This book fills an important gap in previous Husserl scholarship by focusing on intersubjectivity and empathy (i.e., the experience of others as other subjects) and by addressing the related issues of validity, the degrees of evidence with which something can be experienced, and the different senses of 'objective' in Husserl's texts. Despite accusations by commentators that Husserl's is a solipsistic philosophy and that the epistemologies in Husserl's late and early works are contradictory, Hermberg shows that empathy, and thus other subjects, (...) are related to one's knowledge on the view offered in each of Husserl's Introductions to Phenomenology. Empathy is significantly related to knowledge in at least two ways, and Husserl's epistemology might, consequently, be called a social epistemology: (a) empathy helps to give evidence for validity and thus to solidify one's knowledge, and (b) it helps to broaden one's knowledge by giving access to what others have known. These roles of empathy are not at odds with one another; rather, both are at play in each of the Introductions (if even only implicitly) and, given his position in the earlier work, Husserl needed to expand the role of empathy as he did. Such a reliance on empathy, however, calls into question whether Husserl's is a transcendental philosophy in the sense Husserl claimed. (shrink)

The correlation between person and environment has long been a central focus of phenomenological analysis. While phenomenology is usually understood as a descriptive discipline showing how essential features of the human encounter with things and people in the world are articulated, phenomenology is also based on ethical concerns. Husserl himself, the founder of the movement, gave several lecture courses on ethics. This volume focuses on one trend in ethics—virtue ethics—and its connection to phenomenology. The essays explore how phenomenology contributes to (...) this field of ethics and clarifies some of its central issues, such as flourishing and good character traits. The volume initiates a conversation with virtue ethicists that is underrepresented in the current literature. Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics offers contributions from prominent phenomenologists who explore the following issues: how phenomenology is connected to the ancient Greek or Christian virtue tradition, how phenomenology and its foundational thinkers are oriented toward virtue ethics, and how phenomenology is itself a virtue discipline. The focus on phenomenology and virtue ethics in a single volume is the first of its kind. (shrink)

Much has been written about Husserl and the famous problems of intersubjectivity and solipsism, and some work has been done regarding Husserl's notion of empathy and its role in the establishment of intersubjectivity. The vast majority of that work, however, focuses on one of Husserl's texts and on the establishment of the possibility of other subjects. What is lacking in the scholarship is an investigation of the role of empathy in Husserl's corpus which address the related issues: validity, the degrees (...) of evidence with which something can be experienced, the different senses of "objective" in Husserl's texts, whether empathy contributes to knowledge or just to the validity of one's knowledge, where in the empathetic-communicative process something becomes objective. This dissertation begins to fill that gap by offering an investigation of the role of empathy in the attainment of objectively valid knowledge in each of Husserl's three introductions to phenomenology: Ideas: A General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology , Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology , and The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy . ;Despite accusations by commentators that Husserl's is a solipsistic philosophy, I show that empathy is related to one's knowledge on the view offered in each of Husserl's introductions to phenomenology. Empathy is significantly related to knowledge in at least two ways and Husserl's epistemology might, consequently, be called a social epistemology: empathy helps to offer evidence for validity and thus solidify one's knowledge and it helps to broaden one's knowledge by affording the ability to gain access to what others have constituted and known. These roles of empathy are not at odds with one another; rather, both are at play in each of the introductions and, given his position in the earlier work, Husserl needed to expand the role of empathy as he did. Such a reliance on empathy, however, calls into question whether Husserl's is a transcendental philosopher in the sense Husserl claimed it is. (shrink)

Bringing together leading scholars from across the world, this is a comprehensive survey of the latest phenomenological research into the perennial philosophical problem of ‘truth'.Starting with an historical introduction chronicling the variations on truth at play in the Phenomenological tradition, the book explores how Husserl's methodology equips us with the tools to thoroughly explore notions of truth, reality and knowledge. From these foundations, the book goes on to explore and extend the range of approaches that contemporary phenomenological research opens up (...) in the face of the most profound ontological and epistemological questions raised by the tradition. In the final section, the authors go further still and explore how phenomenology relates to other variations on truth offered up by hermeneutic, deconstructive and narrative approaches.Across the 12 essays collected in this volume, Variations on Truth explores and maps a comprehensive and rigorous alternative to mainstream analytic discussions of truth, reality and understanding. (shrink)