Abstract

This dissertation gives what I consider to be the proper account of Edmund Husserl's theories of intentionality and meaning. This account stresses that meaning is the content of intentional acts of consciousness and thus establishes the necessary connection between meaning and consciousness. ;I also maintain that the two leading interpretations of Husserl's concept of the noema, the traditional interpretation of Aron Gurwitsch and the more recent interpretation of Dagfinn Follesdal, are unsatisfactory because each ignores some fundamental aspect of Husserl's concept of the noema. Furthermore, I argue that Follesdal's misleading interpretation of the noema as a Fregean Sinn renders the connection between meaning and consciousness contingent and has facilitated the view, advanced by some recent commentators, that Husserl was primarily a linguistically motivated philosopher. ;I argue that, since for Husserl, the connection between consciousness and meaning is necessary, rather than contingent, no theory of meaning can be developed without first doing a phenomenological study of consciousness itself and of its essential characteristic, intentionality. ;In addition to this, I defend Husserl from criticisms raised against him by Martin Heidegger, Johannes Daubert, and George E. Oberlander. These criticisms are based upon misinterpretations of Husserl. I also consider a possible criticism against Husserl which might be raised by an adherent of Hilary Putnam's position that "meanings are not in the head". If meanings were mind-dependent, Putnam argues, communication would be impossible. I argue that the impossibility of communication does not follow from Husserl's position that meanings are mind-dependent. I demonstrate how Husserl accounts for communication by explaining that a speaker's intentions are intuited by a hearer when that speaker uses expressions to communicate his intentions. ;To conclude, I maintain that, because of the insightfulness of Husserl's theories of intentionality and meaning, it is imperative that phenomenologists go beyond the mistakes of the past and work to formulate an interpretation more faithful to Husserl's intentions