The collection of Edmund Husserl's sketches on time-consciousness from the years 1893-1917, edited by Rudolf Boehm and published as Volume X in the Husserliana series, affords significant new material for the study of the evolution of Husserl's thought. Specifically, the sketches suggest that in the course of analyzing the consciousness of temporal objects Husserl became convinced that a distinction must be drawn between an ultimate or absolute flow of consciousness and the immanent temporal objects or contents -- sense-data, appearances of (...) external things, acts of wishing, judging, etc. -- constituted or known within that flow. Further, the texts indicate that the emergence of the absolute dimension was connected with the development during this period of two distinct interpretations of the constitution of time-consciousness. Husserl apparently worked out the first of these during the years 1901-1907, and only towards the end of this period did the notion of an absolute consciousness, absent in earlier texts, make its appearance. And no sooner did it emerge than Husserl undertook a critique of his first interpretation which ultimately culminated in its rejection. In the new position which then appeared, around 1909, the absolute flow of time-constituting consciousness, and its distinction from temporal objects both immanent and transcendent, was unequivocally affirmed. We propose now to discuss this evolution and the emergence and nature of the absolute flow of consciousness. -/- . (shrink)

A fruitful way to approach The Idea of Phenomenology is through Husserl’s claim that consciousness is not a bag, box, or any other kind of container. The bag conception, which dominated much of modern philosophy, is rooted in the idea that philosophy is restricted to investigating only what is really immanent to consciousness, such as acts and sensory contents. On this view, what Husserl called “the riddle of transcendence” can never be solved. The phenomenological reduction, as Husserl develops it in (...) The Idea of Phenomenology, opened up a new and broader sense of immanence that embraces the transcendent, making it possible both to solve the riddle and to escape the bag conception once and for all. The essay will discuss ways in which this new conception of immanence is tied to the key Husserlian themes of appearance, phenomenon, essence, seeing or intuiting, and constitution. (shrink)

This chapter concentrates on the nature of the image as it presents itself in experience, with its remarkable capacity to represent within itself people, events, emotions, and many other things, and with its place in art. The Husserlian perspective has many affinities with more recent investigations of images. The physical dimension of image plays an important role in imaging and has been largely neglected by philosophers, though not by artists. The uniqueness of image consciousness rests in its ability to see (...) something in something else. Then, the chapter assesses the differences between image consciousness and symbolic or signitive consciousness. The resemblance in image consciousness must precisely not be perfect; it must be paired with and permeated by difference and even conflict. Images improve experience by folding into themselves the world. (shrink)

A fruitful way to approach The Idea of Phenomenology is through Husserl’s claim that consciousness is not a bag, box, or any other kind of container. The bag conception, which dominated much of modern philosophy, is rooted in the idea that philosophy is restricted to investigating only what is really immanent to consciousness, such as acts and sensory contents. On this view, what Husserl called the riddle of transcendence can never be solved. The phenomenological reduction, as Husserl develops it in (...) The Idea of Phenomenology, opened up a new and broader sense of immanence that embraces the transcendent, making it possible both to solve the riddle and to escape the bag conception once and for all. The essay will discuss ways in which this new conception of immanence is tied to the key Husserlian themes of appearance, phenomenon, essence, seeing or intuiting, and constitution. (shrink)

I argue in this essay that Edmund Husserl distinguishes three levels within time-consciousness: an absolute time-constituting flow of consciousness, the immanent acts of consciousness the flow constitutes, and the transcendent objects the acts intend. The immediate occasion for this claim is Neal DeRoo’s discussion of Dan Zahavi’s reservations about the notion of an absolute flow and DeRoo’s own efforts to mediate between Zahavi’s view and the position Robert Sokolowski and I have advanced. I argue that the flow and the tripartite (...) distinction it introduces into consciousness is firmly grounded in Husserl’s texts and is philosophically defensible. The absolute flow is distinct but inseparable from what it constitutes. It is intentional in a nonobjectivating way, and accounts for the awareness I have of my individual acts of consciousness and of the unity and continuity of my conscious life. In its absence, consciousness would become an incoherent stream of episodic acts. There is nothing mysterious about the flow. What would be mysterious is consciousness without the flow. (shrink)

The point of departure for husserl's mature account of memory is his rejection of the traditional view that what is immediately and directly experienced in memory is a present image or replica of what is past and not what is past itself. Husserl rejects the image theory on logical and descriptive grounds, Arguing that memory is a direct consciousness of the past. Memory is experienced as a unique mode of consciousness giving its object in a manner irreducible to pictorial or (...) perceptual modes. Husserl's exploration of memory thus understood includes discussion of the differing temporal determinations of memory and its object, Of memory's relation to the absolute time-Constituting flow of consciousness, Of memory as representation of earlier perception, And of the various senses and ways in which empty memorial intentions can be brought to fulfillment. (shrink)

IN A RECENT AND PHILOSOPHICALLY RICH STUDY, David Wood has undertaken the deconstruction of time through an engagement with the thought of Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, and, of course, Derrida. The present essay is not intended to offer a sustained criticism of Wood's arguments or to canvass what he says about the quartet of philosophers noted above; rather, with his book as background, the essay's purpose is to say something about only one of the four philosophers--Edmund Husserl--and particularly about the place (...) of presence and absence in Husserl's phenomenology of time and the consciousness of time. The results may supply ammunition both to those inclined to criticize Husserl from a deconstructive point of view and to those bold enough to defend him. In any event, what Husserl has to say about these matters is worth considering for its own sake. His discussion of the different ways in which presence and absence enter into our temporal experience is subtle and nuanced. He draws delicate distinctions and points to continuities and discontinuities that deserve the philosopher's careful and sympathetic attention. I will focus on a few of these, hoping that they will suggest something of the rich resources for reflection on this topic that are present in Husserl's texts. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Heidegger Sartre Merleau‐Ponty.

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)

The authors of the essays collected in this volume continue that tradition, challenging, expanding, and deepening it.

The author addresses three interlocking issues in this rich and interesting study: time-consciousness ; the question of temporal realism ; and the possibility of a special temporality belonging to human beings. The author's approach to these questions is phenomenological, generally in Husserl's sense of the term, although he does not hesitate to amend Husserl's method from a Heideggerian perspective and even to depart from it in ways that might leave Husserl himself quite aghast--as in the use of conclusions drawn from (...) current psychological and neurophysiological studies of the dependence of mental processes on brain functions. (shrink)

Much recent discussion in philosophical aesthetics has focused on the issue of defining art, particularly visual art. Such efforts generally presume that art is important without explaining why it is important. It is the latter question that Alan Paskow addresses. He is interested in discovering how and why art, and especially painting, matter in our lives. This is an important topic. If art did not matter to people in some deeply personal sense, it would not be the subject of such (...) intense interest, whether on the part of the art-appreciating public or of academic philosophers. Paskow attempts to link the work of art to the viewer’s existence, to show its continuity with life, and to provide a framework that makes sense of the many effects art can have on those who experience it. To classify something as an artwork is to identify it as the kind of thing that can and should have value in our lives; and such value is not a question of pure, disinterested contemplation cut off from quotidian existence. (shrink)

Professor Gier intends to offer a revisionist reading of Wittgenstein: “It is the analytic or positivist Wittgenstein who is the odd creature”. Wittgenstein was not, as opinion often has it, contemptuous of the classical metaphysicians or dismissive of such contemporaries as Husserl and Heidegger as purveyors of nonsense. In fact, he even came to an “explicit and positive use of the term ‘phenomenology’”. Professor Gier attempts to establish the nature and significance of this claim by examining a broad range of (...) Wittgenstein’s texts and by comparing Wittgenstein’s phenomenology to the versions of Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty, arguing that Wittgenstein’s own development parallels the evolution from “pure” to “existential” phenomenology. He states explicitly that he intends neither to criticize nor to support the views he sets forth. (shrink)