Philosophical Investigations, Volume 44, Issue 4, Page 372-402, October 2021.

In this article, I address the question of violence with respect to the phenomenological difference between the transcendental and the empirical field. In the first part, I phenomenologically address the notion of violence, developing a concept required for an account of the phenomenon of violence. Thus, I correlate it with the notion of vulnerability, arguing that violence cannot be understood irrespective of vulnerability. However, a proper phenomenological account has to indicate the subjective conditions of possibility of a phenomenon as it (...) is given in experience. Therefore, we should ask: what is the status of violence when we are talking about the transcendental field? This question leads to the second part of my article, where I address the notion of violence from the perspective of the difference between the pure and the empirical ego, as it has been traced out by Husserl. If from the point of view of an empirical ego the concept of violence is meaningful, from the point of view of the transcendental ego it seems to be absurd. This is particularly significant, because Husserl is talking about the transcendental ego as being immortal. The pure ego is thus invulnerable and this means that violence—understood from the point of view of both the violating subject and the violated one—is something that cannot be linked to the transcendental field. The question that arises—how is violence possible on the empirical level, since it is impossible on the transcendental level?—is a question to which Husserl cannot respond. (shrink)

In the Logical Investigations, Ideas I and many other texts, Husserl maintains that perceptual consciousness involves the intentional “animation” or interpretation of sensory data or hyle, e.g., “color-data,” “tone-data,” and algedonic data. These data are not intrinsically representational nor are they normally themselves objects of representation, though we can attend to them in reflection. These data are “immanent” in consciousness; they survive the phenomenological reduction. They partly ground the intuitive or “in-the-flesh” aspect of perception, and they have a determinacy of (...) character that we do not create but can only discover. This determinate, non-representational stratum of perceptual consciousness also serves as a bridge between consciousness and the world beyond it. I articulate and defend this conception of perceptual consciousness. I locate the view in the space of contemporary positions on phenomenal character and argue for its superiority. I close by briefly arguing that the Husserlian account is perfectly compatible with physicalism (this involves disarming the Grain Problem). (shrink)

Boethius identifies God both with esse ipsum and esse suum. This paper explains Boethius's general semantic use of "esse" and the application of this use to God. It questions the helpfulness of attributing to Boethius "existence" words and argues for a more robust role in Boethius’s thought for Hilary of Poitiers’s and Augustine’s exegeses of Exodus 3:14-15 than has been acknowledged in recent scholarship.

There is a longstanding debate among Husserl scholars about whether Husserl thinks perception involves mental representation. The debate, I believe, has not been settled. I deny that the existentialist-inspired charge of representationalism about perception in Husserl is precise enough to stick. Given a clearer understanding of just what mental representation amounts to, I contend that those who defend Husserl against the accusation of representationalism fare little better than Husserl's existentialist-leaning critics. I argue that he is in fact a representationalist about (...) perception insofar as it involves a noematic sense. Nevertheless, Husserl opens up the possibility for a representation-free form of perceiving in certain later discussions of the matter in which he suggests that some perceptual states lack noematic sense. What they lack in noematic sense is compensated for by other means, namely, by two sorts of affect and their functional interrelation with abilities for bodily movement. The texts that entertain this possibility, though, severely limit the scope of its actual occurrence. Husserl never commits to a generally or substantially nonrepresentational view of perception. I attempt to sketch out, however, what this nonrepresentationalism about perception that Husserl nearly landed on might look like, rearranging various more or less familiar elements already present in his theory of perception to that end. (shrink)

Husserl’s philosophy, by the usual account, evolved through three stages: 1. development of an anti-psychologistic, objective foundation of logic and mathematics, rooted in Brentanian descriptive psychology; 2. development of a new discipline of "phenomenology" founded on a metaphysical position dubbed "transcendental idealism"; transformation of phenomenology from a form of methodological solipsism into a phenomenology of intersubjectivity and ultimately (in his Crisis of 1936) into an ontology of the life-world, embracing the social worlds of culture and history. We show that this (...) story of three revolutions can provide at best a preliminary orientation, and that Husserl was constantly expanding and revising his philosophical system, integrating views in phenomenology, ontology, epistemology and logic with views on the nature and tasks of philosophy and science as well as on the nature of culture and the world in ways that reveal more common elements than violent shifts of direction. We argue further that Husserl is a seminal figure in the evolution from traditional philosophy to the characteristic philosophical concerns of the late twentieth century: concerns with representation and intentionality and with problems at the borderlines of the philosophy of mind, ontology, and cognitive science. (shrink)

In this article, I analyze the evolution of Husserl's view on the normativity of logic and the corresponding changes in his phenomenological analysis of judgment. Initially, in the Prolegomena, Husserl claimed that the laws of pure logic are ideal and acquire normative status only as a result of application. Later, however, he revised this position and claimed that the same laws are at once ideal and normative. Sections 1 and 2 present textual evidence for attributing such a change of position (...) to Husserl, which is not generally acknowledged in the literature. Section 3 critically examines Husserl's early position, with specific attention to the model of instantiation. Sections 4–6 identify three key stages in the development of Husserl's theory of judgment that lead to the normative conception of pure logic: (1) the critique of the dissociation of ideal content and assertive force; (2) the rejection of the instantiation model of proposition and the development of a new account in terms of identification; (3) the genetic‐phenomenological interpretation of proposition and the elaboration of the three‐layer structure of pure logic. (shrink)

Martin Heideggers Holzwege erschien 1950 und präsentierte dem Publikum seine Überlegungen zum "Ursprung des Kunstwerkes", zur "Zeit des Weltbildes", zu "Hegels Begriff der Erfahrung", zu "Nietzsches Wort 'Gott ist tot'", zur Frage "Wozu Dichter?" und zum "Spruch des Anaximander". Damit liegen in diesem Band einige der wichtigsten Beiträge aus Heideggers Spätwerk vor, in dem er sich kritisch mit der Geschichte der Metaphysik auseinandersetzt und sich in der Begegnung mit Kunst, Dichtung und der vorsokratischen Philosophie um neue Wege des Denkens bemüht. (...) Seit seinem Erscheinen hat dieser Band, der in zahlreichen Übersetzungen vorliegt, die Rezeption von Heideggers Denken maßgeblich geprägt. Mittlerweile liegen zahlreiche andere Texte Heideggers gerade aus den 1930er und 1940er Jahren vor. Diese erlauben eine bessere Einordnung der in Holzwege veröffentlichten Texte und somit auch eine vertiefte Interpretation des Heidegger'schen Spätwerkes. Genau darum bemüht sich der vorliegende Band, der die Aufsätze aus Holzwege sowohl vor dem Hintergrund von Heideggers eigenem Denkweg als auch im weiteren Rahmen der Philosophiegeschichte diskutiert Dieser Band eignet sich zur allgemeinen Einführung in Heideggers Spätwerk als auch zu einer vertieften Auseinandersetzung mit Detailfragen zu seinem Denken. (shrink)

Several commentators have argued that Husserl's phenomenological project is compromised or even destroyed by Wittgenstein's critical inquiries into our use of psychological concepts. In contrast to oppositional interpretations, this paper explicates certain crucial connections between Husserl's phenomenology and Wittgenstein's late thinking—shared views that concern the embodied nature of selfhood and our relations to other selves. In line with certain recent contributions, I argue that there are important similarities between Husserl's analysis of these phenomena and Wittgenstein's remarks on our use of (...) language and that these connections, when noticed and explicated, can help us avoid simplified, barren contrasts and get clear about our actual philosophical alternatives. (shrink)

Whether Husserl is a conceptualist has been heatedly debated among contemporary Husserl scholars. The present article intends to join the debate by asking the question of how, in the Husserlian context, intuitive acts fulfill signitive ones. On the one hand, those who take Husserl to be a conceptualist hold the content-identity theory, arguing that intuitive act and signitive act have the same content, so that the former can fulfill the latter. On the other hand, the non-conceptualists defend the object-identity theory (...) and claim that it is the identity of object of intuitive and signitive act that makes fulfillment possible. On the basis of a careful reading of the sixth investigation of Husserl’s Logical Investigations, the article proposes a dynamic content-identity theory, in which the identity of content does not mean that intuitive act and signitive act have the identical content accidentally, but rather, in the dynamic fulfillment process, the intuitive act obtains the content that overflows into it from the signitive act, so that the two acts have the identical content. And this article shows how the dynamic content-identity theory places Husserl in the conceptualist camp while avoiding certain difficulties of either plain content-identity theory or object-identity theory. (shrink)

There is today much debate about the contents of perceptual experience relative to our capacity to make them figure in judgments. There is considerably less interest, however, in how we subsume perceptual contents in judgments, that is, what judging about a perception is like for us. For Kant and Husserl, this second question is as important as the first. Whereas Kant tries to answer it in the schematism section of the first Critique, Husserl addresses it at length in Experience and (...) Judgment. This paper draws new attention to this ‘forgotten’ transcendental problem by comparing both accounts of it. I will first discuss Kantian conceptualism in section two and schematization in section three. In section four I then turn to the Husserlian notion of type, which is today often juxtaposed to Kant’s schema. After rejecting one commonly held view that they are functionally identical, I turn to Husserl’s work on active synthesis, where I distinguish three different acts of judgment and their respective contents. (shrink)

Husserl’s Logical Investigations has undergone explicitly conceptualist and non-conceptualist interpretations. For Richard Cobb-Stevens, he has extended understanding into the domain of sensuous intuition, leaving no simple perceptions that are actually separated from higher-level understanding. According to Kevin Mulligan, Husserl does in fact sunder nominal and propositional seeing from the simple or straightforward—and yet interpretative—seeing of particulars. To see simply is not to exercise an individual meaning or a general concept. Arguing that Logical Investigations provides evidence for both views, I endeavour (...) to show that the account of perceptual consciousness in Husserl’s subsequent work is far more clear and consistent. It is one of growing beyond the situation portrayed by Mulligan and into the one explicated by Cobb-Stevens. Though they are notionally separable, pre-conceptual syntheses at the passive and noematic levels are inevitably interwoven with conceptual and categorial articulations in a developed consciousness. (shrink)

In this article, it is argued that a convergence between the analytic and continental traditions in philosophy is unlikely. Both traditions have fundamentally different approaches to questions concerning consciousness and subjectivity. They also differ in their conception of the role of philosophy, if we are to become autonomous and reflective humans beings.To illustrate this, a comparison is made between the work of the continental philosopher Dieter Henrich and the 'post- analytic ' philosopher Thomas Nagel, who is often seen as a (...) typical 'converger'. (shrink)

The aim of the paper is to provide information on the evolution of three correlated notions listed above. Only constructive standpoints, assuming possibility of the relevant sciences are taken into account, no criticism of metaphysics as such, etc. is mentioned. Included are some opinions on the methodology of these disciplines. As Polish reader still cannot find information concerning many basic issues in this field of study, some elements of doxography are also included to fill the most nagging gaps. This provisional (...) survey is intended to serve as a complementary source of information in the field of ontology for students of philosophy. (shrink)

Resumen En este trabajo analizo la crítica del psicologismo en las Investigaciones lógicas de Husserl. Para una reconstrucción adecuada del enfoque de este autor, vinculo las ideas centrales de su argumentación contra el psicologismo que se encuentran en el primer volumen con algunos análisis y tesis que introduce en el segundo volumen. Si bien no se presentan de manera explícita como críticas del psicologismo, estos análisis y tesis implican contribuciones para la superación de un enfoque empirista radical, vinculado en forma (...) estrecha con el subjetivismo y el psicologismo. Pongo atención especial en la crítica de las teorías de la abstracción en la Investigación Segunda, cuya vinculación con la crítica del psicologismo no suele reconocerse lo suficiente. También analizo el concepto de posibilidad ideal, fundamental para la comprensión del concepto husserliano de especie.In this paper I analyse the critique of psychologism advanced by Husserl in his Logical Investigations. In order to adequately rebuild the author's approach, I will link the central points of the argument against psychologism developed in the first volume with some analyses and theses introduced by Husserl in the second volume. These analyses and theses, although not explicitly presented as criticisms of psychologism, are clear contributions to overcoming a radical empiricist approach, closely linked to subjectivism and psychologism. I pay special attention to the critique of the theories of abstraction carried out in the Second Investigation, whose link with the critique of psychologism is not properly recognized. I also analyze the concept of ideal possibility, which is fundamental for the understanding of the Husserlian concept of species. (shrink)

This paper discusses George Boole’s two distinct approaches to the explanatory relationship between logical and psychological theory. It is argued that, whereas in his first book he attributes a substantive role to psychology in the foundation of logical theory, in his second work he abandons that position in favour of a linguistically conceived foundation. The early Boole espoused a type of psychologism and later came to adopt a type of anti-psychologism. To appreciate this invites a far-reaching reassessment of his philosophy (...) of logic. (shrink)