Lester Embree is very concerned with the issue of culture in his philosophical thinking. Besides his preoccupation with the cultural disciplines, he explores the notions of culture in Schutz and Gurwitsch. He even brings up the term “phenomenology of culture.” With inspirations from Embree, the present paper intends to explore culture as a phenomenological theme. Starting with elaboration on the concept of cultural object in both Husserl and Schutz, the paper focuses on the question of cultural difference and universalism. I (...) contend that despite apparent differences between Schutz and Husserl, there is close positioning between them. In the final part of my paper, I make a deeper reflection on the problem of cultural difference.Lester Embree está muy preocupado con el tema de la cultura en su pensamiento filosófico. Además de su preocupación por las disciplinas culturales, explora las nociones de cultura en Schutz y Gurwitsch. Incluso menciona el término "fenomenología de la cultura". Con inspiraciones de Embree, el presente documento pretende explorar la cultura como un tema fenomenológico. Comenzando con la elaboración del concepto de objeto cultural tanto en Husserl como en Schutz, el artículo se centra en la cues-tión de la diferencia cultural y el universalismo. Sostengo que a pesar de las aparentes diferencias entre Schutz y Husserl, existe un posicionamiento cercano entre ellos. En la parte final de mi trabajo, hago una reflexión más profunda sobre el problema de la diferencia cultural. (shrink)

This article applies Waldenfels’ responsive phenomenology to the field of history. It suggests interpreting historical experience along the lines of the logic of pathos and response. Using Husserl’s introductory chapter of The Crisis of the European Sciences and his autobiographical remarks as a case study, the article outlines a concept of diachronic responsiveness, which provides a phenomenological understanding of historical phenomena such as legacy, inheritance or witnessing. In particular, it analyses the temporal deferment lying at the heart of our notion (...) of legacy, which Waldenfels captures as ‘diastasis’. Assuming that the human being must be understood as the ‘responsive being’ (Waldenfels), the article provides means to grasp the implications of this claim for our understanding of the concept of historical experience in contrast to approaches relying on hermeneutics or narrativity. (shrink)

In The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, Husserl argues that the only way to respond to the scientific Krisis of which he speaks is with phenomenological reflections on the history, method, and task of philosophy. On the assumption that an accurate diagnosis of a malady is a necessary condition for an effective remedy, this paper aims to formulate a precise concept of the Krisis of the European sciences with which Husserl operates in this work. Thus it seeks (...) an answer to the question: What exactly, according to Husserl, is “the ‘crisis’ [Krisis] of the European sciences”? There are two different tendencies in the literature on this question. According to the traditional interpretation, the Krisis of the European sciences lies not in the inadequacy of their scientificity but in the loss of their meaningfulness for life. According to an innovative suggestion, the Krisis lies not in the loss of their meaningfulness for life but in the inadequacy of their scientificity. These readings are mutually exclusive because each claims that the other misidentifies the Krisis as something that it is not. The argument of this paper, however, is that, given the many different senses of Krisis in The Crisis, an adequate understanding of the Krisis that Husserl identifies requires not a disjunctive but an inclusive approach. Therefore the paper proposes that Husserl’s Krisis of the European sciences is both a crisis of their scientificity and a crisis of their meaningfulness for life. The relevance of this result to Husserl’s philosophical and historical sense-investigations in The Crisis—as well as to the present critical situation of philosophy—is self-evident. (shrink)

Husserl has often stood accused of Eurocentrism given his disquieting coupling of philosophy as universal science with Europe. And yet, however much this accusation has clouded the appeal of transcendental phenomenology, the nature of this charge remains obscure: whether Husserl’s chauvinism is merely a personal opinion punctuating his writing or is instead closely connected to the methods of phenomenology has been left unexplored. This paper offers itself as a corrective, looking to get a clearer picture of how precisely Eurocentrism afflicts (...) transcendental phenomenology. The overarching aim of doing so is to chart the possibilities for the development of a non-Eurocentric, decolonial phenomenological thinking which exploits the enduring appeal of Husserl’s commitment to presuppositionlessness. The first part of the paper considers the relationship between the phenomenological reduction and eidetic variation, showing that, by Husserl’s own lights, phenomenological science seeks to expel all forms of prejudice. Part two, however, shows that the entrance of Eurocentrism into phenomenology is not simply accidental, in two distinct senses. The first, which takes off from Merleau-Ponty’s (implicit) critique of Husserl, argues that Husserl in his late work is insufficiently attentive to the empirical dimension: Eurocentrism thus stems from the overly transcendental emphases of this project and its inability to engage with concrete human diversity. The second draws on Derrida’s (explicit) critique of Husserl, arguing that it is precisely the admission of concrete historico-cultural facts into phenomenology that compromises the universal by identifying it with the particularities of Europe. I thus show that Eurocentrism does indeed insinuate itself in Husserl’s methods—_not_, however, in a manner that renders transcendental phenomenology irredeemable. Given the opposition between these two insightful criticisms, however, I argue that the challenge for a decolonial vision of phenomenology is formidable. (shrink)

In this article, I will discuss the Husserlian phenomenology of animality, by focusing on several texts of the 1920s in which the animal is determined as an abnormal variation of the human being. My aim is to address the question of the abnormality of the animal by reintegrating it in its original context, which is Husserl’s theory of normality. I will sketch the general framework of this theory, its articulations and strata, in order to eventually raise some paradoxical issues, specifically (...) in relation to how the question of animality is interpreted through the couple normality/abnormality. (shrink)

Objections to the computational theory of cognition, inspired by twentieth century phenomenology, have tended to fixate on the embodiment and embeddedness of intelligence. In this paper I reconstruct a line of argument that focusses primarily on the abstract nature of scientific models, of which computational models of the brain are one sort. I observe that the critique of scientific abstraction was rather commonplace in the philosophy of the 1920s and 30s and that attention to it aids the reading of The (...) Organism ([1934] 1939) by the neurologist Kurt Goldstein. With this background in place, we see that some brief but spirited criticisms of cybernetics by two later thinkers much influenced by Goldstein, Georges Canguilhem (1963) and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1961), show continuity with the earlier discussions of abstraction in science. (shrink)

This article examines the mutual influence between Ernst Cassirer and his cousin, the neurologist Kurt Goldstein. For both Cassirer and Goldstein, views on the nature of human cognition were fundamental to their understanding of scientific knowledge, and these were informed by both philosophical theorizing and empirical research on pathologies of the nervous system. Following Cassirer, and in agreement with the physicalism of the Vienna Circle, Goldstein held that the physical sciences had progressed by arriving at abstract, mathematical representations to take (...) the place of qualitative characterizations of observable reality. In tension with physicalism, Goldstein was not sanguine about the fruitfulness of the abstractive approach in biology. He proposed that biology must adhere to its own sui generis methods of observation and experimentation in order to obtain knowledge of the “natures” of living organisms. I argue that there is a parallel with Cassirer’s assertion of the differences between physical and cultural sciences, underwritten by the deployment of varying symbolic functions. I also propose that the neurological writings of Goldstein are an important backdrop to Cassirer’s positive evaluation of abstract thought, in contrast to the pessimism regarding a worldview dominated by scientific abstractions expressed by philosophers such as Bergson, Whitehead, and Husserl. (shrink)