Search

More than a little ink has been spilled recently debating the purity of various ostensible phenomenologists. Two philosophers whose work may seem to pose a particular challenge along these lines are Jean-Paul Sartre, who explicitly uses phenomenology to develop a full-fledged ontology in Being and Nothingness, and Emmanuel Levinas, a 'phenomenologist' whose primary concern in Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being is an Other who does not appear in the mode of intentional consciousness. Indeed, it should be admitted that neither Sartre nor Levinas carries out a Husserlian epoche, if we understand this as a complete bracketing of transcendent, and particularly ontological questions. Nevertheless, I would argue that Sartre's ontological con- cerns and Levinas's inquiry into a non-intentional phenomenality do not mark a break with phenomenology, but rather grow out of their phenomenological analyses of human experience and support these. In order to defend this sugges- tion, I would like to discuss the sense in which Sartre and Levinas remain engaged in a phenomenological project. It is not my goal to comprehensively characterize the senses in which Sartre and Levinas each is and is not a 'phenomenologist.' However, drawing on their accounts of fundamental human experience, it will be possible to defend the claim that Sartre's and Levinas's approaches are mean- ingfully 'phenomenological.' To identify broadly the primary sense in which Sartre and Levinas remain phenomenologists, one need only observe that each undertakes a careful study of the structure and contents of conscious experience in order to describe the foundations of the subject-object correlation and identify its conditions. Each, furthermore, accomplishes this by developing the Husserlian notion of intentionality, focusing on the ways in which the intentional character of consciousness enables its lived encounter with what is transcendent to it.For Sartre, this project means accepting the pre-reflective cogito as one's starting point, describing the phenomena that appear there and the way in which they do so in order eventually to reach the being of consciousness itself. In utilizing the cogito this way, Sartre believes that he is avoiding mistakes made by Descartes, Husserl, and Heidegger.1 The first of these, he claims, "fell into the error of substance" by attempting to pass from the functional description of consciousness to its existence "without a conducting thread" (i.e., the analysis of intentionality and modes of phenomenality constituted by conscious function). Husserl, meanwhile,warned by this error, remained timidly on the plane of functional description. Due to this fact he never passed beyond the pure description of the appearance as such; he has shut himself up inside the cogito and deserves-in spite of his denial-to be called a phenomenalist rather than a phenomenologist. . . . Heidegger, wishing to avoid that descriptive phenomenalism which leads to the Megarian, antidialectic isolation of essences, begins with the existential analytic without going through the cogito. But since the Dasein has from the start been deprived of the dimension of consciousness, it can never regain this dimension.2Sartre's goal, therefore, is to describe the structures and meaning of human exis- tence in the world starting from "the dimension of consciousness." His rejection of what he takes to be Heidegger's attempt to bypass consciousness is an affirmation of the Husserlian endeavor, despite his refusal to accept Husserl's limited (i.e., idealist) conclusions.If Sartre starts out, with Husserl, in the interiority of the cogito as the source of conscious experience, he also continues with him a step further to the inten- tional character of that experience. In the Introduction to Being and Nothingness, Sartre argues that a proper clarification of consciousness' intentional character supports the realist conclusion that the objects of consciousness are things in the world, not representations or ideas of them. …

I argue that perception is necessarily situation-dependent. The way an object is must not just be distinguished from the way it appears and the way it is represented, but also from the way it is presented given the situational features. First, I argue that the way an object is presented is best understood in terms of external, mind-independent, but situation-dependent properties of objects. Situation-dependent properties are exclusively sensitive to and ontologically dependent on the intrinsic properties of objects, such as their shape, size, and color, and the situational features, such as the lighting conditions and the perceiver’s location in relation to the perceived object. Second, I argue that perceiving intrinsic properties is epistemically dependent on representing situation-dependent properties. Recognizing situation-dependent properties yields four advantages. It makes it possible to embrace the motivations that lead to phenomenalism and indirect realism by recognizing that objects are presented a certain way, while holding on to the intuition that subjects directly perceive objects. Second, it acknowledges that perceptions are not just individuated by the objects they are of, but by the ways those objects are presented given the situational features. Third, it allows for a way to accommodate the fact that there is a wide range of viewing conditions or situational features that can count as normal. Finally, it makes it possible to distinguish perception and thought about the same object with regard to what is represented.

Each phenomenon contains variable components, which are conservative. Because of their conservation, they accumulate. Present phenomena contain constituents of phenomena, belonging to the past which form the present and the future, and their dependence on time is an exponential one - S = Sₒe^t-tᵖ (S is a variable component, is a moment in the past). We assume that before and after tₒ = t-tᵖ = 0 the change pertains to phenomena of one type. The dependency is for each defined phenomenon of one and the same type (for its characteristics). The concrete aspect of the change S will depend on the type of the phenomenon. We show in our study how in some cosmological phenomena, the exponential dependence on time is present. The processes of radioactive disintegration of atomic nuclei, are also phenomena of this type. We present the real phenomena as a sum of exponents. Each phenomenon originates, develops and is destroyed. In reality most phenomena are formed as a composition of exponential dependencies of the change (of its characteristics).

Brandom (1994) claims to have succeeded in showing how certain kinds of social practices can institute objective deontic statuses and confer objective conceptual contents on certain performances. This paper proposes a reconstruction of how, on Brandom's views, this is supposed to come about, and a critical examination of the explicit arguments offered in support for this claim.

D'un point de vue physicaliste et epistemologique, les phrases d'observation sont des vehicules d'evidence de notre connaissance du monde exterieur.

L'A. analyse et critique diverses conceptions " pragmatistes " de la verite, inspirees par les theses de James et de Dewey, qui trouvent leur source dans des arguments semantiques sur le fonctionnement du terme " vrai " : en particulier la conception " pro-phrastique " qui fait de la verite un predicat redondant. Ces arguments appuient le phenomenalisme, mais reduisent la verite a la force, et aux pratiques