Edmund Husserl is regarded as the founder of transcendental phenomenology, one of the major traditions to emerge in twentieth-century philosophy. In this book Andrea Staiti unearths and examines the deep theoretical links between Husserl's phenomenology and the philosophical debates of his time, showing how his thought developed in response to the conflicting demands of Neo-Kantianism and life-philosophy. Drawing on the work of thinkers including Heinrich Rickert, Wilhelm Dilthey and Georg Simmel, as well as Husserl's writings on the natural and (...) human sciences that are not available in English translation, Staiti illuminates a crucial chapter in the history of twentieth-century philosophy and enriches our understanding of Husserl's thought. His book will interest scholars and students of Husserl, phenomenology, and twentieth-century philosophy more generally. (shrink)

In Phenomenology and the Problem of History. David Carr examines the paradox involving Husserl's transcendental philosophy and his later historicist theory.

The literature on the work of Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) abounds in specialized studies of various aspects of his philosophy - transcendental phenomenology. Yet there have been few attempts to present Husserl's philosophy as a whole. No wonder, for Husserl's mammoth literary output over some forty years and the highly diverse nature of his investigations have made it extremely difficult to make a broad survey of his work. Now one of the world's leading Husserl scholars presents a unified and critical (...) interpretation of Husserl's philosophical work from the only point of view from which its continuity can be grasped: method. The culmination of several decades of intense scholarly engagement with Husserl's phenomenology, her work reveals as no other the dynamic interplay between the development of Husserl's method and the thematic progression of his research. (shrink)

This paper demonstrates that two signature methodological concepts in Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology, the epoché and the phenomenological reduction, derive from his reflections on the history and significance of epistemological skepticism in the Western tradition. Drawing on his Lectures on Logic and Epistemology (Hua XXIV) from the Winter semester of 1906–07, it is argued that Husserl derives his conception of the fundamental task of transcendental philosophy from his reading of a novel skeptical challenge posed by David Hume’s (...) philosophy—a kind of skeptical challenge that Husserl did not recognize in his earlier treatments of Hume. On Husserl’s revised reading, Hume promotes a certain kind of philosophical “despair” (Verzweiflung) or, as it may be called today, “quietism” as the only possible response to the traditional problems of epistemology stemming back to the ancient skeptics. Husserl’s criticism of Hume’s quietism is presented. And Husserl’s reading of Descartes’s cogito as the first decisive uncovering of the limits of epistemological skepticism in the Western tradition is shown to be the source of two key elements of Husserl’s positive alternative to Humean epistemological quietism, which ultimately become the heart of a novel conception of critical transcendental philosophy. These two key elements are the phenomenological epoché and phenomenological reduction. Husserl’s arguments are presented for the claim that these are essential parts of any epistemological program that can answer traditional skeptical challenges. (shrink)

With this new book, Andrea Staiti provides both a richly researched work in the history of philosophy and an important new introduction, a contextualization really, of Edmund Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology. Staiti situates Husserl among the Neo-Kantian philosophers, particularly Wilhelm Windelband, Heinrich Rickert, Emil Lask, and Franz Böhm of the Southwest school, and two life-philosophers influential in the development of his mature conception of transcendental phenomenology, Wilhelm Dilthey and Georg Simmel. The historical approach he adopts in the (...) book is modeled on the Konstellationsforschung employed in the study of German Idealism by Dieter Heinrich, and this technique when applied to Husserl’s.. (shrink)

Machine generated contents note: Preface; Introduction: Husserl's life and writings; 1. Husserl's Crisis: an unfinished masterpiece; 2. Galileo's revolution and the origins of modern science; 3. The Crisis in psychology; 4. Rethinking tradition: Husserl on history; 5. Husserl's problematical concept of the life-world; 6. Phenomenology as transcendental philosophy; 7. The ongoing influence of Husserl's Crisis.

By tracing the general evolution of HusserI’s theory of logic and mathematics, this essay explores Husserl’s identification and strategic overcoming of the two forms of psychologism--Iogical psychologism and transcendental psychologism--that bar the way to rigorous phenomenological inquiry. In the early works “On the Concept of Number” and the Philosophie der Arithmetik Husserl himself falls victim to a particular form of logical psychologism. By the time of the Logical Investigations this problem has been dealt with: the method of eidetic (...) intuition enables an account of the “origins” of logical and mathematical concepts without reducing such concepts to mere predicates of mental acts. The task of Formal and Transcendental Logic is to disclose the more pervasive problem of transcendental psychologism, one that taints even the theory of pure logic articulated in the Logical Investigations. A radical solution is provided through the development of an “ultimate logic” of transcendental subjectivity. (shrink)

In his book A History of the Culture of the Modern Period, the eminent scholar Egon Friedell wrote concerning Descartes's influence in seven-teenth-century France that all the efforts of the great philosopher's critics notwithstanding, "his school inexorably extended its influence not only through the ‘occasionalists,’ as his closest disciples and followers in philosophy were called, and through the remarkable logic of the Port-Royal school The Art of Thinking and Boileau's tone-setting work The Poetic Art: rather, all of France, headed (...) by the "Sun King," who at one time had banned Descartes's works, became his school. The state, economy, theater, architecture, religious affairs, strategy, and the art of gardening all became Cartesian. Descartes reigned unrestricted, as a sovereign, in all things: in tragedy, where the passions struggled with one another; in comedy, where algebraic formulas were devised for human characters; in the area around Versailles, dominated by the abstract symmetry of gardens; in the analytic methods for waging war and running the economy; and in the so to speak deductive ritual of hairstyles and manners, dances and genteel conversation. One can even say that to this day every Frenchman is a born Cartesian.". (shrink)

The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, Husserl's last great work, is important both for its content and for the influence it has had on other philosophers. In this book, which remained unfinished at his death, Husserl attempts to forge a union between phenomenology and existentialism. Husserl provides not only a history of philosophy but a philosophy of history. As he says in Part I, "The genuine spiritual struggles of European humanity as such take the form (...) of struggles between the philosophies, that is, between the skeptical philosophies--or nonphilosophies, which retain the word but not the task--and the actual and still vital philosophies. But the vitality of the latter consists in the fact that they are struggling for their true and genuine meaning and thus for the meaning of a genuine humanity.". (shrink)

By tracing the general evolution of HusserI’s theory of logic and mathematics, this essay explores Husserl’s identification and strategic overcoming of the two forms of psychologism--Iogical psychologism and transcendental psychologism--that bar the way to rigorous phenomenological inquiry. In the early works “On the Concept of Number” and the Philosophie der Arithmetik Husserl himself falls victim to a particular form of logical psychologism. By the time of the Logical Investigations this problem has been dealt with: the method of eidetic (...) intuition enables an account of the “origins” of logical and mathematical concepts without reducing such concepts to mere predicates of mental acts. The task of Formal and Transcendental Logic is to disclose the more pervasive problem of transcendental psychologism, one that taints even the theory of pure logic articulated in the Logical Investigations. A radical solution is provided through the development of an “ultimate logic” of transcendental subjectivity. (shrink)

It strikes readers as dubious and pointless to compare Husserl and Deleuze straightforwardly on the level of philosophy or history of philosophy, for their thoughts seem to be wide apart or even opposed. Nevertheless, each of their thoughts draws a trajectory of development into one and the same kind of qualitative research, i.e., non-scientific, non-conceptual, fieldwork research trying to grasp the immediately pre-given picture of being. In this paper, I call such a qualitative research transcendental-phenomenological ‘regional studies.’ We (...) might well interpret the concept of ‘life-world’ in later Husserl as ‘region’ and, therefore, his life-world phenomenology as such ‘regional studies.’ Moreover, the concepts of ‘desire,’ ‘force,’ ‘intensity,’ ‘field of immanence’ in Deleuze serve very well to describe the workings of ‘region’ at a deeper level. Therefore, we observe that, under the heading of transcendental-phenomenological ‘regional studies,’ disparate philosophical concepts in Husserl and Deleuze are meaningfully connected and networked. As a result, our exposition of transcendental-phenomenological ‘regional studies’ subsuming Husserl and Deleuze sheds not only new light on the philosophical dialogue between the two, but also introduces a radically new qualitative research on region, regional life and culture. (shrink)

The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology has long occupied a position amongst Edmund Husserl’s writings of almost singular renown and influence. It is easy to see why this should be so. The Crisis offered the reading public its first glimpse of a new Husserl, or at least one strikingly different in tone, mode of presentation, and thematic emphasis from the Husserl of Ideas I or Cartesian Meditations. In a seeming reversal of the Augustinian dictum that Husserl (...) used to close Cartesian Meditations,“Noli foras ire, in te redi, in interiore homine habitat veritas.” The Crisis looks outward rather than within, toward the body, history, the intersubjective community, and an analysis of the life-world, arguably Husserl’s most enduring philosophical contribution and the one with which The Crisis is most closely associated. And these concerns are framed against a backdrop o .. (shrink)

Two of Husserl’s most important, though fragmentary texts from the final phase of his thought, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology and “The Origin of Geometry as an Intentional-Historical Problem,” focus on the themes of history and the life-world. It is well known that prior to these works Husserl sought to establish transcendental phenomenology as both a factually and an historically pure eidetic science. Thus the interpreter of the whole of Husserl’s thought is (...) faced with the question of whether his later focus on history and the life-world represents a significant departure from his previous thought. In what follows, I shall defend the thesis that it does not. Specifically, I shall argue that the completion of Husserl’s project of realizing the goal of First Philosophy in transcendental phenomenology renders necessary the turn both to history and to the life-world. In connection with this, I shall argue further that the peculiar phenomenological character of this necessity demands that the ‘concepts’ of history and life-world operative in Husserl’s last texts are taken to be inseparably rooted in a more original phenomenon. Husserl conceives this more original phenomenon as the crisis situation of the exemplars of European humanity, the philosophers, who, as the “functionaries of mankind” are faced with the “breakdown” situation of our time, with the “breakdown” of science itself. (shrink)

The history of the early phenomenological movement involves a tale of two schisms. The Great Phenomenological Schism originated between 1905 and 1913, as many of his contemporaries, for example, Pfänder, Scheler, Reinach, Stein, and Ingarden, rejected Husserl’s transformation of phenomenology from the descriptive psychology of his Logical Investigations into the transcendental idealism of his Ideas I. The Phenomenological-Existential Schism started between 1927 and 1933, as with Being and Time Heidegger moved away from Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology (...) of consciousness toward an ontological analytic of existence. Yet these schisms were not unrelated developments. Closely following the documentary evidence to determine the exemplary nature of Heidegger’s critique of Husserl’s move into transcendental idealism, this essay establishes the inextricable linkage between the Great Phenomenological Schism and the Phenomenological-Existential Schism. (shrink)

In The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, Husserl argues that the only way to respond to the scientific Krisis of which he speaks is with phenomenological reflections on the history, method, and task of philosophy. On the assumption that an accurate diagnosis of a malady is a necessary condition for an effective remedy, this paper aims to formulate a precise concept of the Krisis of the European sciences with which Husserl operates in this work. Thus (...) it seeks an answer to the question: What exactly, according to Husserl, is “the ‘crisis’ [Krisis] of the European sciences”? There are two different tendencies in the literature on this question. According to the traditional interpretation, the Krisis of the European sciences lies not in the inadequacy of their scientificity but in the loss of their meaningfulness for life. According to an innovative suggestion, the Krisis lies not in the loss of their meaningfulness for life but in the inadequacy of their scientificity. These readings are mutually exclusive because each claims that the other misidentifies the Krisis as something that it is not. The argument of this paper, however, is that, given the many different senses of Krisis in The Crisis, an adequate understanding of the Krisis that Husserl identifies requires not a disjunctive but an inclusive approach. Therefore the paper proposes that Husserl’s Krisis of the European sciences is both a crisis of their scientificity and a crisis of their meaningfulness for life. The relevance of this result to Husserl’s philosophical and historical sense-investigations in The Crisis—as well as to the present critical situation of philosophy—is self-evident. (shrink)

This article seeks to reconstruct and critically extend Jacques Derrida’s critique of Edmund Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology. Derrida’s critique of Husserl is explored in three main areas: the phenomenology of language, the phenomenology of time, and the phenomenological constitution of ideal objects. In each case, Husserl’s analysis is shown to rest upon a one-sided determination of truth in terms of presence—whether it be the presence of expressive meaning to consciousness, the self-presence of the temporal instant, or the complete (...) presence of an ideal object through intuition. At every juncture, Derrida’s reasoning is deployed in order to demonstrate how presence is irreducibly bound up with absence and otherness and thus how the ideal of a phenomenological self-presence of consciousness is itself an abstraction from the contingency of history and our concrete embeddedness within a particular lifeworld. The article concludes with an appraisal of reason’s limits in a time of technological domination and the threat of global annihilation. Rather than a flight into irrationalism or skepticism, the author advocates a deepening of philosophical responsibility and an ethics of undecidability as essential for meeting the challenges of modernity. (shrink)

The concept of habit enfolds an enormous richness and diversity of meanings. According to Husserl, habit, along with association, memory, and so on, belongs to the very essence of the psychic.1 Husserl even speaks of an overall genetic “phenomenology of habitualities”. In this paper, as an initial attempt to explicate the complexity of phenomenological treatments of habit, want to trace Husserl’s conception of habit as it emerged in his mature genetic phenomenology, in order to highlight his enormous and neglected (...) original contribution in this area. I shall show that Husserl was by no means limited to a Cartesian intellectualist explication of habitual action (as commentators such as Bourdieu and Dreyfus have claimed), but attempted to characterize its complexity across the range of human individual, sub-personal, personal, social and collective experience. Habit, as we shall see, for Husserl, is intimately involved in the constitution of meaningfulness (Husserl’s Sinnhaftigkeit) and forms of sense (Sinnesgestalten) at all levels, from the level of perceptual experience, through the formation of the ego, to the development of society, history and tradition, indeed to our whole sense of the harmonious course of worldly life and to the genetic constitution of worldhood as such. Habituality, furthermore, is a key structural principle in the genetic constitution of the transcendental ego itself, as it unfolds as a concrete living and acting person in an intersubjective, cultural and historical world. (shrink)

The first phase of Sartre’s philosophical publications is marked by an apparent ambivalence towards Husserl’s transcendental turn. Sartre accepts both major aspects of that turn, the phenomenological reduction and the use of transcendental argumentation. Yet his rejection of the transcendental ego that Husserl derives from this transcendental turn overlooks an obvious transcendental argument in favour of it. His books on emotion and imagination, moreover, make only very brief comments about the transcendental constitution of (...) the world of experience. In each case, these appear at the end of the book and can seem to contradict the book’s central analysis. The problem underlying these features of his works of phenomenological psychology is clarified and resolved, however, when Sartre articulates his own transcendental phenomenology and ontology in Being and Nothingness a decade after he first encountered the work of Husserl. This resolution raises a new problem that animates the next phase of his philosophy. (shrink)

Underlying Husserl’s complex analyses of phenomenology, and specifically his conception of transcendental subjectivity, is a relatively unexamined description of the notion of persons. What I will be concerned with here is a critical analysis of Husserl’s concept of persons as it emerges in his various attempts to characterize the nature of constituting subjectivity and to distinguish the transcendental ego from the natural self. An attempt will be made to indicate that there is a tension in (...) class='Hi'>Husserl’s thought between his apparent desire to avoid psychologism and the naturalistic standpoint on the one hand, and, on the other hand, his intention to preserve the notion of personal existence. This tension first presents itself in his endeavor to distinguish transcendental subjectivity from psychologistic subjectivity and, hence, it is at this point that we must begin to explore his phenomenology of persons. (shrink)

In this paper, from Husserl in the "philosophy as rigorous science" in the critique of history to start, and then analyzes his "crisis of European science and beyond phenomenological theory" in the exposition of the problem of historicism, the last of Jose Seoul's history and philosophy of our inspiration for a simple summary. This paper starts with Husserl's critique of historicism in Philosophy as Rigorous Science, and analyses his expatiation on the issue in The Crisis of European Science (...) and Transcendental Phenomenology, it also summarizes briefly the philosophy of history of Husserl's views and its revelation to us. (shrink)

According to Husserl, Plato played a fundamental role in the development of the notion of teleology, so much so that Husserl viewed the myth narrated in the Timaeus as a fundamental stage in the long history that he hoped would eventually lead to a teleological science of the world grounded in transcendental phenomenology. This article explores this interpretation of Plato’s legacy in light of Husserl’s thesis that Plato was the initiator of the ideal of genuine science. It (...) also outlines how Husserl sought conceptual resources within transcendental phenomenology to turn the key elements of Plato’s creation myth into rigorous scientific ideas. (shrink)

This volume aims to contextualize the development and reception of Husserl’s transcendental-phenomenological idealism by placing him in dialogue with his most important interlocutors – his mentors, peers, and students. Husserl’s “turn” to idealism and the ensuing reaction to Ideas I resulted in a schism between the early members of the phenomenological movement. The division between the realist and the transcendental phenomenologists is often portrayed as a sharp one, with the realists naively and dogmatically rejecting all of (...) Husserl’s written work after the Logical Investigations. However, this understanding of the trajectory of the phenomenological movement ignores the extensive and intricate contours of the idealism-realism debate. In addition to helping us better interpret Husserl’s attempts to defend his idealism, reconsidering the idealism-realism debate elucidates the relationship and differences between Husserl's phenomenology and the broader landscape of early 20th century German philosophy, particularly the Munich phenomenologists and the Neo-Kantians. The contributions to this volume reconsider many of the early interpretations and critiques of Husserl, inviting readers to assess the merits of the arguments put forward by his critics while also shedding new light on their so-called “misunderstandings” of his idealism. This text should be of interest to researchers working in the history of phenomenology and Husserlian studies. (shrink)

This book covers Husserl’s stance on the philosopher and the history of philosophy, whether or not such a history is part of the philosophical attitude itself, and if so, how Husserl’s phenomenology might weigh in on such matters. Firstly, this text spells out some of the manifold ways in which the history of philosophy works its way in Husserl’s phenomenology, showing how concepts, methods and problems drawn from various Ancient and Modern philosophical traditions (Platonism, (...) Aristotelianism, Sophistry, Stoicism, Scholasticism, Modern Rationalism) are transformed and embedded within transcendental phenomenology itself. Secondly, it shows how a better understanding of the distinctive patterns by means of which Husserl’s phenomenology confronts the history of philosophy could be extremely significant for historians of philosophy who are interested in learning something entirely new about the unexplored horizons of such concepts, methods and problems. Finally, based on such twofold historical and philosophical approach and thanks to a substantial reinterpretation of some key phenomenological concepts such as “multiplicity”, “constitution”, “attitude” and “variation”, this book provides a novel and original reading of Husserl’s overall philosophical project in its full meaning and scope. By doing so, this volume appeals to both students and researchers and critically engages in mainstream interpretations of phenomenology, suggesting a unique take on the idea of transcendental phenomenology as a whole. (shrink)

Derrida's first book-length work, The Problem of Genesis in Husserl's Philosophy , was originally written as a dissertation for his diplôme d'etudes superieures in 1953 and 1954. Surveying Husserl's major works on phenomenology, Derrida reveals what he sees as an internal tension in Husserl's central notion of genesis, and gives us our first glimpse into the concerns and frustrations that would later lead Derrida to abandon phenomenology and develop his now famous method of deconstruction. For Derrida, the problem of genesis (...) in Husserl's philosophy is that both temporality and meaning must be generated by prior acts of the transcendental subject, but transcendental subjectivity must itself be constituted by an act of genesis. Hence, the notion of genesis in the phenomenological sense underlies both temporality and atemporality, history and philosophy, resulting in a tension that Derrida sees as ultimately unresolvable yet central to the practice of phenomenology. Ten years later, Derrida moved away from phenomenology entirely, arguing in his introduction to Husserl's posthumously published Origin of Geometry and his own Speech and Phenomena that the phenomenological project has neither resolved this tension nor expressly worked with it. The Problem of Genesis complements these other works, showing the development of Derrida's approach to phenomenology as well as documenting the state of phenomenological thought in France during a particularly fertile period, when Levinas, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Ricoeur, and Tran-Duc-Thao, as well as Derrida, were all working through it. But the book is most important in allowing us to follow Derrida's own development as a philosopher by tracing the roots of his later work in deconstruction to these early critical reflections on Husserl's phenomenology. "A dissertation is not merely a prerequisite for an academic job. It may set the stage for a scholar's life project. So, the doctoral dissertations of Max Weber and Jacques Derrida, never before available in English, may be of more than passing interest. In June, the University of Chicago Press will publish Mr. Derrida's dissertation, The Problem of Genesis in Husserl's Philosophy , which the French philosopher wrote in 1953-54 as a doctoral student, and which did not appear in French until 1990. From the start, Mr Derrida displayed his inventive linguistic style and flouting of convention."--Danny Postel, Chronicle of Higher Education. (shrink)

This paper aims at a phenomenological analysis of trust. We argue that trust has a transcendental dimension in that it functions as a condition of possibility of the basic ego-world relation. Tacit for the most part in ordinary experience, it comes forth in its problematicity in schizophrenia spectrum disorders. People experiencing psychic disturbances lose trust in the continuity and the mineness of lived experience and conceive the world as uninhabitable. In order to address the transcendental problem of trust, (...) we first carry out a static analysis of trust as perceptual faith and we show that it is founded in the functioning of a transcendental ground. In a second step, we proceed with a genetic analysis drawing on Husserl’s manuscripts on the awakening of the self, on early childhood, and Richir’s recent phenomenological readings of D. W. Winnicott. We situate the archaic experience of trust in an originarily intersubjective and affective dimension, where the parental environment functions as a transcendental matrix for the early development of a yet inchoative self. By doing so, we aim to sketch out the major lines of a transcendental history of trust in the early stages of human experience. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Reception of Husserl’s Phenomenology in Japanese PhilosophyShinji HamauzuWhen we talk about the influence of Husserl’s phenomenology, we should discuss in advance what can justify this talk. When we mention keywords— for instance, intuition of essence, intentionality, inner time-consciousness, rigorous science, natural attitude, phenomenological reduction, transcendental phenomenology, noesis-noema, my living body, genetic phenomenology, empathy, intersubjectivity, life-world, and so on—which keywords should we use when talking about (...) the influence Husserl’s phenomenology had on Japanese philosophy? But we should also ask the following question as well: Which of Husserl’s texts could be available for scholars of Japanese philosophy? Interestingly, there were few works, beyond attending Husserl’s lectures, that one could access, because he only published six books and six articles while he was alive. After Husserl died in 1938, many manuscripts were rescued from the Nazi’s hands and placed at Leuven University in Belgium where the Husserl Archive was first established. The manuscripts were edited and published as Husserliana beginning in 1950 (which now has 42 volumes). Given this, we can think of Husserl’s work as consisting of two periods: the period before and the period after the publication of Husserliana.I myself am interested in the problem of “intersubjectivity” within Husserl’s phenomenology. It is on the one hand the problem of “other-experience (Fremderfahrung)”—i.e., “how I experience the other”—which is the problem of other-experience in the empirical dimension. But it is on the other hand the problem of “intersubjective constitution”—i.e., “how the objective world is the correlate of intersubjective constitution through other-experience,”1 which is the problem of how the other participates in the transcendental dimension. It is characteristic of Husserl’s phenomenology that these two problems are discussed together inseparably. [End Page 1]The manuscripts on the problem of “intersubjectivity” from 1905 to 1935 are collected in volumes XIII to XV of Husserliana. Although the fifth meditation of Cartesian Meditations (first published in French translation in 1931) is often mentioned as the representative work on this theme, it is no more than the tip of the iceberg after Husserl struggled for many years on this problem. The genesis of this theme in the manuscripts dates back to 1905 when terms such as “other” (ein Anderer) and “foreign” (fremd) appeared in manuscript 1, or terms such as “empathy” (Einfühlung) and “intersubjective” appeared in manuscript 2. Husserl wrote later that he had discussed this theme to a relatively large extent in the lecture Fundamental Problems of Phenomenology (Hua XIII) in 1910–1911. In the period of 1905–1910, after the “problem of intersubjectivity” was first introduced, we can also find the idea of “phenomenological reduction” appear for the first time in the literature. This tells us that the problem of intersubjectivity and the idea of phenomenological reduction were born as two sides of the same coin.When Husserl’s phenomenology was first introduced to Japan, Japanese scholars were already reading the first volume of Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, where the “intersubjective world” is thought to refer to a “correlate of experience mediated by empathy,”2 and so the task is to clarify the “intersubjective constitution of the objective world.”3 However, when we consider Husserl’s influence in the history of Japanese philosophy and examine whether the problem of intersubjectivity is discussed as a fundamental problem of philosophy, it can be doubted, in my opinion, whether or not there were any researchers who ever faced this problem seriously. In what follows, I survey several generations of philosophers in Japan who engaged with Husserl’s rehabilitation, to investigate the problem of intersubjectivity in his reception and extent of his influence.Nishida Kitarō’s Interest in PhenomenologyNishida Kitarō (1870–1945) looked back at the revision of his first book in 1936 and wrote,The standpoint of this book [An Inquiry into the Good (1911)] is that of consciousness, which might be thought of as a kind of psychologism... I came to realize that it is not that experience exists because there is an individual, but that an individual exists because there is experience. I... (shrink)

Derrida's first book-length work, _The Problem of Genesis in Husserl's Philosophy_, was originally written as a dissertation for his _diplôme d'études supérieures_ in 1953 and 1954. Surveying Husserl's major works on phenomenology, Derrida reveals what he sees as an internal tension in Husserl's central notion of genesis, and gives us our first glimpse into the concerns and frustrations that would later lead Derrida to abandon phenomenology and develop his now famous method of deconstruction. For Derrida, the problem of genesis in (...) Husserl's philosophy is that both temporality and meaning must be generated by prior acts of the transcendental subject, but transcendental subjectivity must itself be constituted by an act of genesis. Hence, the notion of genesis in the phenomenological sense underlies both temporality and atemporality, history and philosophy, resulting in a tension that Derrida sees as ultimately unresolvable yet central to the practice of phenomenology. Ten years later, Derrida moved away from phenomenology entirely, arguing in his introduction to Husserl's posthumously published _Origin of Geometry_ and his own _Speech and Phenomena_ that the phenomenological project has neither resolved this tension nor expressly worked with it. _The Problem of Genesis_ complements these other works, showing the development of Derrida's approach to phenomenology as well as documenting the state of phenomenological thought in France during a particularly fertile period, when Levinas, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Ricoeur, and Tran-Duc-Thao, as well as Derrida, were all working through it. But the book is most important in allowing us to follow Derrida's own development as a philosopher by tracing the roots of his later work in deconstruction to these early critical reflections on Husserl's phenomenology. "A dissertation is not merely a prerequisite for an academic job. It may set the stage for a scholar's life project. So, the doctoral dissertations of Max Weber and Jacques Derrida, never before available in English, may be of more than passing interest. In June, the University of Chicago Press will publish Mr. Derrida's dissertation, _The Problem of Genesis in Husserl's Philosophy_, which the French philosopher wrote in 1953-54 as a doctoral student, and which did not appear in French until 1990. From the start, Mr Derrida displayed his inventive linguistic style and flouting of convention."—Danny Postel, _Chronicle of Higher Education _. (shrink)

Heidegger’s criticism of the transcendental philosophy of Kant and Husserl is primarily leveled at its underlying understanding of the transcendental subject. Heidegger argues that in order to give an adequate account of the intelligibility of the world, the transcendental subject must be factical. By discussing central aspects of Heidegger’s criticism, this paper shows that his notion of a factical transcendental subject is a necessary step out of aporias of transcendental philosophy. I argue that Heidegger’s emphasis (...) on the facticity of the human being must be understood not as an abandonment of the transcendental standpoint, but as a radicalization of its central ideas. Heidegger is thereby transforming transcendental philosophy into a transcendental ontology. I demonstrate that this allows Heidegger to reconceptualize the constitution of the world as social and historical without having to jettison the role of the transcendental subject. (shrink)

Time-consciousness made its appearance in Husserl’s thought in the first decade of the twentieth century in analyses that were notably silent on the issue of the ego. The ego itself made its debut in the Ideas in 1913, but without an account of its relationship to time. Husserl described time-consciousness, particularly what he called the absolute time-constituting flow of consciousness, as perhaps the most important matter in all of phenomenology. He also came to view phenomenology as centered on the (...) study of the ego understood as transcendental subjectivity. It was not until the last years of his life, however, in his late writings on time-consciousness collected as the C-manuscripts, that Husserl made a serious effort to work out the connections between these two themes. The point of this essay is to examine how Husserl sought to understand the relation between the ego and temporal awareness in the C-manuscripts. I will argue that in these late texts, Husserl preserves and deepens his early understanding of the absolute flow of time-consciousness but that he also attempts to show how the flow is interwoven with the ego’s constitution of itself and of the world. Time-consciousness plays a role on every level of egological constitution. At the same time, egological constitution contributes to the consciousness of time, and particularly to the constitution of the Husserlian monad, the ego understood not simply as the bare pole from which conscious acts radiate but in its full concreteness as embracing its unique individual history. (shrink)

What the present work aimed to achieve is an assessment of the origin an d unity of Husserl s Logical Investigations. My approach was to take the history of its development as fundamental for the determination of its basic structure. Therefore, I proceeded to analyse Husserl s development between the Philosophy of Arithmetic and Logical Investigations with re spect to the fundamental issues in the justification of knowledge in mathematics and logic. In Husserl s own words, one of the (...) concerns that set him on the road to phenomenology was the clarification and analysis of the relation b etween the subjectivity of knowing and the objectivity of knowledge. Fro m my investigations it has, I hope, become apparent how this problem ori ginated in his earliest works and, through various influences and exchanges, led to his theory of intentionality in the first editio n of the Logical Investigations. The Logical Investigations is located between his Brentanist phase and t he ultimate development of transcendental phenomenology. It is the sedim ent of Husserl s logical investigations during the 1890s, which is the m ain period I analysed in the present work. Husserl himself often remarke s on the early origin of some of the issues he tried to deal with in the Logical Investigations. Still in his sketches for a new preface to the second edition of 1913, he took pains to point out the developmental his tory of the work from the Philosophy of Arithmetic onward. Regarding the Philosophy of Arithmetic, more often than not, Husserl remarks that it was just and elaboration of his Habilitationsschrift. Hence, following h is lead, we tried to embrace the whole period of his psychological and l ogical analyses from 1886/7 to 1900/01. Of course, I was certainly not the first, nor will I be the last, to be intrigued by Husserl s development in these years. Numerous books and articles have been written long before mine on precisely these issue s, often dealing with specific topics, such as the uneasy relation of psychology and psychologism in Husserl s work or fundamental inʂ 58;uences such as Bolzano s, which I therefore chose to leave aside. Not simply to duplicate or summarise such pre-existing scholarship, I tried to concentrate on the issues to which I felt I could contribute an orig inal insight, advancing the field. I would like to indicate ᤙ 7;ve points here, where I think I attained this goal: 1. The enduring relevance of Husserl s mathematical ba ckground. 2. Support for an early development of a theory of hig her order objects 3. A better evaluation of Frege s influence 4. A contextualisation of Schuhmann s thesis regarding the relevance of Twardowski for Husserl s notion of intentionality 5. The dependence of the unity of the Logical Investig ations on its historical development. Without understanding its developmental history we would misunderstand i ts internal coherence. In the first part we saw Husserl s early struggle to integrate the mathematical and psychological points of view on the philosophy of math ematics, a struggle that lasted from the Habilitationsschrift at least u p to and including his Doppelvortrag. The basic problem is the justi@ 257;cation of knowledge, in the case of mathematics, the justifica tion of knowledge in formal sciences, obtained with symbolic methods. Su ch problems regarding the subjectivity of knowing and the objectivity of knowledge guided the development of his position from Philosophy of Ari thmetic to Logical Investigations. In articulating his solution Husserl analysed the various relations betw een founding and founded layers of knowledge and whether and how one cou ld pass from on to the other. Already at the time of the Philosophy of A rithmetic he tried to account for higher order acts, relations and objec ts, the mature account of which would have to wait until the Logical Inv estigations and later. Among various influences on his progression towards phenomenology, Frege has been often considered to have provided the conversion to an ti-psychologism with his review of the Philosophy of Arithmetic. I think I have demonstrated that the review is almost entirely irrelevant in th is sense and that we should rather look at a much earlier influenc e on the Philosophy of Arithmetic. By showing that Brentano s conception of intentionality was already more sophisticated than until recently assumed, thanks to some recent public ations of unpublished material from Brentano s and Husserl s Nachlass, I think Schuhmann s thesis is right, but should be reinterpreted as being less radical than it would appear. Both Husserl and Twardowski were in& #64258;uenced by Brentano as his students. Following his and Meinong s l ead, they both elaborated a theory on intentionality, in connection with the other theories of intentionality in his school and the Brentano-Bol zano paradox. Furthermore, by providing a more continuous reading of Hus serl s development through the transcendental turn, I hope to have made clear that his later theory of the noema is not a return to a neo-Twardo wskian triadic position, but a reaffirmation, now in transcendental key, of his 1894 take on the matter. The Logical Investigations are uniquely determined by their historical c ontext in the middle of Husserl s development, falling almost exactly be tween the Habilitationsschrift and the Ideas. Due to their troubled hist ory, including changes in Husserl s earliest position around 1890, the f ailure of the second volume of the Philosophy of Arithmetic, various in& #64258;uences around 1894, and the subsequent reorientation and broadeni ng of his theories to a non-psychologistic logic and mathesis universali s, the Logical Investigations might at first seem to fall apart in two fundamentally disconnected books, the second one of which containin g six heterogeneous studies. It is my contention that it is exactly its troubled history that ties the Logical Investigations together, as Husse rl developed his logical investigations in the 1890s on the basis of a h andful thorny problems, including intentionality as centerpiece. From th e Habilitationsschrift to the Ideas it is the relation between subject a nd object, in all respects, ontological as well as epistemological, that guides his research. The Logical Investigations is a intermediate sedim ent of his struggles, containing an elaboration and improvement of his p osition in his early works and also pointing ahead towards the later pos ition of transcendental phenomenology as an implication and continuation of the solutions he proposes. Furthermore, I tried to address the problem that, while Husserl regarded his Logical Investigations as the breakthrough to phenomenology, many f undamental notions of the later transcendental phenomenology seem to be missing in the first edition of the Logical Investigations. The me thod of the reduction, the notion of a pure ego and a full account of th e noema are at most sketched or implied. Hence, I also looked ahead to t he further development of phenomenology after the Logical Investigations. As Husserl s influence has extended beyond the movement he found ed, I felt I could not bypass his significance for the currently d ominant analytical philosophy. Especially with respect to some of the co re topics of the Logical Investigations, but also earlier themes such as Husserl s semiotics, there is an interest in phenomenology from the ana lytic side. Nevertheless, precisely with regard to the unifying theme of intentionality, analytical philosophy often seems to miss the mark, and spectacularly so. I discussed Searle s influential, but in my opi nion, misguided and flawed approach, and I hope it is clear that I have chosen my method and approach in complete antithesis to his. The central contributions I was able to give, were only possible thanks to solid historical groundwork as necessary prerequisite for systematic analyses. Wherever possible, a reference to the original primary sources was provided, allowing the texts to speak for themselves and providing the reader with the critical instruments to evaluate my interpretations. As Husserl stood in a fruitful exchange with many other scholars, as st udent, colleague, friend and teacher, the intellectual context of his th oughts is essential to a correct understanding of his theories and aims. I hope to have found the right balance in the historical and the system atical aspects of my work to suit the interests of the reader and the re quirements of scholarship. (shrink)

This book focuses on Edmund Husserl’s philosophical collaboration with Eugen Fink which took place in the early 1930s, and shows how their disagreement over the nature, origin, and aim of phenomenology led to a crucial divergence on the issue of who was engaging in phenomenology, and with what motivation. It provides a philosophical investigation of a key moment in the development of Husserl’s late phenomenology. The author claims that Husserl’s meta-phenomenological exploration of the theoretical and, importantly, practical (...) underpinnings of the transcendental investigator leads him to affirm their humanity and, ultimately, to adopt an ethically charged ideal of “higher humanity” as telos of phenomenology. Fink argued that phenomenology was essentially an activity beyond the horizon of human possibility and history. In contrast, Džanić illustrates how Husserl was looking for a way to theoretically unite the purity of transcendental insight with the existential reality and practical motives of the phenomenologist. Understanding the complex aspects of this debate is crucial for understanding the Crisis-period of Husserl’s thought. This text appeals to graduate students and researchers in phenomenology and related fields of philosophy. (shrink)

Carr examines whether Husserl’s later recognition of the importance of history, and the historical situation in which philosophy is carried out, destroys his earlier conception of philosophy as "transcendental," as the analysis of changeless, trans-historical structures of reason and experience. In the first nine chapters he discusses texts from different periods of Husserl’s development and surmises that some evidence exists for an affirmative answer: Husserl does seem to imply, especially in the Crisis and parts of Experience (...) and Judgment, that cultural concepts so permeate our life-world that it is impossible to isolate structures which go beyond our situation. (shrink)

Ideas II has been the source of several issues in the broader phenomenological literature. Some of these issues focus on the particular aims of that work and its place within the system of transcendental constitutive and genetic Phenomenology. Others are concerned with its significance in the development of Husserl’s thought on the possibility and direction of a phenomenological philosophy of natural science (still under discussion), along with a systematic phenomenological grounding of the human sciences. Furthermore, the manuscript of (...) Ideas II seems to have contributed to the formation of Heidegger’s views on the nature and status of Husserl’s Phenomenology and of Phenomenology in general. Thus, an examination of the actual meaning of the analyses in Ideas II would contribute significantly to the understanding of a variety of important issues in phenomenological philosophy. Husserl’s so-called “transcendental turn” between 1905 and 1907 represents the beginning of the path to Ideas II. From 1907 onwards, Husserl attempted a clear and systematic development of his ideas on the transcendental constitution of intentional beings in their—whatever—actuality. This is a task he undertook in the Ideas I, in which he expounds the general core of the new discoveries that allowed him to go beyond the analyses of the Logical Investigations. Having established transcendental subjectivity as the ultimate ground where “the Mothers” accomplish their constitutive work, Husserl became convinced that he had discovered the source from which all Being (Sein) arises. [...] In Ideas II, inanimate nature is presented as comprising the most basic region and as the fundament for the constitution of all the other ontological regions (or regions of Being or Being-regions). But, in Part I of that work (the English translation reads “Section One”), we find Husserl providing an analysis of the constitution of naturething (Naturding).1 What is Husserl’s conception of nature-things there? How do they relate to inanimate beings in general? How do they relate to the things that are supposed to be given in simple visual perception or in simple sense or sensory experience? Are they the accomplishment of a predicative or of a pre-predicative intentionality? Are they the subject matter of natural science, and in what sense— and, if not, why? The text of the Ideas II generates puzzlement and confusion, much of which is reproduced in the relevant literature. (shrink)

Nikolai Lossky is key to the history of the Husserl-Rezeption in Russia. He was the first to publish a review of the Russian translation of Husserl’s first volume of the Logische Untersuchungen that appeared in 1909. He also published a presentation and criticism of Husserl’s transcendental idealism in 1939. An English translation of both of Lossky’s publications is offered in this volume for the first time. The present paper, which is intended as an introduction to these (...) documents, situates Lossky within the Rezeptionsgeschichte of Husserl in Russia and explains why he is central to it. It also explains what Lossky principally found in Husserl: he saw in the latter’s critique of psychologism support for his own ontology, epistemology, and axiology. Lossky characterizes his ontology as an ideal-realism. According to ideal-realism, both the realm of ideal beings and the realm of real beings are mind-independent. Per his epistemology, which he calls “intuitivism,” real beings are intuited by sensual intuition and ideal beings by intellectual intuition. The realm of ideal beings includes the subrealm of values, which is intuited by axiological intuition. This thoroughly realist conception contrasted sharply with the subjectivist tendencies of the time. So, when Lossky took cognizance of Husserl’s critique of psychologism, he thereupon found an ally in his battle against the various subjectivisms. But, when Husserl took the transcendental idealist turn, Lossky was at the forefront of the backlash against the new direction Husserl wanted to give to phenomenology. (shrink)

"With provocations on every page, this book is a philosophical feast. The specialist will find familiar ingredients assembled here in a perspicuous and compelling way, while the nonspecialist will discover a Husserl whose philosophy is made of flesh and blood." —Journal of the History of Philosophy In this thorough study of the full body of his writings, Donn Welton uncovers a Husserl very different from the established view. Arguing against established interpretations, The Other Husserl traces Husserl’s move from (...) static to genetic phenomenology and uses accounts of perception, discourse, subjectivity, and world to elaborate the scope of his systematic phenomenology. This serious reflection on the meaning of phenomenology is the first book in English to outline in full Husserl’s phenomenological method and to argue for its cogency. Welton’s stimulating interpretation highlights Husserl’s relevance for current philosophical debates. (shrink)

In this paper I explore Husserl’s and Foucault’s approaches to the historical a priori and defend Husserl’s richer notion. Foucault borrows the expression ‘historical a priori’ from Husserl and there are continuities, but also significant and ultimately irreconcilable differences, between their conceptions. Both are looking for ‘conditions of possibility,’ forms of ‘institution’ or instauration, and patterns of transformation, for scientific knowledge. Husserl identifies the ‘a priori of history’ with the ‘historical a priori’ and believes that the ‘invariant (...) essential structures of the historical world’ can be identified. Foucault, on the other hand, is less interested in the Kantian inquiry into the limits or legitimization of knowledge than in the relation between knowledge and power. Foucault rejects the idea of universal and necessary a priori structures and denies that the structure of the conceptual framework governing an era can be fully determined. Both Foucault and Husserl contrast ‘inner’ history with external history, but, I argue, Foucault misconstrues Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology as a form of ‘absolute subjectivity’ against which his ‘archaeological’ method reacts. In fact, Foucault’s own conception of the historical a priori is ambiguous and fails to have explanatory value precisely because it misunderstands the need for the a priori to be both universal and necessary, and offers no account of the ‘a priori of historicity’ which, for Husserl, is essential to human cultural life. (shrink)

Throughout his career, Husserl identifies naturalism as the greatest threat to both the sciences and philosophy. In this paper, I explicate Husserl’s overall diagnosis and critique of naturalism and then examine the specific transcendental aspect of his critique. Husserl agreed with the Neo-Kantians in rejecting naturalism. He has three major critiques of naturalism: First, it (like psychologism and for the same reasons) is ‘countersensical’ in that it denies the very ideal laws that it needs for its own justification. (...) Second, naturalism essentially misconstrues consciousness by treating it as a part of the world. Third, naturalism is the inevitable consequence of a certain rigidification of the ‘natural attitude’ into what Husserl calls the ‘naturalistic attitude’. This naturalistic attitude ‘reifies’ and it ‘absolutizes’ the world such that it is treated as taken-for-granted and ‘obvious’. Husserl’s transcendental phenomenological analysis, however, discloses that the natural attitude is, despite its omnipresence in everyday life, not primary, but in fact is relative to the ‘absolute’ transcendental attitude. The mature Husserl’s critique of naturalism is therefore based on his acceptance of the absolute priority of the transcendental attitude . The paradox remains that we must start from and, in a sense, return to the natural attitude, while, at the same time, restricting this attitude through the on-going transcendental vigilance of the universal epoché. (shrink)

Book review of Rollinger & Sowa's 2004 translation of Husserl's own later collection of manuscripts on transcendental idealism (and realism): It has long served the interests of certain partisans to paint Husserl as a Cartesian philosopher of consciousness, as a man who, like his early modern predecessor, was obsessed with demonstrating that the ‘‘data’’ of conscious experience constitute an epistemological fundamentum inconcussum. Husserl thus becomes a stock character in those narratives of modern philosophy which see it as having been (...) dominated by a poisonous Cartesian subjectivism prior to the arrival of one or another of philosophy’s great twentieth-century saviors (typically one chooses either Heidegger or Wittgenstein here). On the other side, it has long been common for Husserlians to brush aside this character- ization of Husserl as a gross oversimplification and indeed fundamental mis- understanding of his thought, one resting on a lack of any real familiarity with his writings and ideas.We are thus presented with the paradox that while many of the most conscientious of Husserl’s expositors could read him as an anti- Cartesian philosopher, other, generally less sympathetic but often not less intelligent readers could come to the exact opposite conclusion... (shrink)

The paper aims to capture a form of naturalism that can be found “built-in” in phenomenology, namely the idea to take science or mathematics on its own, without postulating extraneous normative “molds” on it. The paper offers a detailed comparison of Penelope Maddy’s naturalism about mathematics and Husserl’s approach to mathematics in Formal and Transcendental Logic. It argues that Maddy’s naturalized methodology is similar to the approach in the first part of the book. However, in the second part (...) Husserl enters into a transcendental clarification of the evidences and presuppositions of the mathematicians’ work, thus “transcendentalizing” his otherwise naturalist approach to mathematics. The result is a moderately revisionist view that takes the existing mathematical practices seriously, calls for reflection on them, and eventually gives suggestions for revisions if needed. (shrink)