Search

A number of critical social epistemologists have argued that a form of ignorance makes up the epistemic dimension of existing relations of oppression based on racial and/or gender identity. Recent phenomenological accounts of the habitual nature of perception can be understood as describing the bodily, tacit, and affective character of this form of ignorance. At the same time, as I aim to show in this article, more could be phenomenologically said and made of both the active and pervasive character of said ignorance. Drawing on the phenomenological concept of receptivity, I propose a way to further understand the active character of ignorance both in and beyond perception. By doing so, we also get a better view on what it would take to overcome this kind of ignorance.

With the aim of showing what it takes to see the world and others as they are, this article provides a phenomenological account of what Iris Murdoch has memorably called “the work of attention.” I first show that Aron Gurwitsch’s analyses of attention provide a basis on which to reject a voluntaristic account of attention according to which seeing things as they are is as simple as directing one’s attention to something. Then, in order to elucidate the work that is involved in paying attention, I draw on Edmund Husserl’s descriptions of the activity characteristic of attentive consciousness. I then show how a Husserlian account of the work of attention can help make sense of Murdoch’s pessimistic claim that our consciousness is not “a transparent glass through which it views the world” while also indicating how we, by paying attention, can do better.

In "On what matters: Personal identity as a phenomenological problem" (2020), Steven Crowell engages a number of contemporary interpretations of Husserl's account of the person and personal identity by noting that they lack a phenomenological elucidation of the self as commitment. In this article, in response to Crowell, I aim to show that such an account of the self as commitment can be drawn from Husserl's work by looking more closely at his descriptions from the time of Ideas and after of the self as ego or I and egoic experience as attentive experience. I specifically aim to sketch the beginning of a response to three questions I take Crowell to be posing to a Husserlian account of the person and personal identity: (1) What more than pre-reflective self-awareness can be attributed to the self on phenomenological grounds so that we can understand, phenomenologically speaking, how selves become persons? (2) How can what characterizes the self in addition to pre-reflective self-awareness be discerned in both our commitment to truth and our feeling bound by love and other emotive commitments that cannot be fully rationally justified, which Husserl acknowledges are both sources of personal self-constitution? And (3), do all selves become persons? In the paper I elaborate how my answers to the first two questions turn on the self not just being self-aware but active in a particular sense. And to begin to address the third question, I suggest that while any form of wakeful conscious experience is both self-aware and active, this activity of the self makes a difference for those who are socio-historically embedded in the way we are. Specifically, on the proposed Husserlian account, selves that are socio-historically embedded become persons in and through their active relating to what they attentively experience. In concluding, I indicate how this Husserlian account might compare to Crowell's claim that "self-identity (ipseity) is not mere logical identity (A=A) but a normative achievement [ horizontal ellipsis ] which makes a 'personal' kind of identity possible" (2020).

Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) is widely regarded as the principal founder of phenomenology, one of the most important movements in twentieth-century philosophy. His work inspired subsequent figures such as Martin Heidegger, his most renowned pupil, as well as Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, all of whom engaged with and developed his insights in significant ways. His work on fundamental problems such as intentionality, consciousness, and subjectivity continues to animate philosophical research and argument. The Husserlian Mind is an outstanding reference source to the full range of Husserl's philosophy. Forty chapters by a team of international contributors are divided into seven clear parts covering the following areas: Husserl's major works Husserl's phenomenological method phenomenology of consciousness epistemology ethics and social and political philosophy philosophy of science metaphysics. Contained in these sections are chapters on many of the key aspects of Husserl's thought, including intentionality, transcendental philosophy, reduction, perception, time, self and subjectivity, personhood, logic, psychology, ontology, and idealism. Offering an unparalleled guide to the enormous range of his thought, The Husserlian Mind is essential reading for students and scholars of Husserl, phenomenology, and the history of twentieth-century philosophy. It will also be of interest to those in related fields in the humanities, social sciences, and psychology and the cognitive sciences.

This paper spells out Husserl’s account of the exercise of rationality and shows how it is tied to the capacity for critical reflection. I first discuss Husserl’s views on what rationally constrains our intentionality (section 1). Then I localize the exercise of rationality in the positing that characterizes attentive forms of intentionality and argue that, on Husserl’s account, when we are attentive to something we are also pre-reflectively aware of what speaks for and against our taking something to be a certain way (section 2). After discussing the conditions under which this pre-reflective awareness gives way to reflective deliberation (section 3), I contrast this account to a compelling Kantian-inspired account of the activity of reason that has recently been developed by Matthew Boyle (section 4). In particular, I argue that Husserl delimits the scope of the exercise of rationality differently than Boyle, and I show how this implies different accounts of the self.

Phenomenology is an approach to consciousness that originates at the beginning of the twentieth century in the work of Edmund Husserl. A phenomenological account of consciousness begins from a first-person reflection on consciousness that puts out of play our everyday or natural-scientific preconceptions about consciousness and the world and describes the structural features of our consciousness of the world. This project is carried on in the phenomenological works of authors such as Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, albeit with sometimes quite different emphases and aims. Insofar as phenomenology describes the structures of consciousness by virtue of which there is a world for us, phenomenology is a form of transcendental philosophy. Specifically, phenomenologists describe how the structures of intentionality, self-awareness, temporality, attention, embodiment, and intersubjectivity make possible our consciousness of worldly things, situations, and events. According to them, the world is not just an objective nature comprised of spatiotemporally extended and causally connected things; it is also always an intersubjectively accessible world that is shot through with values and organized in light of practical projects, due to which the world appears with a significance that is variable across time and space. Husserl maintains that phenomenological descriptions of the essential structures of consciousness that make possible the experience and knowledge of the world—that is, of transcendental consciousness—can also be taken as psychological descriptions of consciousness conceived as a natural event in the world. In this way, a number of contemporary philosophers draw on specific descriptive insights from the phenomenological tradition to address issues in contemporary philosophy of mind and drive the empirical investigation of consciousness forward (such as Gallagher and Schmicking 2010; Dahlstrom et al. 2015; Petitot et al. 1999; Thompson 2007; Zahavi and Gallagher 2012; Zahavi 2012). Alternatively, both Sartre and Merleau-Ponty explicitly draw on insights from psychology and psychopathology to inform their phenomenology of consciousness, which is a strategy that has also been employed by some contemporary phenomenologists (see Zahavi 2000).

This chapter focuses on a number of respects in which Husserl’s, Heidegger’s, and Merleau-Ponty’s accounts of the world differ, despite other significant commonalities. Specifically, it discusses how both Heidegger’s and Merleau-Ponty’s accounts of our experience of the world challenge Husserl’s assertion of the possibility of a worldless consciousness; how Heidegger’s discussion of the world entails a rejection of Husserl’s claim that the world is at bottom nature; and how Merleau-Ponty puts pressure on Husserl’s account of the necessary structure of the world. In concluding, and as a propaedeutic to adjudicating these disputes, this chapter aims to show why Husserl makes these contested claims. Specifically, it suggests that it is Husserl’s phenomenological conception of reason and his commitment to (this conception of) reason that motivate him to make the claims about our experience and world with which the later phenomenologists take issue.

In this article I consider whether and how Husserl’s transcendental phenomenological method can initiate a phenomenological way of life. The impetus for this investigation originates in a set of manuscripts written in 1926 (published in Zur phanomenologischen Reduktion) where Husserl suggests that the consistent commitment to and performance of phenomenological reflection can change one’s life to the point where a simple return to the life lived before this reflection is no longer possible. Husserl identifies this point of no return with becoming a transcendental idealist. I propose a way of understanding Husserl’s claim that transcendental idealism makes a simple return to life before phenomenological reflection impossible. I then suggest that a phenomenological way of life is characterized by an epistemic modesty that follows from Husserl’s transcendental idealism and consider whether and how such a phenomenological way of life is a life worth living.

The Routledge Companion to Phenomenology covers an impressive range of issues and authors from the phenomenological tradition and presents phenomenology's philosophical contributions in a clear and compelling way. The quality of the individual essays is consistently outstanding, and they nicely complement one another. In contrast to volumes such as Moran and Embree (2004), The Routledge Companion to Phenomenology is a collection of essays written specifically for this volume. Its formal approach can be compared to Dreyfus and Wrathall (2006), though the emphasis of the The Routledge Companion to Phenomenology is different. The existentialists do get their fair share of attention in The Routledge Companion to Phenomenology, but as the editors explicitly state in the introduction, their companion takes a more Husserlian starting point in selecting contributors and topics (p. 13). Finally, in contrast to the recently published The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Phenomenology (Zahavi 2012), which collects article length research papers on phenomenological topics, the contributions in The Routledge Companion to Phenomenology are shorter articles that could orient the newcomer to phenomenology or expand the horizons of those already familiar with this philosophical tradition. The volume succeeds in addressing a wide and diverse audience because the individual contributions are both accessible and display philosophical depth and accuracy. The volume is divided into four main parts. The first part treats the main figures in the phenomenological movement. Ten individual essays provide historical information and a general overview of the philosophical works and contributions of the phenomenologist in question. Some contributions focus more on the philosophical development of the respective phenomenologist throughout the different stages of their work (Moran on Husserl, Romdenh-Romluc on

Betrachtet man die Geschichte des Begriffs ›Phanomenologie‹, ist nicht auf den ersten Blick klar, was darunter zu verstehen ist. Wie Schuhmann (1984) herausgearbeitet hat, tritt dieser Begriff in der Philosophiegeschichte auf, noch lange bevor Edmund Husserl sich ihn zu eigen machte, um sein eigenes philosophisches Projekt zu beschreiben. Auch hinderte Husserls Versuch, diesen Begriff fur die Beschreibung seines eigenen einmaligen Projekts zu beanspruchen, seine Zeitgenossen (z. B. Pfander, Reinach, Stein) keineswegs daran, denselben Begriff ebenfalls zur Beschreibung ihrer jeweiligen Projekte und Methoden zu verwenden.

In the chapter on attention in the Principles of Psychology, William James writes what on a first reflection might sound rather plausible : “Millions of items of the outward order are present to my senses which never properly enter into my experience. Why? Because they have no interest for me. My experience is what I agree to attend to.” That is, according to James here, what I experience is what receives my attention, attracts my gaze, or interests me and therefore becomes, is, or remains th...

I am Awake : Husserl on Wakefulness and Attention. The article presents Husserl’s account of wakefulness and shows that, according to Husserl, only a phenomenology of attention is capable of elucidating what characterizes the state of wakefulness. That is, the article shows, from a Husserlian point of view, that attention introduces a distinction between theme and background in our experience and that this accounts for why we are never fully awake when we are awake (section 1 and 2), how the sleep within wakefulness is different from genuine sleep (section 3), and, finally, in what way the intentionality that occurs when genuinely asleep, such as dreaming, is radically different from any awareness that occurs while awake., L’article présente une reconstruction d’analyse husserlienne de l’éveil et démontre que, selon Husserl, seule une phénoménologie de l’attention est en mesure d’élucider les véritables caractéristiques de l’état d’éveil. Plus précisément, l’article démontre que, d’un point de vue husserlien, l’attention introduit une distinction entre thème et arrière-plan dans notre expérience et que cette différence est ce qui nous permettra de déterminer dans quelle mesure nous ne sommes jamais pleinement éveillés lorsque nous sommes éveillés (section 1 et 2), comment le sommeil au sein de l’état d’éveil diffère du sommeil véritable (section 3), et, enfin, comment l’intentionnalité survenant lors du sommeil véritable, à l’instar des rêves, diffère radicalement de toute forme de conscience intentionnelle survenant lors de l’état d’éveil (section 4)., Jacobs Hanne. Je suis éveillée : Husserl sur l’attention et l’éveil. In: Intellectica. Revue de l'Association pour la Recherche Cognitive, n°66, 2016/2. Phénoménologie de la vigilance et de l'attention. Philosophie, sciences et techniques. pp. 37-56.

Descartes’1 Meditationen gaben uns schon durch mehrere Vorlesungen hindurch den Stoff fur unsere historischen und systematischen Uberlegungen. In der Tat steht dieses Werk sozusagen als eine Ouverture am Eingang der neueren Philosophie. In ihm liegen die bedeutsamsten Motive fur die ferneren geistigen Bewegungen und gerade fur diejenigen, die uns so sehr interessieren, in denen namlich die Idee einer reinen Vernunftkritik und damit einer neuartigen Philosophie zu Tage drangt. Darin liegt aber, dass bis dahin in ihrer methodischen Grundart verborgene Probleme, solche, die nicht in der Ebene des naturlichen Denkens und zunachst auch noch nicht in derjenigen des naturwissenschaftlichenDenkens liegen, sich beiDescartes so zwingend fuhlbar machen, dass sie zu Triebkraften der Entwicklung werden. Freilich kommen sie erst am Ende langer historischer Entwicklung zu reiner Formulierung und 〈werden〉 zum Thema einer echtenWissenschaft.Um nun diese Probleme, wie es ihre voraussetzungsreiche Art erfordert, stufenweise zum Verstandnis zu bringen, vertiefen wir uns in den Geistesgehalt der „cartesianischen Zweifelsmethode“ und des durch sie als absolut zweifellos herausgestellten „cogito“.

Eine Einfuhrung in die Philosophie kampft mit Schwierigkeiten, wie sie die Einfuhrung in keine andere Wissenschaft kennt. Das Forschungsgebiet jeder nicht-philosophischen Wissenschaft ist dem Anfanger im Voraus bekannt, es ist ihm durch die naturliche Erfahrung oder sonstige allgemeine Anschauungen des praktischen Lebens wohlvertraut, und so weis er von vornherein, worum es sich handelt. Ist es Zoologie oder Botanik, ist es Psychologie, Sprachwissenschaft, Kunstwissenschaft, so weis er: Es handelt sich um Tiere oder Pflanzen, es handelt sich um Seelenleben oder um die Sprache, die Kunst usw. Der Blick ist sofort auf Bestimmtes und Bekanntes, nur eben noch nicht wissenschaftlich Erkanntes dirigiert. Unter den wissenschaftlichen Disziplinen finden wir freilich auch so manche, deren Gebiete jenseits der gemeinen Erfahrung und Anschauung liegen – sei es, dass methodisch-kunstlich geleitete Erfahrung auf Zusammenhange fuhrt, die dem naturlichen Menschen verborgen waren, sei es, dass sich wissenschaftliche Forschung stufenweise aufbaut und sich relativ selbstandige Disziplinen hoherer Stufe abzweigen – aber dannmacht die Einfuhrung in diese Disziplinen doch keine prinzipielle Schwierigkeit. Es wird eben wie zum Beispiel bei der Chemie durch Vorfuhrung von fundamentalen Experimenten Sorge getragen fur die Gewinnung jener neuen Erfahrungen, die dem Anfanger durch den Gang seines fruheren Lebens noch nicht dargeboten sein konnten. Oder wenn es sich um eine Disziplin hoherer Stufe handelt (wie in der Geometrie um die sogenannte analytische Geometrie, in der Zahlenlehre um die Theorie der komplexen Zahlensystemen u. dgl.), nun dann steht derAnfanger selbstverstandlich schon dicht an der hoheren Stufe: Er hat die niederen Disziplinen seiner allgemeinenWissenschaft schon ausreichend studiert, und die Einfuhrung in die hoherenDisziplinen verfugt frei uber die vorangegangenen Einsichten, die hier die Rolle der vorgebenden Anschauung spielen.

The relation between Bergson’s philosophy and French phenomenology has received far more attention than has the possibility of bringing Bergson’s philosophy and Husserl’s phenomenology into dialogue.1 This is not only because Levinas, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty all at some point directly engage with Bergson’s philosophy in their work, but also because both the method and the aim of Bergson and Husserl’s philosophies seem incompatible.2 Most generally stated, unlike Husserl, Bergson does not aim to provide a description of the essence of acts of consciousness; and unlike Bergson, Husserl is not at all interested in developing a metaphysics that would ‘penetrate more deeply into the interior of matter, of life, or reality in general.’3

Most contemporary philosophical discussions of personal identity still refer to or even engage with John Locke’s account of personal identity in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. For Locke, the question of personal identity is essentially a question of what it means to experience oneself as a person and, more precisely, to experience oneself as the same person at different times.

Le baccalaureat en poche, Husserl âge de dix-sept ans part a Leipzig pour etudier l’astronomie. Il y fait la connaissance d’un etudiant en mathematiques, Hermann Ernst Grassmann (1857-1922), le fils du celebre mathematicien Hermann Gunter Grassmann (1809-1877) qui a publie en 1844 une Ausdehnungslehre, reeditee en 1862 sous une « forme mathematique rigoureuse ».