In “On what matters: Personal identity as a phenomenological problem” (2020), Steven Crowell engages a number of contemporary interpretations of Husserl’s account of the person and personal identity by noting that they lack a phenomenological elucidation of the self as commitment. In this article, in response to Crowell, I aim to show that such an account of the self as commitment can be drawn from Husserl’s work by looking more closely at his descriptions from the time of Ideas and after (...) of the self as ego or I and egoic experience as attentive experience. I specifically aim to sketch the beginning of a response to three questions I take Crowell to be posing to a Husserlian account of the person and personal identity: (1) What more than pre-reflective self-awareness can be attributed to the self on phenomenological grounds so that we can understand, phenomenologically speaking, how selves become persons? (2) How can what characterizes the self in addition to pre-reflective self-awareness be discerned in both our commitment to truth and our feeling bound by love and other emotive commitments that cannot be fully rationally justified, which Husserl acknowledges are both sources of personal self-constitution? And (3), do all selves become persons? In the paper I elaborate how my answers to the first two questions turn on the self not just being self-aware but active in a particular sense. And to begin to address the third question, I suggest that while any form of wakeful conscious experience is both self-aware and active, this activity of the self makes a difference for those who are socio-historically embedded in the way we are. Specifically, on the proposed Husserlian account, selves that are socio-historically embedded become persons in and through their active relating to what they attentively experience. In concluding, I indicate how this Husserlian account might compare to Crowell’s claim that “self-identity (ipseity) is not mere logical identity (A=A) but a normative achievement […] which makes a ‘personal’ kind of identity possible” (2020). (shrink)

In this article I consider whether and how Husserl’s transcendental phenomenological method can initiate a phenomenological way of life. The impetus for this investigation originates in a set of manuscripts written in 1926 (published in Zur phänomenologischen Reduktion) where Husserl suggests that the consistent commitment to and performance of phenomenological reflection can change one’s life to the point where a simple return to the life lived before this reflection is no longer possible. Husserl identifies this point of no return with (...) becoming a transcendental idealist. I propose a way of understanding Husserl’s claim that transcendental idealism makes a simple return to life before phenomenological reflection impossible. I then suggest that a phenomenological way of life is characterized by an epistemic modesty that follows from Husserl’s transcendental idealism and consider whether and how such a phenomenological way of life is a life worth living. (shrink)

This paper spells out Husserl’s account of the exercise of rationality and shows how it is tied to the capacity for critical reflection. I first discuss Husserl’s views on what rationally constrains our intentionality. Then I localize the exercise of rationality in the positing that characterizes attentive forms of intentionality and argue that, on Husserl’s account, when we are attentive to something we are also pre-reflectively aware of what speaks for and against our taking something to be a certain way. (...) After discussing the conditions under which this pre-reflective awareness gives way to reflective deliberation, I contrast this account to a compelling Kantian-inspired account of the activity of reason that has recently been developed by Matthew Boyle. In particular, I argue that Husserl delimits the scope of the exercise of rationality differently than Boyle, and I show how this implies different accounts of the self. (shrink)

In this article, I develop how the phenomenological understanding of the intentionality of consciousness allows us to formulate a theory of personal identity that can at least account for the continuity of consciousness through time, provide an account of a certain aspect of what it means to be a person, namely to be able to appropriate one’s past as one’s own, and give an original answer to the question of personal identity and state in what the identity of a person (...) through time consists. After having developed the outlines for such a phenomenological theory of personal identity, I conclude that the provided account of the person is the correlate of the phenomenological concept of world. (shrink)

According to a predominant view, reflection is constitutive of personhood. In this paper I first indicate how it might seem that such an account cannot do justice to the socially embedded nature ofpersonhood. I then present a phenomenologically-inspired account of reflection as critical stance taking and show how it accommodates the social embeddedness of persons. In concluding, I outline how this phenomenological account is also not vulnerable to a number of additional challenges that have been raised against accounts that consider (...) reflection to be constitutive of personhood and what matters for responsibility. (shrink)

"Edmund Husserl is widely regarded as the principal founder of phenomenology, one of the most important movements in twentieth-century philosophy. His work inspired subsequent figures such as Martin Heidegger, his most renowned pupil, as well as Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, all of whom engaged with and developed his insights in significant ways. He also made important contributions to logic and philosophy of mathematics and his work on fundamental problems such as intentionality, consciousness and subjectivity continues to animate philosophical research (...) and argument. The Husserlian Mind is an outstanding reference source to the full range of Husserl's philosophy. Forty chapters by a team of international contributors are divided into seven clear parts covering the following areas: Husserl's major works, Husserl's phenomenological method, Phenomenology of consciousness, Epistemology, Ethics and social and political philosophy, Science, Metaphysics. Contained in these sections are chapters on many of the key aspects of Husserl's thought, including intentionality, transcendental philosophy, reduction, perception, time, self and subjectivity, personhood, logic and mathematics, psychology, ontology and idealism. Offering an unparalleled guide to the enormous range of his thought, The Husserlian Mind is essential reading for students and scholars of Husserl, phenomenology, and the history of twentieth-century philosophy. It will also be of interest to those in related fields, such as religion and sociology"--. (shrink)

This volume is a broad anthology addressing many if not most major topics in phenomenology and philosophy in general: from foundational and methodological ...

This chapter focuses on a number of respects in which Husserl’s, Heidegger’s, and Merleau-Ponty’s accounts of the world differ, despite other significant commonalities. Specifically, I discuss how both Heidegger’s and Merleau-Ponty’s accounts of our experience of the world challenge Husserl’s assertion of the possibility of a worldless consciousness; how Heidegger’s discussion of the world entails a rejection of Husserl’s claim that the world is at bottom nature; and how Merleau-Ponty puts pressure on Husserl’s account of the necessary structure of the (...) world. In concluding, and as a propaedeutic to adjudicating these disputes, I aim to show why Husserl makes these contested claims. Specifically, I suggest that it is Husserl’s phenomenological conception of reason and his commitment to (this conception of) reason that motivate him to make the claims about our experience and world with which the later phenomenologists take issue. (shrink)

[Title: A phenomenological account of the habitual and active character of ignorance] -/- A number of critical social epistemologists have argued that a form of ignorance makes up the epistemic dimension of existing relations of oppression based on racial and/or gender identity. Recent phenomenological accounts of the habitual nature of perception can be understood as describing the bodily, tacit, and affective character of this form of ignorance. At the same time, as I aim to show in this article, more could (...) be phenomenologically said and made of both the active and pervasive character of said ignorance. Drawing on the phenomenological concept of receptivity, I propose a way to further understand the active character of ignorance both in and beyond perception. By doing so, we also get a better view on what it would take to overcome this kind of ignorance. (shrink)

ABSTRACT With the aim of showing what it takes to see the world and others as they are, this article provides a phenomenological account of what Iris Murdoch has memorably called “the work of attention.” I first show that Aron Gurwitsch’s analyses of attention provide a basis on which to reject a voluntaristic account of attention according to which seeing things as they are is as simple as directing one’s attention to something. Then, in order to elucidate the work that (...) is involved in paying attention, I draw on Edmund Husserl’s descriptions of the activity characteristic of attentive consciousness. I then show how a Husserlian account of the work of attention can help make sense of Murdoch’s pessimistic claim that our consciousness is not “a transparent glass through which it views the world” while also indicating how we, by paying attention, can do better. (shrink)

In this article, I show how Husserl’s reflections on attentive or patent intentionality and on the differentiation between background and foreground that is brought about by attentive interest allows us to better understand the distinction between sleep within wakefulness and genuine sleep as well as the distinction between the intentionality that occurs while awake and when asleep. In this way it also becomes more clear what wakefulness amounts to.

Betrachtet man die Geschichte des Begriffs ‚Phänomenologie‘, ist nicht auf den ersten Blick klar, was darunter zu verstehen ist. Wie Schuhmann (1984 ) herausgearbeitet hat, tritt dieser Begriff in der Philosophiegeschichte auf, noch lange bevor Edmund Husserl sich ihn zu Eigen machte, um sein eigenes philosophisches Projekt zu beschreiben. Auch hinderte Husserls Versuch, diesen Begriff für die Beschreibung seines eigenen einmaligen Projekts zu beanspruchen, seine Zeitgenossen (z.B. Pfänder, Reinach, Stein) keineswegs daran, denselben Begriff ebenfalls zur Beschreibung ihrer jeweiligen Projekte und (...) Methoden zu verwenden. Es versteht sich also, dass Husserl selbst beträchtlichen Aufwand betrieb, um zu definieren, was der Begriff ‚Phänomenologie‘ in seinen Augen zu bedeuten hatte. Zum Zeitpunkt der Publikation des ersten Buches seiner Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie im Jahre 1913 charakterisiert Husserl Phänomenologie als eine neue Wissenschaft, die sich von jeder anderen, bereits geschichtlich verankerten Wissenschaft wie Physik, Psychologie oder Kulturwissenschaft unterscheidet (Hua III/1, 1). Diese Darstellung von Phänomenologie lässt auf Anhieb eine wichtige Abweichung von seiner einstigen Gleichsetzung von Phänomenologie und deskriptiver Psychologie in den Logischen Untersuchungen (1901) erkennen. In der breiteren philosophischen Landschaft wären angesichts Husserls positiver Bestimmung dessen, was diese phänomenologische Wissenschaft ist, möglicherweise auch heute noch viele genauso irritiert wie einige der damaligen Teilnehmer des VI. Kongresses für experimentelle Psychologie, denen Husserl 1914 erklärte: „Analog wie die reine Geometrie Wesenslehre des ‚reinen‘ Raumes bzw. Wissenschaft von den ideal möglichen Raumgestalten ist, ist die reine Phänomenologie Wesenslehre des ‚reinen‘ Bewusstseins, Wissenschaft von den ideal möglichen Bewusstseinsgestalten (mit ihren ‚immanenten Korrelaten‘)“ (Schumann 1914, 144-5). Was heute wie damals für ein Verständnis dieser Darstellung von Phänomenologie der Klärung bedarf, ist Husserls Beschreibung der Phänomenologie als einer Wesenslehre, d.h. einer reinen oder eidetischen Wissenschaft, ebenso wie seine Aussage, deren Untersuchungsgegenstand sei das von ihm sogenannte reine Bewusstsein. Nur indem man die beiden Bedeutungen von ‚rein‘ erhellt, die hiermit angesprochen sind, wird auch deutlich, inwiefern Husserl behaupten kann, Phänomenologie unterscheide sich von anderen Wissenschaften: sowohl von empirischen wie Physik oder experimenteller Psychologie als auch von anderen eidetischen Wissenschaften wie Geometrie und deskriptiver Psychologie. Diese Erläuterung zeigt nicht nur, inwiefern Phänomenologie von all diesen Disziplinen verschieden ist, sondern auch, inwiefern sie mit ihnen zusammenhängt – und damit ist gerade die Idee der Phänomenologie begründet. (shrink)

This article addresses an ambiguity in Edmund Husserl’s descriptions of what it means to be a human being in the world. On the one hand, Husserl often characterizes the human being in natural scientific terms as a psychophysical unity. On the other hand, Husserl also describes how we experience ourselves as embodied persons that experience and communicate with others within a socio-historical world. The main aim of this article is to show that if one overlooks this ambiguity then one will (...) misunderstand the relation between the subject that experiences a world (and that Husserl terms transcendental) and the human being within the world. (shrink)

Der vorliegende Band, der außer Husserls Freiburger Einleitung in die Philosophie von 1919/20 auch die noch erhaltenen Teile seiner beiden ersten Freiburger Einleitungen in die Philosophie von 1916 und 1918 enthält, bietet eine sowohl historisch als auch systematisch orientierte Hinführung zur transzendentalphänomenologischen Philosophie auf dem Weg über die Ontologie und die Erkenntnistheorie. Im Ausgang von der Darstellung des Anstoßes durch die Sophisitk entwickelt Husserl ausführlich Platons Entdeckung des Apriori als den für die Folgezeit maßgeblichen Schritt zu einer wissenschaftlichen Philosophie und (...) verfolgt in kritischen Analysen deren neuzeitliche Entwicklung seit Descartes über die rationalistischen und empiristischen Systeme bis hin zu Kant. -/- In den systematisch orientierten Abschnitten der Vorlesung stellt Husserl zunächst die grundlegenden Disziplinen der theoretischen Philosophie dar: die Erkenntnistheorie, die formale Wissenschaftslehre und die Ontologie, die sich in formale Ontologie, die materialen Ontologien und die von Aristoteles begründete Ontologie der realen Welt differenziert. Die praktische Philosophie behandelt Husserl in einer detaillierten Skizze der apriorischen Wertlehre und der in dieser fundierten apriorischen Ethik; diese beiden Prinzipienwissenschaften bilden für ihn die Grundlagen einer wissenschaftlichen Ethik. Diese aus der Göttinger Zeit stammende, unter dem Einfluss Brentanos stehende Konzeption von Ethik erfährt in der Vorlesung von 1919/20 bzw. in den wenig später in diese eingefügten kritischen Reflexionen gewichtige Korrekturen. Diese Korrekturen sowie die detailierte Analyse und Entfaltung des von Platon und Aristoteles grundgelegten, durch den Siegeszug der ateleologischen Naturwissenschaft verdrängten Gedankens einer teleologischen Welterklärung deuten vor auf Husserls späte Ethik und seine metaphysische Weltdeutung. (shrink)

In this chapter I aim to show that Husserl’s descriptions of the nature and role of activity in the epistemic economy of our conscious lives imply a nondeflationary account of epistemic agency. After providing the main outlines of this account, I discuss how it compares to contemporary accounts of epistemic agency and respond to some potential objections. In concluding I indicate that according to this Husserlian account of epistemic agency we can be said to be intrinsically responsible for holding the (...) beliefs we do as well as for the absence of belief. (shrink)

L’article présente une reconstruction d’analyse husserlienne de l’éveil et démontre que, selon Husserl, seule une phénoménologie de l’attention est en mesure d’élucider les véritables caractéristiques de l’état d’éveil. Plus précisément, l’article démontre que, d’un point de vue husserlien, l’attention introduit une distinction entre thème et arrière-plan dans notre expérience et que cette différence est ce qui nous permettra de déterminer dans quelle mesure nous ne sommes jamais pleinement éveillés lorsque nous sommes éveillés (section 1 et 2), comment le sommeil au (...) sein de l’état d’éveil diffère du sommeil véritable (section 3), et, enfin, comment l’intentionnalité survenant lors du sommeil véritable, à l’instar des rêves, diffère radicalement de toute forme de conscience intentionnelle survenant lors de l’état d’éveil (section 4). (shrink)

In the paragraphs immediately following the introduction of the method of phenomenological epoché (§§34-46) in Ideas, rather than applying this new method, Husserl provides a series of psychological descriptions on the basis of psychological reflection. This is surprising for at least two reasons. First, since Husserl has already distinguished phenomenology from psychology (both empirical and eidetic), it is not clear why he would engage in psychological reflection and description at this point in the book. Further, the psychological descriptions that Husserl (...) provides in these paragraphs are of consciousness — specifically, of our consciousness of something. But, as Husserl indicates at several points in the first book of Ideas, and as he more fully develops in the 1912 pencil manuscript of the second book of Ideas, the object of psychology is, strictly speaking, not consciousness but the soul (Seele) considered as reality (Realität). In this chapter, I first develop how these two interpretative difficulties can be overcome if we consider the overall aim of the second chapter — namely, to establish that consciousness has its own kind of being and hence essence. Then, I elucidate how exactly Husserl establishes this in this chapter and show how it entails a radical rethinking of the distinction between and relation of consciousness and world. (shrink)

In diesem Beitrag möchte ich die Auswirkungen untersuchen, die die phänomenologische Reflexion und die Erlangung phänomenologischer Einsichten auf denjenigen haben, der Phänomenologie treibt. Husserl selbst gibt den Impetus für diese Untersuchung, indem er (wie in einer der Textpassagen, die diesem Artikel als Motto vorangestellt sind) behauptet, dass die phänomenologische Reflexion einen derart langanhaltenden Effekt auf denjenigen hat, der phänomenologisch reflektiert, dass eine Rückkehr zum bisher gelebten Leben unmöglich wird. Dieser Punkt der Umkehr – besser gesagt, der Punkt, an dem keine (...) Rückkehr mehr möglich ist –, wie Husserl wiederholt in einer Sammlung von Forschungsmanuskripten aus dem Herbst 1926 betont, die in Zur phänomenologischen Reduktion erschienen sind, ist der Punkt, an dem man transzendentaler Idealist wird. Warum und in welchem Sinn wird es dem transzendentalen Idealisten unmöglich, einfach zu dem Leben zurückzukehren, wie er es vor der phänomenologischen Reflexion geführt hat? Allgemeiner gefragt, wie kann eine philosophische Einsicht das Leben ändern, das dieser Einsicht vorherging und zu ihr hinführte? Und, schließlich – auch, wenn Husserl selbst diese Frage nicht explizit stellte – auf welche Weise kann die Aussicht auf eine solche Veränderung oder die Veränderung selbst das Leben des Phänomenologen als ein lebenswertes Leben erscheinen lassen? In einem Versuch, Antworten auf diese Fragen zu finden, skizziere ich einige Aspekte des Vorgangs der phänomenologischen Reflexion und der verschiedenen Arten der Veränderung, die von der phänomenologischen Reflexion für das Leben des Reflektierenden ausgehen können. Ich beginne hier mit einer Beschreibung der besonderen reflektierenden Haltung, die sich durch die Methode der transzendental-phänomenologischen Epoché und die Reduktion einstellt. Dann diskutiere ich die verschiedenen Möglichkeiten, wie wir von etwas wie einem Habitus des Phänomenologen sprechen können. Schließlich erläutere ich, warum für Husserl eine unveränderte Rückkehr zur natürlichen Einstellung nicht länger möglich ist, wenn phänomenologische Reflexion zu transzendentalem Idealismus führt. (shrink)