This text examines the many transformations in Husserl’s phenomenology that his discoveries of the nature of appearing lead to. It offers a comprehensive look at the Logical Investigations’ delimitation of the phenomenological field, and continues with Husserl’s account of our consciousness of time. This volume examines Husserl’s turn to transcendental idealism and the problems this raises for our recognition of other subjects. It details Husserl’s account of embodiment and takes largely from his manuscripts, both published and unpublished, dealing with his (...) theory of instincts, his considerations of mortality and the teleological character of our existence. This book appeals to students and researchers and presents a genetic account of our selfhood, one that unifies Husserl’s different claims about who and what we are. (shrink)

To say we are present to ourselves through our bodies is to express something so obvious that most people hardly give it a thought. Philosophers, however, came late to this recognition. The idea that our embodiment shapes our apprehensions seemed to Descartes to designate a problem rather than a topic of study. His effort was to overcome embodiment, that is, to reach a realm where the unencumbered mind could confront the world. The same prejudice informed the modern tradition he founded. (...) It took for granted that the mind, or self, was unextended. Since the nonextended could not interact with the extended, Leibniz assumed that the self was a “windowless monad.” God provided its impressions of the external world. The same position was embraced by Berkeley. Realizing that matter had entirely lost its function of supplying the disembodied self with impressions, he denied its existence altogether. Even Hume, the dedicated empiricist, refused to speculate on the origin of such impressions. They could as well come from God, the external world, or the mind itself. The latter, as disembodied, was a mere theater--a ghostly stage on which our impressions and ideas succeeded each other. Kant pushed this tradition to its logical extreme. The disembodied self, he declared, was entirely noumenal. It could not even appear. It was only with Nietzsche’s biologism that a break with this tradition appears. Nietzsche’s will to power, however, was something more than an organic will to life. Its appeal was ultimately to something beyond our bodily being. (shrink)