Abstract

The first systematic evaluation and comparison is undertaken of Aron Gurwitsch's and Dagfinn Follesdal's competing--and mutually incompatible--interpretations of Edmund Husserl's theory of intentionality. While agreeing with Husserl that mental acts are directed towards their objects in virtue of their associated noemata, or meanings, the two views present radically different accounts of how that directedness is realized. It is argued that Gurwitsch took intentionality to be a species of relation between a mental act and its object. On Gurwitsch's view, the noema determines the object of perception by being the immediate object of the perceptual act and a constituent of the ordinary object. Follesdal, on the other hand, argued that Husserl departed from this traditional approach by adopting a non-relational view, on which intentionality is an intrinsic feature of a mental act, whose object may or may not exist. For Follesdal, the noema functionally determines the act's object, but is itself neither the object of the act, nor a constituent of the object of the act. Each interpretation is evaluated in terms of its internal coherence and consistency, and its ability to account for prominent features of our perceptual experience, most notably, instances of perceptual error and mishap. Gurwitsch's interpretation fails these tests--and does so precisely in those details which represent departures from Husserl's original account . Follesdal's interpretation is both internally coherent and successful in accounting for those features of ordinary perceptual experience which seem intractable on Gurwitsch's view, and Follesdal resolutely avoids any metaphysical claims regarding the nature of ordinary objects. The systematic comparison of the substantive merits of these competing interpretations makes clear that there is more at stake in the vigorous debate over the interpretation of Husserl's theory of intentionality than historical or parochial issues of textual fealty. Rather, the competing interpretations present radically different--and incompatible--accounts of human experience.