This work investigates the early encounters of French philosophers and religious thinkers with the phenomenological philosophy of Edmund Husserl. Following an introductory chapter addressing context and methodology, Chapter 2 argues that Henri Bergson's insights into lived duration and intuition and Maurice Blondel's genetic description of action functioned as essential precursors to the French reception of phenomenology. Chapter 3 details the presentations of Husserl and his followers by three successive pairs of French academic philosophers: Léon Noël and Victor Delbos, Lev Shestov (...) and Jean Hering, and Bernard Groethuysen and Georges Gurvitch. Chapter 4 then explores the appropriation of Bergsonian and Blondelian phenomenological insights by Catholic theologians Édouard Le Roy and Pierre Rousselot. Chapter 5 examines applications and critiques of phenomenology by French religious philosophers, including Jean Hering, Joseph Maréchal, and neo-Thomists like Jacques Maritain. A concluding chapter expounds the principal finding that philosophical and theological receptions of phenomenology in France prior to 1939 proceeded independently due to differences in how Bergson and Blondel were perceived by French philosophers and religious thinkers and their respective orientations to the Cartesian and Aristotelian/Thomist intellectual traditions. (shrink)

This book investigates the emergence and development of early analytic philosophy and explicates the topics and concepts that were of interest to German and British philosophers. Taking into consideration a range of authors including Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, Fries, Lotze, Husserl, Moore, Russell and Wittgenstein, Nikolay Milkov shows that the same puzzles and problems were of interest within both traditions. Showing that the particular problems and concepts that exercised the early analytic philosophers logically connect with, and in many cases hinge upon, (...) the thinking of German philosophers, Early Analytic Philosophy and the German Philosophical Tradition introduces the Anglophone world to key concepts and thinkers within German philosophical tradition and provides a much-needed revisionist historiography of early analytic philosophy. In doing so, this book shows that the issues that preoccupied the early analytic philosophy were familiar to the most renowned figures in the German philosophical tradition, and addressed by them in profoundly original and enduringly significant ways. (shrink)

In the Logical Investigations Husserl announced a critique of Lotze’s epistemology, but it was never included in the printed text. The aim of my paper is to investigate the remnant of Husserl’s planned text with special emphasis on the question of whether it goes beyond the obvious aspects of Husserl’s indebtedness to Lotze. Using Husserl’s student notes, excerpts, and book annotations, I refine the dating of Husserl’s encounter with Lotze and separate the various layers of influence. I argue that Husserl’s (...) acquaintance with Lotze’s epistemology forms a separate layer of influence, and that this layer cannot antedate the middle of the decade before the Logical Investigation. Husserl’s investigation of Lotze’s epistemology constitutes the most interesting aspect of the unpublished text that underlies the missing chapter from the Logical Investigations. I show that the most relevant influence of Lotze’s epistemology on Husserl lies in Lotze’s idea of the formal and real significance of logical laws. Although Husserl negatively evaluated Lotze’s epistemological problem both in the planned chapter and in other printed parts of the Logical Investigations, the problem repeatedly surfaced during Husserl’s Göttingen period. Finally, I use an unpublished student transcript to reconstruct Husserl’s SS 1912 seminar on Lotze’s epistemology. I argue that the deeper dimension of Lotze’s epistemological problem (and Husserl’s rejection of it) lies in the way that it highlights the epistemological function of phenomenology. (shrink)

The following text, which is now published for the first time, comes from Husserl’s manuscript A III 1 and was probably written in 1914. The text belongs to a bundle of pages which Husserl wrote down during the presentation and examination of the “Staatsexamensarbeit” of his student Jean Hering. The work “Die Lehre vom Apriori bei Lotze” was done by Hering in the summer semester 1914 in order to receive a degree that would qualify him as a secondary school teacher. (...) Although this “Staatsexamensarbeit” was never published, Hering used parts of it for his article which appeared in the Jahrbuch, “Bemerkungen über das Wesen, die Wesenheit und die Idee. Edmund Husserl zum 60. Geburtstag gewidmet”. Husserl characterized pages 5 to 8 of the manuscript A III 1 as his “own reflections” on Hering’s work. These pages are published as “Text Nr. 5” in Husserliana XLI. What follows here are pages 9 to 16 of this manuscript, which Husserl called “free excerpts”. (shrink)

The contributions of Alsatian philosopher and theologian Jean Héring to the early reception of Husserl’s phenomenology in France have been recognized by Spiegelberg, Monseu, and others. This essay probes and elucidates certain historical details to a greater degree than previous studies and also calls attention to the philosophical influences that Héring transmitted to his contemporaries, focusing in particular on his encounters with Emmanuel Levinas and Lev Shestov. It argues that while Héring’s role in facilitating the introduction of Levinas and others (...) to Husserl was important, his more significant contributions consisted in analysing and correcting Levinas’s and Shestov’s appraisals of Husserl’s teachings. (shrink)

In this paper we will be discussing the “Platonism” of two former Göttingen students of Husserl, notably Jean Héring and Roman Ingarden. By “Platonism” we mean not simply an account of the diff erence between individuals and Forms. We mean a peculiar insight into what Ingarden explicitly designates as “the content of Ideas”. Our primary concern is to emphasize a major shift in Plato’s treatment of Forms: we will see Plato switching the focus of his investigation from the difference between (...) the visible world of bodies and the invisible realm of Forms to the internal structure of the Forms themselves. We will then discuss Héring’s Bemerkungen über das Wesen, die Wesenheit und die Idee and Ingarden’s Essentiale Fragen in order to explain the diff erence between the notions of individual essence, morphe, essentiality and Idea. (shrink)

Ce livre apporte un nouvel eclairage sur ce qu'il conviendrait d'appeler les commencements de la phenomenologie en France et donc, plus particulierement, sur la ...