In Edmund Husserl's Phenomenology, Joseph J. Kockelmans provides the reader with a biographical sketch and an overview of the salient features of Husserl's thought. Kockelmans focuses on the essay for the Encyclopedia Britannica of 1928, Husserl's most Important effort to articulate the aims of phenomenology for a more general audience. Included are Husserl's text -- in the original German and in English translation on facing pages -- a synopsis, and an extensive commentary that relates Husserl's work as (...) a whole to the essay for the Encyclopedia. (shrink)

All of the major themes of Edmund Husserl's phenomenology, from the Logical Investigations to The Crisis of the European Sciences, are investigated from a critical point of view by James M. Edie. The philosophy of logic is considered insofar as it relates to the phenomenological and transcendental foundation of logic itself. Transcendental logic is studied with reference to both the formal logic of Aristotle and Leibniz and the dialectical logic of Hegel. Edie considers Husserl's theories of meaning and (...) reference, intentionality, the distinction between perceptual and eidetic intuition, the notion of the ideality of meaning, the laws of objectivity in general, and formal and material ontology, as well as Husserl's reinterpretation of the apriori. (shrink)

The concept of habit enfolds an enormous richness and diversity of meanings. According to Husserl, habit, along with association, memory, and so on, belongs to the very essence of the psychic.1 Husserl even speaks of an overall genetic “phenomenology of habitualities”. In this paper, as an initial attempt to explicate the complexity of phenomenological treatments of habit, want to trace Husserl’s conception of habit as it emerged in his mature genetic phenomenology, in order to highlight his enormous and (...) neglected original contribution in this area. I shall show that Husserl was by no means limited to a Cartesian intellectualist explication of habitual action (as commentators such as Bourdieu and Dreyfus have claimed), but attempted to characterize its complexity across the range of human individual, sub-personal, personal, social and collective experience. Habit, as we shall see, for Husserl, is intimately involved in the constitution of meaningfulness (Husserl’s Sinnhaftigkeit) and forms of sense (Sinnesgestalten) at all levels, from the level of perceptual experience, through the formation of the ego, to the development of society, history and tradition, indeed to our whole sense of the harmonious course of worldly life and to the genetic constitution of worldhood as such. Habituality, furthermore, is a key structural principle in the genetic constitution of the transcendental ego itself, as it unfolds as a concrete living and acting person in an intersubjective, cultural and historical world. (shrink)

This study clarifies the confusion concerning the purpose of Husserl's last major phenomenological treatise, Experience and Judgment, and presents his theory of categorical judgment.

Karl Jaspers' phenomenology remains important today, not solely because of its continuing influence in some areas of psychiatry, but because, if fully understood, it can provide a method and set of concepts for making new progress in the science of psychopathology. In order to understand this method and set of concepts, it helps to recognize the significant influence that Edmund Husserl's early work, Logical investigations, exercised on Jaspers' formulation of them. We trace the Husserlian influence while clarifying the (...) main components of Jaspers' method. Jaspers adopted Husserl's notions of intuition, description, and presuppositionlessness, transforming them when necessary in order to serve the investigations of the psychopathologist. Jaspers also took over from Wilhelm Dilthey and others the tools of understanding (Verstehen) and self-transposal. The Diltheyian procedures were integrated into the Husserlian ones to produce a method that enables psychiatrists to define the basic kinds of psychopathological mental states. (shrink)

The University Of California Studies, Philosophy Series, No. 4.

Attempts to introduce phenomenology to the English-speaking world have often been hampered by the specialist's tendency to substitute a part for the whole--thereby threatening the delicate balance guaranteed by the transcendental turn and so carefully maintained by Husserl throughout his-philosophical career. Thus some, in their concern to place Husserl in the context of the realism-idealism issue, have stressed the contrast between Ideen and some aspects of Krisis. Others, relying on the illuminating power of the notion of human roles, have (...) devoted themselves exclusively to the working out of a mundane phenomenology with or without ontological pretensions. While there is value to be found in this branching out of the research, it nevertheless needs to be integrated. Because of the character of the phenomenological synthesis, moreover, such integration cannot be achieved simply by generalists. Hence the value of scholars like Kockelmans whose experience in more than one type of reduction permits them to move readily from one level of intentionality to another. As the book amply demonstrates, Kockelmans has acquired this multiple capability by following in detail Husserl's philosophical development as it progressively opens the way to the exploration of all these levels. In commenting upon this development, he is also rendering an invaluable service by bringing to light many of Husserl's writings which otherwise might remain unknown to the interested student. The work is concise, a model of balance between exposition of the doctrine and clarification of the issues; in short, an excellent and welcome addition to the phenomenological literature.-A. M. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss some significant aspects of Husserl’s phenomenology which could not be adequately known without studying the manuscripts, unpublished during his lifetime and then published gradually since 1950 by Husserl Archives in Leuven founded by Father van Breda in 1939. The aspects I discuss here are listed under 6 subjects: Husserl’s phenomenological analyses of the constituting corporeal subjectivity, Husserl’s phenomenological analysis of the conditions of possibility of representifications, concept of I-consciousness, conception of transcendental subjectivity as intersubjectivity, (...) the development of Husserl’s conception of phenomenological philosophy, and Husserl’s metaphysics. This paper is drawn from, and an extension of, a lecture given at the Catholic University of Louvain in the occasion of 80th anniversary of the foundation of the Husserl Archives. (shrink)

Introduction 11 PART I: THE HALLE YEARS Chapter One: The Rehabilitation of the Imagination in Husserl’s Early Thought. 17 §1. Brentano’s Rehabilitation of Intentionality and the Problem of Imagination. §2. Husserl and the Breakthrough of Phenomenology. §2.1 The Meaning-Bestowing Act as ‘the Peg from which Everything hangs.’ §2.2 Consciousness is not a Container. §2.3 ‘A Difference that cannot be Phenomenologically Reduced.’ §3. Imagination as an Authentic, Intuitive Intentionality. PART II: THE GÖTTINGEN YEARS Chapter Two: Irreconcilable Differences: Imagination and Image (...) Consciousness. 71 §1. Separations, Convergences, and Goodbyes §2. A nothing in the midst of things that sees me. §3. Wrestling with the angel of Imagination. §4. Images of Productive Phantasy. Chapter Three: The Garden of the Forking Paths: On Time Consciousness. 107 §1. Picking up an Ancient Cross. §2. Continuum of Continua. §3. In Search of Time Lost. Chapter Four: Absence and the Absolute: The Revisions of Phantasy and Time-Consciousness. 143 Recapitulation: Cutting loose the baggage of the ‘Content for an Apprehension and Apprehension’ Schema. §1. The Concept of an Absolute Consciousness and the Embedment of Contents. §2. Transcendental Phenomenology and the Opening Up of a Closed Field. §3. The Breakthrough on the Contents of Consciousness. §3.1. ‘Consciousness through and through’ §3.2. Ambiguities of Immanence. §4. Primary and Secondary Memory revisited. §5. The New Account of Internal Time Consciousness. Chapter Five: The Breakthrough of the Life of Phantasy: Recollection and Pure Phantasy. 187 §1. Introducing the Pure Ego. §2. The Pending Problem of Belief in Presentifications. §3. Recollection and Internal Time Consciousness. §3.1. The Characterization of Recollection as Consciousness ‘Once Again’ following the Revision of the Schema. §3.2. Recollection as a Modified Appearance and a Directedness toward the Past Object. §3.3. Recollection as the Reproductive Modification of the Internal Consciousness of a Past Act. §4. The Differentiation of Recollection and Pure Phantasy on the basis of Internal Time-Consciousness. PART III: THE FREIBURG YEARS AND BEYOND Chapter Six: The Subject in Image: Husserl’s Revisiting of Image-Consciousness. 239 §1. Introducing the Concept of Perceptual Phantasy. §2. The Subject in Image. §3. Is There Temporality in Image?. §4. Revisiting the Theory of Image-consciousness as Depiction. §5. Pictoriality and Phantasy Temporality. Chapter Seven: ‘Myth that is Truest Memory:’ Phantasy and the Literary Work of Art. 303 §1. Theater and Drama. §2. Is the Literary Work of Art Itself Imaginary? §3. The Literary Work as an Idea with a Temporality. §4. Phantasy and the Consciousness of Possibility. Parting Words on Poetry and Philosophy. Bibliography: 361. (shrink)

In the vast landscape of Edmund Husserl’s investigations, the theme of attention has long been neglected: the dispersal of his treatment of the topic across works from various years, the use of a diversified lexicon, and an intrinsic difficulty in identifying the attentional phenomenon itself have all contributed to the long-standing underestimation of this theme. Following a line of study that – especially after the publication of volume XXXVIII of the Husserliana (Wahrnehmung und Aufmerksamkeit) – has renewed interest in (...) this topic, this article aims to contribute to the historical as well as theoretical reconstruction of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology of attention. In particular, we will focus on the contribution of a figure who had a crucial impact on Husserl’s development and the framing of the phenomenological method itself, namely Carl Stumpf, concentrating especially on the engagement that the father of phenomenology had with him, starting from the treatment of attention through the concept of interest. This debate will be reconstructed from the examination of (1) part of the Göttingen Lectures of 1904-05, explicitly dedicated to attention; (2) a very early but theoretically significant Husserlian manuscript, “Noten zur Lehre von Aufmerksamkeit und Interesse” (1893); and (3) Stumpf’s own work, particularly Tonpsychologie, where the interpretation of attention as “Lust am Bemerken” is formulated and with which Husserl engages in a rigorous critical dialogue. On the basis of this confrontation, we will highlight from an original perspective Husserl’s significant debt to the psychology of the time, from which he not only borrowed certain themes and a general interest in the simplest levels of experience, but also the basic outlines of notions that would serve as the foundation for the development of some crucial concepts of transcendental phenomenology such as that of intentionality. Moreover, it is through the examination of attention that the profound continuity of Husserl’s reflection becomes apparent, evidenced by the extraordinarily early emergence of crucial and typical notions of his later phase (known as “genetic phenomenology”) during these formative years, even before the phenomenological method was fully developed. (shrink)

Like the history of much of Husserl’s work, the history of his contribution to a phenomenology of the body is in part a history of understandable misunderstandings and subsequent reevaluations concerning the scope and significance of his achievements. To a certain extent, this is due not so much to what he actually said on this topic, but to the circumstances under which he said or wrote it—university lecture course? unpublished book draft? published work? research manuscript? conversation noted down by (...) others?—and to the sequence and manner in which this work gradually became available to the larger phenomenological community. For example, it was widely held at one time, primarily on the basis of Ideas I (see, e.g., III: §§ 39, 53–54),2 that Husserl dealt only with a disembodied and desituated consciousness, and that it was only with the advent of existential phenomenology that the body truly became an important phenomenological theme. However, we now know that Merleau-Ponty, for example, drew upon Husserl’s manuscripts for many of the descriptions and insights developed in the extensive and influential discussions of the body in Phenomenology of Perception (see Van Breda 1962/1992). Moreover, though it is now more readily acknowledged that Husserl did indeed take the body into account, some still assume or imply that he did so only toward the end of his life. Yet a closer examination of material published to date reveals that Husserl was concerned with bodilihood in texts from many different periods.3 A fuller appreciation of the range and richness of Husserl’s work in phenomenology of the body is nevertheless emerging only slowly.4 It is the purpose of this essay to help establish a basis for such appreciation by sorting out and summarizing certain key contributions to a phenomenology of the body in Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Second Book, and by indicating the continuing relevance of Husserl’s achievements in this text to current issues. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Commentary on “Edmund Husserl’s Influence on Karl Jaspers’s Phenomenology”Jean Naudin (bio) and Jean-Michel Azorin (bio)Keywordsphenomenology, intentionality, intuition, empathy, ambiguitySchwartz and Wiggins’s paper clearly shows that Jaspers’s comprehensive psychiatry draws mainly from Husserl’s phenomenology. This thesis enters a current debate opened by Chris Walker and German Berrios about the influence of Husserlian philosophy on Jaspers’s work. This debate, which emerged at the end of the so-called decade (...) of the brain, could be considered perfectly obsolete. But its topicality relies on taking up the challenge of the scientific bases of comprehension in psychiatric experience. Wiggins and Schwartz perfectly achieve this aim by opposing a theory of seeing and a theory of thinking. Works such as Walker’s are grounded on thinking; they are works about theory. They are not works about experience, but rather epistemological or historical works. In contrast, Wiggins and Schwartz suggest to see, as Jaspers did, and not to think, following Husserl by grounding their psychopathology on intuition and presuppositionlessness. They emphasize Jaspers’s method of “making present” by doing a perfect analysis of the issues of translation of vergegenwärtigung as a co-experiencing of mental processes as if they were directly given. These main principles of direct-givenness, presuppositionlessness, and making present pull the Jaspersian concepts to the Husserlian phenomenological reduction and seem like the foremost principle in Husserlian phenomenology: the intuition of the thing in itself. Whereas Jaspers refuted the principle of eidetic reduction, Wiggins and Schwartz clearly show how much he grounded on the basis of the concept of intentionality, discovered and enlightened during Husserl’s life within the horizon of phenomenological reduction. Actually, it seems that the authors take the side of Jaspers to better support their own vision of psychiatric experience, which they more explicitly argued in Husserlian terms of the later period in some other papers (Schwartz and Wiggins 1985; Wiggins and Schwartz 1988, 1991; Wiggins, Schwartz, and Northoff 1990). However, they take care here to struggle exclusively with the epistemological field of their opponents, considering only Jaspers’s own writings and the Husserlian texts that were accessible to Jaspers when he wrote his psychopathology. There is no room for Kant in Jaspers’s main [End Page 37] principles, and this assumption must lead us to consider the horizon opened by Jaspers, that is, the horizon of a science of meaning essentially built on the lived experiences and the bracketing of any kind of a priori. In contrast to the slight influence of Kant, one idea that emerges is that of the straight impact of Dilthey on both Jaspers and Husserl. We perfectly agree with Wiggins and Schwartz that Jaspers, grounding both on Husserl and Dilthey, arrives at a methodological principle that is all his own, by considering both the connections of the life-stories and the objectivity of symptoms. In other words, we can find the originality and maybe the astonishing modernity of Jaspers in his perfect description of the balance between comprehension and observation, between empathy and its limits, that are obviously found in psychotic processes.We thus focused our comments on the following critiques to Jaspers, although they were already well argued in the brief conclusion of Wiggins and Schwartz: (a) the issue of empathy, (b) the limits of Jaspersian phenomenology, and (c) the merits of its genuine ambiguity.The Issue of Empathy. Indeed we have no reliable scientific mean to guarantee the correctness of our intuitions of the other’s mental life, and this problem might lead one to globally reject the method. The discussion of this problem, classical in the Continental literature since the twenties, led the Continental psychiatrists to unfortunately abandon their own traditions. And it is surprising for a Continental psychiatrist to see this debate coming back into the English-speaking literature. When we address the issue of empathy, we have no easy means to abandon folk psychology. Using philosophical slang weakens the attempt to enlighten its foundations instead of describing its values. The suspicion regarding empathy is partially legitimated by the prejudices of Jaspers himself. As psychiatrists, we have to carry on the Jaspersian research by progressively abandoning it and coming back... (shrink)

The article contains a review of the main arguments proposed by the philosophers of late structuralism against Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology, particularly, his theses on semantics. Polemics against the Husserlian conception of semantics are grounded in the structuralists’ opposition to the various theses of Husserl’s phenomenologies. Initially, it was an attempt at combining the logical and linguistic theses of Husserlian phenomenology with the structuralist theses proposed by Ferdinand de Saussure, as known from late works by Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In (...) the 1960s, it was an attempt at challenging the status of subjectivity – the subject, including the transcendental ego and the role of consciousness. Simultaneously, it is a polemic against essentialism, in regard to ontological, epistemological and anthropological theses. In the article, I focus on the polemics of the thinkers that reformulated Saussure’s theses, against Husserlian semantics which they considered in reference to the broad understanding of a sign, exceeding the sign of language. (shrink)

Purpose. The article suggested for consideration is aimed at clarifying the shift in human perception from the spatial turn announced by Michel Foucault, to a performative turn. The performative turn has an anthropological footing. It is based on the all-round investigation of the body’s principal role for cultural existence, as a result of a reverse reaction to artificial conceptual gap between space and body, which basically means ignoring the embodiment theme. An example of such theoretical deformation was Edmund Husserl’s (...) “anthropology phobia” revealed and thoroughly analysed by Hans Blumenberg in his critical works. Originality of the approach applied in this research, first and foremost, demonstrates not an abstract phenomenological conception as a theoretical construct, but a phenomenological activity itself, as well as practical work expressing antepredicative experience and solving the problems arising in this complicated process. Applying the Blumenberg’s analysis also allows to peep in the sideline notes of Edmund Husserl himself, which, for their part, acquire special meaning in relation to such a practical turn. Conclusions show the following state of affairs demonstrated by the anthropological and performative shift towards the body theme: 1) absolutisation of space without mentioning its relation to body experience is unreasonable and groundless, like in Husserl’s “anthropology phobia ”; 2) since the ground itself is a metaphorical anthropology basis, anthropology can reveal the structural conditions of perception due to thematic fronting of embodiment; 3) this gives anthropology some compensational features, to avoid false culture and nature dualism; 4) so, the space and body relationship is expressed by the Vehikel-phenomenon of the body itself, by placing, arranging and depicting, and thus replacing something missing and unavailable for direct contemplation, by revealing the spatial infrastructure for object perception, creating the presence conditions and metaphorically marking the contemplation boundary; 5) the depicting arrangement is at the same time a bodily performance, a play, staging and performing, which gives an aesthetic, poetic and emphatic impact on the use of philosophy language, in our case, on the way a phenomenology philosopher works with the language. (shrink)

Phänomenologische Psychologie is a companion for both Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, Vol. II and Die Krisis der Europäischen Wissenschaften und die Transzendentale Phänomenologie, for it has in common with the former work a certain number of problems, themes, and theoretical conceptions which are further developed ten years later in Krisis. Apart from the difference concerning the maturation of Husserl's thought, apart from preparing or anticipating Krisis, Phänomenologische Psychologie has an importance in its own right.

Husserl rejects the contrast between human life as an irrational factum and reason as an objectifying force that is hostile to life. Hence he moves away from the incompatibility between philosophy as science and philosophy of life. This paper has two purposes. First, it attempts to analyze the sequence of living horizons of reason, i.e., to lay out a progressive bringing-into-play that begins in a primal history linked to instinct, goes through history proper with its manners of practical reason, and (...) reaches its culmination in a second historicity with a teleological development. In his last dated manuscript, Husserl speaks of “the upright, fair reason of the natural, sound human understanding” that plays a role before “the scientific, philosophical reason”. Secondly, against this background, phenomenology of reason is considered as a view that is grounded in passive fulfillments, traces theory back to life, and emphasizes the interpenetration of the various manifestations of reason. It is argued that the relationship between intention and fulfillment pervades the movement from latent to manifest reason, renders possible different modes of rational legitimation, and shows distinctive traits in each mode. With regard to the vitality of Husserlian reason, a brief epilogue for the Spanish speaking world deals with some of J. Ortega y Gasset’s views on the issue.Husserl rechaza la contraposición entre la vida humana como un factum irracional y la razón como una fuerza objetivante hostil a la vida. Por eso se aparta de la incompatibilidad entre la filosofía como ciencia y la filosofía de la vida. Este trabajo tiene dos propósitos. Prime-ro, intenta analizar la secuencia de horizontes vitales de la razón, es decir, desplegar una progresiva puesta-en-juego que se inicia en la protohistoria ligada al instinto, pasa a través de la historia en sentido propio con sus modalida-des de razón práctica, y culmina en una segun-da historicidad con un desarrollo teleológico. En su último manuscrito fechado, Husserl habla de “la proba y honrosa razón del entendimiento humano natural” que desempeña un papel con anterioridad a “la razón científica, la filosófica”. En segundo lugar, frente a este trasfondo, se examina la fenomenología de la razón como una visión que se funda en cum-plimientos pasivos, refiere la teoría a la vida, y pone énfasis en la compenetración de las varia-das manifestaciones de la razón. Se sostiene que la relación entre intención y cumplimiento atraviesa el movimiento desde la razón latente a la razón patente, hace posible diversos modos de legitimación racional, y muestra rasgos distintivos en cada uno de los modos. Respecto de la vitalidad de la razón husserliana, un breve epílogo para hispanoparlantes considera algu-nos puntos de vista de J. Ortega y Gasset sobre la cuestión. (shrink)

Se describen varios elementos que le permiten a la fenomenología elaborar una descripción del ser humano sin renunciar a lo que tiene de ontología universal o antropologización, lo que implica que en todo análisis de la conciencia general deben caer la razón humana, la paradoja de la subjetividad o, lo que es lo mismo, la paradoja de la conciencia en su estado humano. De aquí se desprende que ella pueda ser observada en un sujeto que posee un cuerpo con el (...) cual y desde el cual la experiencia y la percepción pueden tener lugar. Esto valida el ejercicio de interrogar a la razón por su genética antropológica en un proceso de filogenias. This article describes the various elements which allow phenomenology to develop a description of the human being without giving up its status of universal ontology or anthropologization, which implies that any analysis of general awareness refers to human reason, the paradox of subjectivity, or, in other words, the paradox of con-sciousness in its human state. From this it follows that it can be observed in a subject that has a body with which and from which experience and perception can take place. This validates the action of interrogating reason for its anthropological genetics in a process of phylogenies. (shrink)

It strikes readers as dubious and pointless to compare Husserl and Deleuze straightforwardly on the level of philosophy or history of philosophy, for their thoughts seem to be wide apart or even opposed. Nevertheless, each of their thoughts draws a trajectory of development into one and the same kind of qualitative research, i.e., non-scientific, non-conceptual, fieldwork research trying to grasp the immediately pre-given picture of being. In this paper, I call such a qualitative research transcendental-phenomenological ‘regional studies.’ We might well (...) interpret the concept of ‘life-world’ in later Husserl as ‘region’ and, therefore, his life-world phenomenology as such ‘regional studies.’ Moreover, the concepts of ‘desire,’ ‘force,’ ‘intensity,’ ‘field of immanence’ in Deleuze serve very well to describe the workings of ‘region’ at a deeper level. Therefore, we observe that, under the heading of transcendental-phenomenological ‘regional studies,’ disparate philosophical concepts in Husserl and Deleuze are meaningfully connected and networked. As a result, our exposition of transcendental-phenomenological ‘regional studies’ subsuming Husserl and Deleuze sheds not only new light on the philosophical dialogue between the two, but also introduces a radically new qualitative research on region, regional life and culture. (shrink)

It is commonly believed that Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), well known as the founder of phenomenology and as the teacher of Heidegger, was unable to free himself from the framework of a classical metaphysics of subjectivity. Supposedly, he never abandoned the view that the world and the Other are constituted by a pure transcendental subject, and his thinking in consequence remains Cartesian, idealistic, and solipsistic. The continuing publication of Husserl’s manuscripts has made it necessary to revise such an interpretation. (...) Drawing upon both Husserl’s published works and posthumous material, Husserl’s Phenomenology incorporates the results of the most recent Husserl research. It is divided into three parts, roughly following the chronological development of Husserl’s thought, from his early analyses of logic and intentionality, through his mature transcendental-philosophical analyses of reduction and constitution, to his late analyses of intersubjectivity and lifeworld. It can consequently serve as a concise and updated introduction to his thinking. (shrink)

In his award-winning book _The Philosophy of Edmund Husserl: A Historical Development_, J. N. Mohanty charted Husserl's philosophical development from the young man's earliest studies—informed by his work as a mathematician—to the publication of his _Ideas_ in 1913. In this welcome new volume, the author takes up the final decades of Husserl's life, addressing the work of his Freiburg period, from 1916 until his death in 1938. As in his earlier work, Mohanty here offers close readings of Husserl's main (...) texts accompanied by accurate summaries, informative commentaries, and original analyses. This book, along with its companion volume, completes the most up-to-date, well-informed, and comprehensive account ever written on Husserl's phenomenological philosophy and its development. (shrink)

This paper explores how phenomenology facilitates people’s grasp of unfamiliar artworks. When avant-garde artworks lack handy categories, meaning-makers unwittingly deploy Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological method to avail interpretive concepts. Curators and critics engaged in the challenging process of determining the significance of artworks or performances deploy his reductions to identify relevant concepts that facilitate their ability to qualitatively differentiate indiscernible artworks and performances. Even if contemporary art curators and critics have never heard of Husserl, let alone studied his brand (...) of philosophical phenomenology, his “phenomenological epoché” epitomizes the way curators and critics deactivate their beliefs. Doing so guides curators and critics to observe as comprehensively as possible in order to generate novel, albeit fitting “potential” interpretations. Unbeknownst to most curators and critics, Husserl’s tools also guide their decision-making processes when selecting and positioning artworks within the context of an exhibition or article. What make phenomenology an especially useful tool for curators and critics is Husserl’s insight, contra Gottlob Frege, that Sinn (sense) expands Bedeutung (meaning), rather than contracts or fixes meaning to some referent. As this paper demonstrates, Husserl’s generative approach arises from his triadic system for meaning making, namely the active relationship between noema, noesis, and hyle, as opposed to Frege’s standard duo of Sinn and Bedeutung. For Husserl, identification, significance, and meaning-making prove imaginative, and thus exemplify world-making. To tease out phenomenology’s advantage over analytic aesthetics, I refer to MoMA’s “Picasso: Guitars, 1912-1914” (2011) to show how his method “radiates,” or opens-up meanings, rather than closes them down. (shrink)

In this short study, I attempt to reconstruct the main conceptual components of Edmund Husserl’s concept of death following the leading clue of his late transcendental phenomenological methodology. First, I summarise his thoughts on death, from the point of view of “the natural attitude”, as an event in the world. Then, I try and explore the manifold senses of the limit phenomenon of death as a multidimensional transcendental phenomenological problem in all of its intersubjective-world constitutive, personal-primordial, and metaphysical-constructive layers (...) of meanings, respectively. By doing so, I also hope that the path we travel can serve the reader as an opportunity for a personal and reflective confrontation with death. (shrink)

It is commonly believed that Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), well known as the founder of phenomenology and as the teacher of Heidegger, was unable to free himself from the framework of a classical metaphysics of subjectivity. Supposedly, he never abandoned the view that the world and the Other are constituted by a pure transcendental subject, and his thinking in consequence remains Cartesian, idealistic, and solipsistic. The continuing publication of Husserls manuscripts has made it necessary to revise such an interpretation. (...) Drawing upon both Husserls published works and posthumous material, Husserls Phenomenology incorporates the results of the most recent Husserl research. It is divided into three parts, roughly following the chronological development of Husserls thought, from his early analyses of logic and intentionality, through his mature transcendental-philosophical analyses of reduction and constitution, to his late analyses of intersubjectivity and lifeworld. It can consequently serve as a concise and updated introduction to his thinking. (shrink)

The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness is a translation of Edmund Husserl's Vorlesungen zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewußtseins. The first part of the book was originally presented as a lecture course at the University of Göttingen in the winter semester of 1904–1905, while the second part is based on additional supplementary lectures that he gave between 1905 and 1910. In these essays and lectures, Husserl explores the terrain of consciousness in light of its temporality. He identifies two categories of (...) temporality—retention and protention—and outlines how temporality provides the form for perception, phantasy, imagination, memory, and recollection. He demonstrates a distinction between cosmic and phenomenological time and explores the relevance of phenomenological time for the constitution of temporal objects. The ideas Husserl developed here are explored further in his Ideas and were pursued until the end of his philosophical career. (shrink)

Edmund Husserl gave his famous London Lectures (in German) in June 1922 where he says his purpose is to explain “transcendental sociological [intersubjective] phenomenology having reference to a manifest multiplicity of conscious subjects communicating with one another”. This effective definitionof semiotic phenomenology as Communicology was reported in English (1923) by Charles K. Ogden and I. A. Richards in the first book on the topic titled The Meaning of Meaning. This groundwork was in full development by 1939 with (...) the first detailed use of Husserl’s phenomenology to explicate human communication, i.e., the publication of Wilbur Marshal Urban’s Language and Reality. My paper addresses Urban’s use of Husserl’s philosophy toboth explicate the phenomenological method and to explore the constitutive elements of human communication and culture. Urban makes use of the workon language and culture by his famous colleagues at Yale University (USA): Edward Sapir (the linguist), Benjamin Lee Whorf (Sapir’s graduate student),and Ernst Cassirer. My own teacher at the University of New Mexico (USA) was Hubert Griggs Alexander, a doctoral student under Urban and a classmateof Whorf. The interdisciplinary focus on Culture and Communicology by Professors Cassirer, Sapir, Urban, and their doctoral students, Alexander and Whorf are collectively known as the “Yale School of Communicology.” Typical empirical examples of theoretical points are provided in the footnotes. (shrink)

This article provides an overview of Edmund Husserl’s lesser known account of high-level imaginative empathy. The author discusses Husserl’s solution to what we might call the ‘generalizability problem’; if empathy is conceived as a relation whereby the understanding I have of my own mind allows me to understand your mind, then how does empathy account for potential differences between us? The author also discusses some features that make empathy more generalizable than might be initially thought, as well as its (...) limits. A second major aim is to use this exegesis of Husserl to show a variety of overlaps between his theory and high-level simulation theory. The author also shows how Husserl’s phenomenological theory provides a compelling response to critiques of high-level simulation from authors that utilize a hybrid cognitive science/phenomenological approach. (shrink)

Harvey (philosophy, U. of Central Arkansas) argues that the phenomenology of German philosopher Edmund Husserl is a response to the dualisms that emerged from 17th c. philosophy. He sheds light on the relation classical phenomenology has to broad concerns in the history of philosophy. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

Derrida's introduction to his French translation of Husserl's essay "The Origin of Geometry," arguing that although Husserl privileges speech over writing in an account of meaning and the development of scientific knowledge, this privilege is in fact unstable.

This essay attempts a renewed, critical exposition of Husserl’s theory of the phenomenological reduction, incorporating manuscript material that has been published since the defining essays of the first generation of Husserl research. The discussion focuses on points that remain especially crucial, i. e. the concept of the natural attitude, the ways into the reduction, and the question of the “meaning of the reduction”. The reading attempted here leads to two, not necessarily related, focal points: a Cartesian and a Life-world tendency. (...) In following these two paths, Husserl was consistent in pursuing two evident leads in his philosophical enterprise; however, he was at the same time unable to systematically unify these two strands. Thus, I am offering an interpretation which might be called a modified “departure from Cartesianism” reading that Landgrebe proposed in his famous essay from the nineteen-fifties. This discussion should make apparent that Husserl’s theory of the phenomenological reduction deserves a renewed look in light of material that has since appeared in the Husserliana and by incorporating the most important results of recent tendencies in Husserl research. (shrink)