Frank Welz's "Kritik der Lebenswelt" undertakes a sociology of knowledge criticism of the work of Edmund Husserl and Alfred Schutz that construes them as developing absolutist, egological systems opposed to the "processual" worldview prominent since the modern rise of natural science. Welz, though, misunderstands the work of Schutz and Husserl and neglects how their focus on consciousness and eidetic features pertains to the kind of reflection that one must undertake if one would avoid succumbing to absolutism, that uncovers the presuppositions (...) of the processual worldview itself, and that secures a domain distinctive of philosophy over against sociology. Finally, Welz's charge that Schutz favors a Neo-Kantian social scientific methodology contradictory to his phenomenology neglects the levels of Schutz's discourse and ignores how the Weberian ideal-typical approach can be subsumed within phenomenology. (shrink)

In discussing the fractious relationship between phenomenology and social theory, this chapter argues that a phenomenological social theory has developed. Of particular import is the work of Edmund Husserl. His "intentionality" of consciousness, insight regarding lived experience and the "intuition of essences," and conception of the need for modalization support a phenomenological social theory. Husserl's phenomenology also encompasses the ideas of embodiment, temporality, and intersubjectivity. Despite the relevance of phenomenology to sociological theory, it has been largely ignored by sociologists and (...) social theorists. Meanwhile, Husserl has been criticized by phenomenologists such as Martin Heidegger and Gabriel Marcel. What must be understood by these theorists, however, is that the significance of phenomenology -- rather than its assumptions -- is what must be evaluated. (shrink)

Contributions from an international team of experts revisit and update the concept of linguistic ecology in order to critically examine current theoretical approaches to language contact. Language is understood as a part of complex socio-historical-cultural systems, and interaction between the different dimensions and levels of these systems is considered to be essential for specific language forms. This book presents a uniform, abstract model of linguistic ecology based on, among other things, two concepts of Edmund Husserl's philosophy. It considers the individual (...) speaker in the specific communication situation to be the essential heuristic basis of linguistic analysis. The chapters present and employ a new, transparent and accessible contact linguistic vocabulary to aid reader comprehension, and explore a wide range of language contact situations in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, Asia and the Pacific. This book will be fascinating reading for students and researchers across contact linguistics and cultural studies. (shrink)

Th is paper attempts to examine history in the framework of Edmund Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology and Alfred Schutz’s constitutive phenomenology of the natural attitude. Significant similarities regarding the analysis of the lifeworld, its historical character, and the levels of this development will be shown in order to highlight the importance of the complementation that can be found in Schutz’s descriptions. Whereas Husserl’s furnishes signifi cant ideas dealing with, so to speak, a longitudinal or horizontal plane of history that involves the (...) successive moments of establishment, sedimentation, and teleological reestablishment of meaning, Schutz’s main contributions concern themselves with, as it were, a transversal or vertical plane that entails the simultaneous systems of thematic, interpretative, and motivational relevance. The intersection of both structures leads to an enrichment of the analysis of history insofar as the types of relevance help to clarify and develop further the moments described by Husserl. Examples taken from the history of philosophy will off er an illustration. Finally, reference is made to the interdependence of moments and relevances in view of the problem of the continuity of history. (shrink)

In the field of philosophy of history, the problem of historical representation has become one of the central points of interest during the past few decades. Through the publication of Hayden White’s influential Metahistory , Louis Mink’s studies of the narrative form, and recent openings in the so-called “new philosophy of history” , we have witnessed a new interest in the questions of narrativity and emplotment—that is, the ways in which historical knowledge is constructed through the creative activity of the (...) historian. Although history deals with facts and real events, it is argued, this past reality is always given to us in a certain narrative form: historical explanation cannot merely employ universally valid causal laws because it concerns particular beings—humans, groups, institutions—and their intentions, which are bound to unique circumstances and contexts. Further, history is not just about facts or general ideas but involves an element .. (shrink)

With the advent of Postmodernism, the recent discussions in Continental thought has called into question the philosophy of the Subject, particularly the Cartesian “cogito” and the related method of reflection. One of the important ramifications of these questioning of the reflective subject is to do with the phenomenological doctrine of intentionality of consciousness. Recently, David Carr, himself a phenomenologist, has advanced a serious objection to the phenomenological approach to social reality. In what follows, I will be attempting a defence of (...) phenomenology against criticisms like Carr’s. (shrink)

Chiedersi “come fare fenomenologia” – superando la domanda “che cos’è la fenomenologia” – significa riflettere su di essa non solo come metodo di indagine filosofico, ma anche come approccio metodologico nell’ambito delle scienze umane.Molti sono gli approcci fenomenologici che offrono al ricercatore una metodologia e una serie di strumenti per fare ricerca. Come ricercatori qualitativi è importante interrogarsi in che modo si possa studiare, analizzare e descrivere l’esperienza umana da una prospettiva di tipo fenomenologico. Questo articolo, che introduce uno speciale (...) sul metodo descrittivo fenomenologico di Amedeo Giorgi, cerca di chiarire in che modo la fenomenologia – più specificatamente quella husserliana – possa guidare il ricercatore qualitativo nella riflessione e nell’elaborazione dei dati, intesi essi come “segni” del fenomeno sotto indagine. Alla ricerca della realtà e rifiutando costantemente la Verità, la fenomenologia offre la sua attenzione ai fenomeni, anzi alle esperienze che i soggetti hanno degli stessi fenomeni.Asking “how to do phenomenology” – beyond the question “What is phenomenology” – means not only reflect upon it as a method of philosophical inquiry, but also as a methodological approach in human sciences. Many phenomenological approaches offer a methodology and a set of tools for the research. As qualitative researchers, is important to ask how we can study, analyze and describe the human experience from a phenomenological perspective. This article introduces a special issue on Giorgi’s descriptive phenomenological method, highlighting how phenomenology – more specifically Husserlian one – could guide the qualitative researcher in reflection and in data processing; in fact, data are as “signs” of phenomenon under investigation. Seeking reality and constantly denying the Truth, phenomenology offers its attention to phenomena, better to the experiences that people have of phenomena. (shrink)

This study, originally published in 1977, focuses on a critical examination of the life-work of Alfred Schutz, the most important and influential ‘father’ of several recent schools of empirical social research. The author shows why Shutz and his followers fail in their attempts to ‘humanize’ empirical social science. The problems they encounter, he argues, are due to their attempt to achieve a methodological synthesis of self-determining subjectivity and empirical criteria of validation, based on Schutz’s heuristic adoption of relevant ideas from (...) Weber and Husserl. This is, in effect, an artificial union of subjectivity and objectivity – their ‘dual vision’ – that satisfies neither phenomenological nor naturalist perspectives. Dr Gorman suggests that the radical implications of phenomenology must lead to a consistent, socially-conscious method of inquiry, and, in a final chapter, he re-defines the methodological implications of phenomenology with the aid of existential and Marxist categories. (shrink)

This dissertation is about the essence of war. War has a dual nature---it is both a physical and cognitive phenomenon. It includes physical objects such as soldiers, tanks, aircraft, and bombs. It also includes physical processes such as tactical maneuvers, battles, and campaigns. However, it also has a non-physical side derived from the cognitive operations of the participants. This includes the soldiers, planners, and countrymen . How wars are planned for, carried out, and even just thought of results in the (...) cognitive features. It is this side of war I will analyze in the following dissertation. ;Furthermore, this dissertation is about the invariant features of war. In what follows I will elucidate what is constant in war---i.e. what is not subject to change regardless of technological, cultural, and political changes. To do this I apply the eidetic reduction to warfare. Husserl's eidetic reduction helps us to analyze objects and events by removing the temporally relative facts and elucidating the essential features of the remainder---i.e. the Husserlian phenomenologist is after the eidos, or essence, of that which is observed. This includes the technique of imaginative variation, wherein one analyzes an object or phenomenon from different perspectives, e.g. if we were to analyze a thousand wars, we would be able to identify those features that are constant or essential. ;The eidetic reduction in the case of war results in a stratified ontology, with similarities to Ingarden's analysis of literary works of art. His analysis of these abstract artifacts takes into account the supervening qualities of human intentional states upon physical features. Furthermore, Ingarden's concept of stratification applies to wars, governments, fraternities, congressional sessions, and tracts of real estate alike.His analysis is relevant because literary works maintain a dual nature. That is to say, we consider them to be abstract artifacts with both physical and cognitive features. Ingarden calls the literary work of art a "stratified polyphonic harmony." The goal then is to show how the different strata of war make up one whole. (shrink)

This dissertation demonstrates the need for a new theoretical framework for interpreting television texts and for limiting relativism in the interest of reliability. Being an exploration of the antinomies between structural determinism and genetic freedom, this project traced the debate to Kant and Hume. Several schools of interpretive thought were critically investigated for a possible solution to relativism including; de Saussure's semiotics, Jakobson's formalism, Levi-Strauss' structuralism, Chomsky's transformational grammar, Husserl's phenomenology, Heidegger's Dasein analytics, Wittgenstein's logical analyses, Gadamer and Ricoeur's respective (...) versions of philosophical hermeneutics, Apel and Habermas' theories of communicative pragmatics, Barthes' global semantization, and Derrida's grammatology. Aspects of these approaches that offered some potential for limiting the crisis of conflicting interpretations and illegitimation were synthesized for the first time with Gebser's pluralistic phenomenology and McLuhan's theory of electronic media. Several advertisements were analyzed in order to illustrate the problem. Gebser's phenomenological analysis of multiple consciousness structures was demonstrated to be a partial solution to the absurd nihilism of unchecked skepticism. Gadamer's theory of self-critically presenting prejudices in the Heideggerian tradition of authentic being was shown to have a powerful convergence with Gebser's notion of "presentation." The valuable insights of these two approaches to relativism were tempered by an analysis of their respective logocentric biases. The goal of this dissertation was to demonstrate that relativism can and must be limited in the interest of all communicative and scientific projects, that a distinction can be made between blind and enabling prejudices thus defeating the determinism of hegemonic communicative strategies. Gebser's radical temporalization of genetic ontology was shown to be in accord with Husserl's analyses of internal time-consciousness, and a complement to Gadamer's notion of the fundamentally temporal nature of effective-historical consciousness. The linguisticality of world was grounded by Husserl's phenomenology and developed to accommodate a limited, rational pluralism by the application of Gebser's work. Thus an intelligible pluralism is offered as a solution to the absurd infinite regression postulated by Derrida and the intolerant paradox of Foucault's claim to absolutely know that one cannot know. (shrink)

This treatise argues that "rationalism" and "individualism," two metaphysical frameworks of modern thought, have affected sociology in its effort to understand man in relation to society. Sociology has failed to reconcile its objective view of social structure and its subjective image of individual action. ;The thought of major philosophers of the 20th century is examined in order to consider possible resolutions of this problem. This examination includes Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger and Wittgenstein, who see contradictions as due not to the inherent (...) nature of the object of human studies but to the dualist epistemology of modern metaphysics. Husserl and Merleau-Ponty demonstrate a way to overcome dualism by examining "phenomena" directly given to sensibility and tracing them to the lived meaning which constitutes the human world and the basis of all knowledge. Heidegger and Wittgenstein, on the other hand, argue that the phenomenal world is linguistically constituted in communicative activities. Their linguistic philosophy provides a possibility for overcoming both subjectivism and rationalism. ;Major sociological theorists are then examined to see how their thought has dealt with these same issues. They include Dilthey, Scheler and Mannheim, all of whom opposed the individualist position separating individuals from society and proposed an interpretive methodology and a sociology of knowledge for treating the individual, culture and knowledge as a unity, historically developed and developing. Weber, Simmel, Durkheim and Marcuse are shown, by contrast, to have conceived individuality as the loftiest value of Western civilization and developed divergent critiques of society. Schutz, through a phenomenological sociology, and Garfinkel, in ethnomethodology, are considered critical of the metaphysical framework of conventional sociology. ;This treatise aims to clarify how meaning and the understanding of action have become de-subjectivated, particularly as exemplified in the approaches of phenomenological sociology and ethnomethodology which may offer an alternative to sociology's entanglement with individualism and rationalism. (shrink)

Phenomenology is increasingly proposed along with critical theory as a theoretical framework for social sciences faced with the collapse of positivism. Yet Husserl's transcendental phenomenology provides the reflexivity human sciences require at the cost of a Cartesian ontology. Even in his work on the life-world, Husserl's subject is absolute and constituting. Thus he models intersubjectivity on shifts of standpoint between transcendental and everyday perspectives. He avoids positivism, but makes sociality a product of the transcendental ego. To avoid this, Schutz applies (...) Husserl's language, but not his ontology. Merleau-Ponty's existential phenomenology subordinates the transcendental to the lived world, rather than the reverse. The Logos of phenomena is itself a phenomenon, as is consciousness, which thus has no privileged status. Rather than the self-experience of Husserl or Descartes, phenomenology turns to reflexivity in the life-world. Perception for Merleau-Ponty is a reversibility of the world's flesh, a fold of phenomena back upon themselves. His phenomenology does not collapse the subject-object dialectic into the former to counter positivism's collapse of it into the latter. All objects are objects for a subject, but the subject is a reflexive object. This reforms subject-object and subject-other subject dialectics. In the lived world, the subject is not constituting or constituted but instituted and instituting. In a world no less social than natural, subjective perspectives arise within intercorporeity and interperspectivality, both instituted by centripetal social forces and instituting them as sediments of their centrifugal acts. Subjectivity and social being are correlative and the dialectic of instituted and instituting is irreducible. In social science theory, neither individuals nor groups have explanatory priority if the personal and social are co-primordial. In political theory, neither liberalism's stress on class commitment nor Marxism's emphasis on class position suffice alone if social being is always a dialectic of both. Existential phenomenology yields a post-Cartesian ontology and thus renews and reforms theory of social science and political theory as well. (shrink)

Este artículo trata sobre los horizontes de la eficacia histórica y la comprensión en la fenomenología de Husserl. El autor comienza considerando el marco que ofrece el análisis de Gadamer de los tres modos de llegar a un acuerdo con las tradiciones, es decir, la metodología generalizadora, la conciencia histórica singularizadora, y la exposición de la conciencia efectiva de la historia. A continuación pasa a describir cómo Husserl se basa en las ideas de Dilthey, y argumenta que el punto principal (...) de partida se encuentra en el concepto de nexo de eficacia. Por último, se realiza un intento por mostrar el punto de vista de Husserl sobre los tres niveles en el camino hacia la experiencia hermenéutica. Se recuerda que Gadamer se refiere a una línea clara que va desde los conceptos de la síntesis pasiva y la intencionalidad anónima hasta la experiencia hermenéutica. Al examinar lo que está involucrado en los horizontes de la eficacia, los horizontes de comprensión, las tipicidades de acceso, las fusiones de mundos familiares y extraños, y los movimientos en zigzag a lo largo de las tradiciones, el trabajo concluye que Husserl se ha preocupado mucho por la noción de una conciencia expuesta ante la eficacia de la historia. This paper deals with the horizons of historical effectiveness and understanding in Husserl’s phenomenology. The author begins by considering the framework afforded by Gadamer’s analyses of the three modes of coming to terms with traditions, i.e., generalizing methodology, singularizing historical consciousness, and exposure of consciousness to effective-history. He then goes on to outline how Husserl draws on Dilthey’s ideas, and argues that a main point of departure is to be found in the notion of nexus of effectiveness. Finally, an attempt is made to show Husserl’s views on the three levels in the way to hermeneutic experience. It is recalled that Gadamer refers to a clear line that leads from the concepts of pasive synthesis and anonymous intentionality to hermeneutic experience. By examining what is involved in horizons of effectiveness, horizons of understanding, access-typicalities, fusions of homeworlds and alienworlds, and zigzag movements throughout traditions, the paper concludes that Husserl has concerned himself a great deal with the notion of a consciousness exposed to the effectiveness of history. (shrink)