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In Jesús Padilla Gálvez (ed.), Phenomenology as Grammar. Berlin, Boston: Ontos. pp. 77-96 (2008)
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Abstract

It seems reasonable to say that the basic problem of Husserl’s phenomenology is the possibility for the mind to get related to the world. In Brentano’s view, intentionality was a universal characterization of the mental. In Husserl’s, it becomes as well the framework of the possible contact of the mind with the world. As Hilary Putnam observes: “‘Brentano’s thesis’ was meant by him to serve as a way of showing the autonomy of mentalistic psychology (‘act-psychology’) by showing that the mental was separate from the real (external) world. Brentano himself, to my knowledge, never used the word ‘intentionality’, nor did he use the terms ‘intentional inexistence’ and ‘intentional existence’ to refer to the relation between mind and the real world, as philosophers have come to use the word ‘intentionality’ after Husserl.”1 * I owe my understanding of what Wittgenstein says on ‘intentionality’ to Bouveresse 1987, p.279-302. My further criticism of ‘intentional objects’, and my present conception of intentionality, was also deeply influenced by Vincent Descombes’s realist strand of intentionalism. See Descombes 1995 and 1996. John McDowell (see “Intentionality and interiority in Wittgenstein”, reprinted in McDowell 1998a, 297-321, among other papers) gave me the decisive clue as to the problem of the basic ‘harmony’ between thought and reality in Wittgenstein, and illuminating discussions with Jean-Philippe Narboux, in particular on the occasion of a lecture in which he presented a sharp criticism of Husserl’s conception of indexicality, helped me to measure up all the difficulty of a comparison with Husserl. See Narboux 2008. As to my awareness of the trouble one may have ‘meaning’ and sticking to a use, I owe it to Stanley Cavell’s radical reading of Wittgenstein that shows that realism makes room for scepticism, far from extinguishing it, and Sandra Laugier’s sensitive research in the field of moral philosophy, following in the footsteps of Cora Diamond, drew my attention to the role some experiences play in overcoming such difficulty (as the lack of such experiences can make it a dead-end)..

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Jocelyn Benoist
Université paris 1

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