The present paper is guided by the belief that Edmund Husserl’s concept of noema can be significantly enriched when considered in light of extreme epistemological instances. These include the phenomena of the absurd and nonsense, but also intentional conflict and cases of consciousness directed to contradictory objects. The paper shows that the noema, when experienced in such a context, exhibits interesting characteristics that are rather difficult to note in other circumstances. The paper consists of five sections. The first interprets and (...) relates concepts from Logical Investigations to those from Ideas I. The second section discloses the noematic ability to assemble senses for which there is no corresponding object. The third section stresses that the noema must, in some instances, be able to comprise two separate structures of senses through which two different objects are meant. In the fourth section, all of these characteristics are shown to be restricted by the concept of nonsense and the laws of meaning-compounding. In this way, the noema is clarified as “possibly thinkable content.” Finally, in Sect. 5, this idea is brought into dialogue with the most significant interpretations of the noema. (shrink)

The subject of the present work is noema and its structure in various stages of the objectivating process. Despite its great importance, this issue has never been adequately explained, neither by Husserl nor by his followers. The main objective is to provide the theory that would describe the structure of noema and its function without simplifying the case or appealing to non-phenomenological data. This has been achieved by way of analysis divided into four sections. The first provides an overview of (...) noema. The second section is devoted to analysis of the process of objectivation, i.e., how an active awareness of the object in a logical sense is constituted by a series of passive experiences. The third section refers to a noema as found at different stages of objectivation. It explains how the increasing level of activity, which turns out to be a noetic function, causes changes to the structure of a noema. The last section summarises the results and stresses the advantages of the developed theory in comparison with other interpretations, especially those offered by Drummond, Smith and McIntyre. (shrink)