This chapter offers an overview of the philosophy of Robert S. Sokolowski with a focus on his account of what philosophy is, how philosophy arises out of pre-philosophical life, and how it is related back to pre-philosophical life. It also situates Sokolowsk’s achievements in articulating the relationship between Husserlian phenomenology and modern and pre-modern styles of philosophizing.

This article is composed of three sections that investigate the epistemological foundations of Husserl’s idea of logic from the Logical Investigations . First, it shows the general structure of this logic. Husserl conceives of logic as a comprehensive, multi-layered theory of possible theories that has its most fundamental level in a doctrine of meaning. This doctrine aims to determine the elementary categories that constitute every possible meaning (meaning-categories). The second section presents the main idea of Husserl’s search for an epistemological (...) foundation for knowledge, science and logic. Their epistemological clarification can only be reached through a detailed analysis of the structure of those intentions that give us what is meant in our intentions. To reveal the intuitive giveness of logical forms is the ultimate aim of Husserl’s epistemology of logic. Logical forms and meaning-categories can only be given in a certain higher-order intuition that Husserl calls categorical intuition. The third section of this article distinguishes different kinds of categorical intuition and shows how the most basic logical categories and concepts are given to us in a categorical abstraction. (shrink)

Technology always provides a new perception of the world. However, it is not clear when technology produces “mere” new informations and when it provides something more such as a production of new objects in our world which start to “live” around us. The aim of this paper is to study how technology shapes our surrounding world. The questions which we are going to answer are: Is it really adding new objects to our world? If yes, does every technology have this (...) potentiality? We are going to tackle the problem using a phenomenological and post-phenomenological approach focussing our attention on the perceptual level. Using Husserl’s philosophy we will study how technology are deeply involved in our perception and, thanks to post-phenomenology and its concept of “embodiment relations,” we will be able to determine which kind of technologies have the potentiality to change our surrounding world introducing and producing new objects in it. (shrink)

An argument is made for the relevance of phenomenological hermeneutics to economics, with special attention to recent debates on hermeneutics among economists of the Austrian school of Ludwig von Mises and F. A. Hayek. Hermeneutics is explicated in the context of Husserlian phenomenology, with special attention to phenomenology's Aristotelian roots. Naive and methodological forms of ?objectivism?; are contrasted with hermeneutics, which recovers the horizons of scientific knowledge: the whole, and the activities of the human knower. Finally, the charges that hermeneutics (...) entails pernicious forms of relativism and historicism are confronted. (shrink)

The notion of the absolute time-constituting flow plays a central role in Edmund Husserl’s analysis of our consciousness of time. I offer a novel reading of Husserl’s remarks on the absolute flow, on which Husserl can be seen to be grappling with two key intuitions that are still at the centre of current debates about temporal experience. One of them is encapsulated by what is sometimes referred to as an intentionalist (as opposed to an extensionalist) approach to temporal experience. The (...) other centres on the thought that temporal experience itself necessarily unfolds over time. I show how some of Husserl’s more enigmatic-sounding remarks about the absolute flow become intelligible if they are read as attempts to accommodate both these intuitions at the same time. However, I also question whether Husserl ultimately provides good reasons for preferring his intentionalist approach to a rival extensionalist one. (shrink)

Variants of the slogan that a succession of experiences does not amount to an experience of succession are commonplace in the philosophical literature on temporal experience. I distinguish three quite different arguments that might be captured using this slogan: the individuation argument, the unity argument, and the causal argument. Versions of the unity and the causal argument are often invoked in support of a particular view of the nature of temporal experience sometimes called intentionalism, and against a rival view sometimes (...) called extensionalism. I examine these arguments in light of the individuation argument. In particular, I show that the individuation argument is, at least prima facie, neutral between those two views of temporal experience; and once the individuation argument is in place, the unity and causal argument also lose their force against extensionalism. (shrink)

Addressing Walter Hopp’s original application of the distinction between agent-fallibility and method-fallibility to phenomenological inquiry concerning epistemic justification, I question whether these are the only two forms of fallibility that are useful or whether there are not also others that are needed. In doing so, I draw my inspiration from Husserl, who in the beginnings of his phenomenological investigations struggled with the distinction between noetic and noematic analyses. For example, in the Preface to the Second Edition of the Logical Investigations (...) he criticizes the First Investigation as having been “one-sidedly” noetically directed and as having thus neglected the noematic aspects of meaning (XVIII 13–14). Also, in an addendum to the Fifth Investigation he notes that in the transition from the First Edition to the Second he has learned to broaden the concept of “phenomenological content” to include not only the “real” ( reell ) contents (noetic, subjective) of consciousness but also the “intentional” (noematic, objective) (XIX/1 411). The fact that, in gradually moving from consciousness (noesis) to what consciousness is of (noema), Husserl struggled with this distinction is an indication of the immensity of the perplexing problems and potential solutions that Hopp has led the phenomenology of knowledge into by introducing his useful notions of agent-fallibility and method-fallibility. Like Husserl, he has focused mainly and mostly on the noetic issues; like Husserl as well, I will try to move step by step from the noetic area into the noematic. I conclude that Hopp’s approach has the potential to become seminal. (shrink)

In this paper I explore the nature, varieties, causes and meanings of comebacks related to sport. I argue that comebacks have an axiological dimension, and that the best comebacks involve personal growth. I attempt to show that a major reason that comebacks connected to sport are often inspiring is that we are all in need of a comeback at some point in our lives. When improbable comebacks occur in the world of sport, they expand our sense of possibility.

Husserl’s philosophy of culture relies upon a person’s body being expressive of the person’s spirit, but Husserl’s analysis of expression in Logical Investigations is inadequate to explain this bodily expressiveness. This paper explains how Husserl’s use of “expression” shifts from LI to Ideas II and argues that this shift is explained by Husserl’s increased understanding of the pervasiveness of sense in subjective life and his increased appreciation for the unity of the person. I show how these two developments allow Husserl (...) to better describe the bodily expressiveness that is the source of culture. Husserl’s account of culture is thoroughly intentionalistic, but it does not emphasize thought at the expense of embodiment. Culture originates not in an abstract subjectivity, but by persons’ expressing themselves physically in the world. By seeing how Husserl develops his mature position on bodily expressiveness, we can better appreciate the meaningfulness and the bodily concreteness of cultural objects. (shrink)

The systematic importance of the eidetic account of phantasy for Husserlian phenomenology in general is undisputed, but whether this account can be relevant for Aesthetics has often been put into question. In this paper I argue that Husserl’s rich phenomenology of phantasy, and in particular his account of perceptual phantasy, can nevertheless significantly enhance our understanding of how we recognize and imaginatively participate in artistic fictions. Moreover, I show how Husserl’s peculiar formulation of a non-intuitive phantasy at stake in artistic (...) representation anticipates some uses of the imagination in Aesthetics suggested by Ernst Gombrich and Kendall Walton. (shrink)

Although there has been a great deal said about Husserl’s account of time-consciousness, little attention has been specifically paid to future-consciousness. This article gives an Husserlian account of future-consciousness. It begins by arguing that protention should be understood as a future-directed version of retention and so that future-consciousness should be understood as perception. This account is developed in two ways: the future need not be determinately given in protention and so future-consciousness can be vague; cases when the future turns out (...) to be other than we perceived it to be can be understood as temporal illusions. This account of future-consciousness both illuminates some of Husserl’s more obscure remarks on time-consciousness and provides a means of understanding an often neglected phenomenon of independent philosophical interest: our awareness of the future. (shrink)