In this paper I compare how Michel Henry and Henri Maldiney interpret Kandinsky’s heritage. Henry’s phenomenology is based on a distinction between two main modes of manifestation: the ordinary one, that is, the manifestation of the world, and the “manifestation of life.” For him, Kandinsky’s work provides a paradigmatic example of the second, more original mode of manifestation, which is free from all forms of self-alienation. Henry claims that this living through the work of art is transformative; it is akin (...) to ascetic practice or mystical experience that goes beyond the distinction of the subject and the object. Maldiney acknowledges Kandinsky’s work as an attempt to provide access to an a-cosmic and ahistoric experience of one’s inner self; yet for him this is not a positive characteristic. For Maldiney, the key distinction is not between modes of phenomenalisation, but between the dimensions of meaning. For him there is no radical self-transformation which is not a transformation of one’s being-in-the-world and one’s meaning of the world, and so Kandinsky’s a-cosmic paintings cannot induce a true transformation of the self. I conclude that the disagreement of Henry and Maldiney on Kandinsky does not unfold on the level of phenomenological description of concrete aesthetic experience, but on the level of metaphysics. (shrink)

This paper argues for a Husserlian account of phenomenal intentionality. Experience is intentional insofar as it presents a mind-independent, objective world. Its doing so is a matter of the way it hangs together, its having a certain structure. But in order for the intentionality in question to be properly understood as phenomenal intentionality, this structure must inhere in experience as a phenomenal feature. Husserl’s concept of horizon designates this intentionality-bestowing experiential structure, while his concept of motivation designates the unique phenomenal (...) character of this structure as it is experientially lived through. The way experience hangs together is itself a phenomenal feature of experience. (shrink)

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, I discuss 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, I aim to show why Husserl makes these contested claims. Specifically, I suggest 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. (shrink)

This paper discusses Husserl’s theory of intentionality and compares it to contemporary debates about intentionalism. I first show to what extent such a comparison could be meaningful. I then outline the structure of intentionality as found in Ideas I. My main claims are that – in contrast with intentionalism – intentionality for Husserl covers just a region of conscious contents; that it is essentially a relation between act-processes and presented content; and that the side of act-processes contains non-representational contents. In (...) the third part, I show that Husserl also offers resources against intentionalism’s exclusive concern with propositional content. (shrink)

This dissertation is a contribution to the contemporary field of phenomenological psychopathology, or the phenomenological study of psychiatric disorders. The work proceeds with two major aims. The first is to show how a phenomenological approach can clarify and illuminate the nature of psychopathology—specifically those conditions typically labeled as major depressive disorder and bipolar disorder. The second is to show how engaging with psychopathological conditions can challenge and undermine many phenomenological presuppositions, especially phenomenology’s status as a transcendental philosophy and its corresponding (...) anti-naturalistic outlook. In the opening chapter, I articulate the three layers of the subject matter of phenomenological research—what I refer to as “existentials,” “modes,” and “prejudices.” As I argue, while each layer contributes to what we might call the “structure” of human existence, they do not do so in the same way, or to the same degree. Because phenomenological psychopathology—and applied phenomenology in general—aims to characterize how the structure of human existence can change and alter, it is paramount that these layers be adequately delineated and defined before investigating these changes. In chapters two through five, I conduct hermeneutic and phenomenological investigations of psychopathological phenomena typically labeled as major depressive disorder or bipolar disorder. These investigations address the affective aspects of depression and mania, and the embodied aspects of depression. In addition to clearly articulating the nature of these phenomena, I show how certain psychopathological conditions involve changes in the deepest or most fundamental layer of human existence—what I refer to as existentials. As I argue, many of the classical phenomenologists (including Husserl and Heidegger) believed that these structural features were necessary, unchanging, and universal. However, this presupposition is challenged through the examination of psychopathological and neuropathological conditions, undermining the status of phenomenology as a transcendental philosophy. While this challenge to classical phenomenology is only sketched in the early chapters, in chapters six and seven I develop it in more detail in order to achieve two distinct ends. In chapter six I argue that psychopathology and neuropathology not only challenge phenomenology’s status as a transcendental philosophy, but also supply a key to developing a phenomenological naturalism (which I contrast with a naturalized phenomenology). Phenomenological naturalism, as I articulate it, is a position in which phenomenology is not subsumed by the metaphysical and methodological framework of the natural sciences, but nonetheless maintains the capacity to investigate how the natural world stands independent of human subjectivity (and how events in the natural world can bring about changes in the most fundamental structures of human existence). In the seventh chapter I argue that a phenomenology in which existentials are contingent and variable rather than necessary and unchanging allows phenomenologists to contribute to new dimensional approaches to psychiatric classification. Rather than begin from distinct categories of disorder, these approaches begin from distinct core features of human existence. These features, referred to as either dimensions or constructs, can vary in degree and are studied in both normal and pathological forms. (shrink)

This dissertation proposes the central elements of a Social Enactive Theory of Perception. According to SEP, perception consists in sensory-based practices of interaction with objects, events, and states of affairs that are socially constituted. I oppose the representational view that perception is an indirect contact with the world, consists of the passive receiving and processing of sensory input, is in need of constant assessment of accuracy, and is a matter of individuals alone. I share the basic enactivist insight that perception (...) is a type of activity, but I depart from standard enactivism on the grounds of its individualistic bias and its limited conception of activity. Instead of motor actions, I formulate the concept of perceptual practices as the appropriate framework to understand perception. Perception is woven into socially informed, contextual, sensory-based everyday activities, such as food, dance, and dress, and even seemingly independent, basic perceptual activities and concepts are constituted by such practices. Perceptual individual interactions instantiate social perceptual practices but are not just repetitions of a script. We perceive objects in virtue of perspectives or appearances, not in spite of them, and on this basis I offer SEPâs take on experience, properties, and contents. I conceive perceptual experience as finely grained interactions between subjects and objects, both of which are spatially, temporally, and pragmatically situated. Objects and their sensory properties are perceived dynamically and always in multiple appearances. Perceptual content offers a pragmatic specification of the perceptual objects in the specific ways they appear to subjects. For SEP, perception is normatively structured. SEPâs perceptual normativity is not a worry about a supposed constant threat that our perceptions be nonveridical, but about the placement of perceptual things in a system of possibilities and expectations, cast in terms of degrees of fulfillment of expectations and in a horizon of pragmatic significance, both of which are functions of the socially constituted interactions between a perceiver and a rich theory of appearances. (shrink)

Many have deemed ineluctable the tension between Husserl’s transcendental eidetics and his Crisis method of historical reflection. In this paper, I argue that this tension is an apparent one. I contend that dissolving this tension and showing not only the possibility, but also the necessity of the successful collaboration between these two apparently irreconcilable methods guarantees the very freedom of inquiry Husserl so emphatically stressed. To make this case, I draw from Husserl’s synthetic analyses of type and concept constitution as (...) well as his later work on sedimentation and streaming-in and develop a richer modal taxonomy than the one Husserl proposed. I employ this taxonomy in an examination of the structures and conditions for the possibility of transcendental eidetic variation in order to show this method’s reliance on historically sedimented epistemic and normative resources. This reliance brings to light the necessity for a methodological critique, which is precisely what I take to be the work of teleological–historical reflection as Husserl comes to conceive it in the Crisis. (shrink)

The hermeneutical tradition represented by Yorck, Heidegger, and Gadamer has distrusted Dilthey as suffering from the two sins of modernism: scientific “positivism” and individualistic and aesthetic “romanticism.” On the one hand, Dilthey’s epistemology is deemed scientistic in accepting the priority of the empirical, the ontic, and consequently scientific inquiry into the physical, biological, and human worlds; on the other hand, his personalist ethos and Goethean humanism, and his pluralistic life- and worldview philosophy are considered excessively aesthetic, culturally liberal, relativistic, and (...) subjective. This essay involves two tasks in response to this negative evaluation of Dilthey that has shaped our current understanding of his philosophical project; first, an interpretation of the issues at stake in Heidegger’s reception of and struggles with Dilthey. These issues touch upon language, historicity, and the nature of hermeneutics. Second, by pursuing this task in light of Guignon’s interpretation of Dilthey and Heidegger, I hope to question and challenge the “overcoming” of Dilthey’s epistemic and life-philosophical hermeneutics in the “ontological” or “philosophical” hermeneutics of Heidegger. (shrink)

Our environment is changing rapidly, as is the spectrum of possible relationships we can entertain with it. Against this background, one important task emerging in contemporary philosophical discussion concerns defining the status of contemporary images and the "iconic spaces" we encounter with ever-increasing frequency in their various forms. Within this context, the dimension of perception seems to be losing its primacy over the image, making a philosophical description of the relationships between image and reality all the more necessary. Among images, (...) the classical distinction between documentary and fiction has been drastically called into question, and along with it the nature of the emotions and values we experience in these two domains. Rozzoni promotes a phenomenology of the image, that is, a return to a description of images that starts from their essential features while avoiding simplistic dichotomies. By elucidating images’ intimate relationship with phantasy and aesthetic experience and their role in shaping our experience of "reality," this book develops a perspectival notion of "truth" intended to shed light on our contemporary interactions with images and the events, emotions, and values we experience through them. (shrink)

Several authors maintain that we are capable of having inconsistent intentional states, either in cases of illusion, in certain cases of imagination, or because the observable world is (partly) inconsistent and we perceive it as such. These views are all premised on the assumption that inconsistent intentional states—even if acknowledged—are peculiar and have nothing essential to do with our perceptual capacities. In the present article, I would like to present, and argue for, a much stronger thesis: that inconsistent intentional states (...) underlie the possibility of having intentional content in mind. I argue for this thesis based on a Husserlian phenomenological analysis of our grasp of objects, which I formulate in terms of incompatibility semantics. (shrink)

“Bodily autonomy” has received significant attention in bioethics, medical ethics, and medical law in terms of the general inviolability of a patient’s bodily sovereignty and the rights of patients to make choices (e.g., reproductive choices) that concern their own body. However, the role of the body in terms of how it can or does contribute to a patient’s capacity for, or exercises of their autonomy in clinical decision-making situations has not been explicitly addressed. The approach to autonomy in this paper (...) is aligned with traditional theories that conceive autonomy in terms of an individual’s capacities for, and exercises of rational reflection. However, at the same time, this paper extends these accounts by arguing that autonomy is, in part, embodied. Specifically, by drawing on phenomenological conceptions of the experience of autonomy, we argue that, in principle, the body is a necessary component of the capacity for autonomy. Secondly, through the presentation of two different cases, we highlight ways in which a patient’s body can contribute to the autonomy of treatment choices. Ultimately, we hope to encourage others to explore additional conditions under which a concept of embodied autonomy should be employed in medical decision making, how its underlying principles might be operationalised in clinical situations, and its consequences for approaches to patient autonomy in healthcare practice, policy, and law. (shrink)

Phenomenology gives rise to certain ontological considerations that have far-reaching implications for standard conceptions of patient autonomy in medical ethics, and, as a result, the obligations of and to patients in clinical decision-making contexts. One such consideration is the phenomenological reduction in classical phenomenology, a core feature of which is the characterisation of our primary experiences as immediately and inherently meaningful. This paper builds on and extends the analyses of the phenomenological reduction in the works of Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty (...) in order to identify and explain its implications for our current understanding of the principle of respect for patient autonomy and the norms of clinical decision making. (shrink)

Seeking to contribute to the recent emergence of critical phenomenology by clarifying the relation between ontology and ethics, this article offers a new account of the sources of normativity in the context of Heidegger’s critique of technological enframing (Gestell) and Derrida’s political philosophy. I distinguish three levels of normativity in Heidegger and show how moving between the levels permits the critical deployment of the affirmation (Zusage) in response to being’s address. On this view, not only are humans constitutively claimed by (...) being, but the claim calls for its express hearing and critical elaboration. I then show how Derrida reconceives Heidegger’s normativity by developing a notion of double affirmation that communicates with key concepts from his moral-political work, such as the gift, the advance, and friendship. I conclude by indicating what double affirmation entails for critique today. (shrink)

I reconstruct the notion of significance [_Sinnhaftigkeit_] in the later Husserl, with attention to his conceptions of judgment and transcendental logic. My analysis is motivated by the idea that an account of significance can help to connect analytic, Anglo-American conceptions of meaning as a precise, law-governed phenomenon investigated via linguistic analysis and Continental European conceptions of meaning in a broader “existential” sense. I argue that Husserl’s later work points to a transcendental-logical conception of a founding level of _significance_ [_Sinnhaftigkeit_] prior (...) to language, and that this conception meets characteristically analytic demands for precision and governance by logical constraints. At the same time, since it is based in descriptions of perceptual intentionality at the level of essential possibility, it leaves room for an account of meaning as a partially undetermined phenomenon of lived experience, and not just of our language and concepts, and thereby meets the characteristically Continental demand to take at face value meaning’s vagueness and indeterminacy in everyday human life. (shrink)

Husserl’s theory of types is most often associated with his account of perception. Here, types operate as pre-predicative frames of experience that guide the perception of objects. In this paper, I will argue that Husserl’s theory of types is also central to his account of intersubjectivity. More specifically, I will show that a foundational kind of typical subjectivity is entailed by his discussion of the sphere of ownness. It is by way of this type that even a solitary subject can (...) tacitly anticipate the possibility of other subjects. It is also this type that is enriched through interactions between actual subjects. (shrink)

Drawing on recent phenomenological discussions of collective intentionality and existential phenomenological accounts of agency, this article proposes a novel interpretation of shared action. First, I argue that we should understand action on the basis of how an environment pre-reflectively solicits agents to behave based on (a) the affordances or goals inflected by their abilities and dispositions and (b) their self-referential commitment to a project that is furthered by these affordances. Second, I show that this definition of action is sufficiently flexible (...) to account for not only individual action (in which both (a) and (b) refer only to an individual) but also several distinct subtypes of shared action. My thesis is that behaviour counts as shared action if and only if it is caused by a solicitation in which either (a) the goals, or (b) the commitments, or both (a) goals and (b) commitments are joint, i.e., depend on several individuals. We thereby get three distinct subtypes of shared actions: (i) jointly coordinated individually committed action, (ii) individually coordinated jointly committed action, and (iii) jointly coordinated jointly committed action. (shrink)

This paper demonstrates that two signature methodological concepts in Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology, the epoché and the phenomenological reduction, derive from his reflections on the history and significance of epistemological skepticism in the Western tradition. Drawing on his Lectures on Logic and Epistemology (Hua XXIV) from the Winter semester of 1906–07, it is argued that Husserl derives his conception of the fundamental task of transcendental philosophy from his reading of a novel skeptical challenge posed by David Hume’s philosophy—a kind of skeptical (...) challenge that Husserl did not recognize in his earlier treatments of Hume. On Husserl’s revised reading, Hume promotes a certain kind of philosophical “despair” (Verzweiflung) or, as it may be called today, “quietism” as the only possible response to the traditional problems of epistemology stemming back to the ancient skeptics. Husserl’s criticism of Hume’s quietism is presented. And Husserl’s reading of Descartes’s cogito as the first decisive uncovering of the limits of epistemological skepticism in the Western tradition is shown to be the source of two key elements of Husserl’s positive alternative to Humean epistemological quietism, which ultimately become the heart of a novel conception of critical transcendental philosophy. These two key elements are the phenomenological epoché and phenomenological reduction. Husserl’s arguments are presented for the claim that these are essential parts of any epistemological program that can answer traditional skeptical challenges. (shrink)

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 […] which makes a ‘personal’ kind of identity possible” (2020). (shrink)

This paper focuses on the connection between meaning, the specific field of phenomenological philosophy, and mattering, the cornerstone of personal identity. Doing so requires that we take a stand on the scope and method of phenomenological philosophy itself. I will argue that while we can describe our lives in an “impersonal” way, such descriptions will necessarily omit what makes it the case that such lives can matter at all. This will require distinguishing between “personal” identity and “self” identity, an idea (...) well-established in the phenomenological literature – for instance, in Husserl’s distinction between the “transcendental ego” and the person -- but I will argue that self-identity is a normative achievement whose clarification requires a move into second-person phenomenology. The argument moves through three sections. First, I will discuss Aron Gurwitsch’s “non-egological” conception of consciousness and will explain the most important reason Husserl rejected this view in his transcendental phenomenology. Second, I will discuss some contemporary approaches to Husserl’s distinction between person and ego. Third, I will argue that these approaches testify to an ambiguity in Husserl’s account of being “true” to oneself that requires us to understand selfhood as having the structure Heidegger called care. The importance of this will be demonstrated phenomenologically in a critical examination of Paul Ricoeur’s ontology of selfhood, particularly his interpretation of the second-person phenomenology of conscience. (shrink)

What justifies one interlocutor to challenge the conversational expectations of the other? Paul Grice approaches conversation as one instance of joint action that, like all such action, is governed by the Cooperative Principle. He thinks the expectations of the interlocutors must align, although he acknowledges that expectations can and do shift in the course of a conversation through a process he finds strange. Martin Heidegger analyzes discourse as governed by the normativity of care for self and for another. It is (...) the structure of care that warrants disrupting the presumed cooperative horizon of a conversation in order to occasion some new insight. The chapter expands Heidegger’s ontological conception of care to make sense of the exigencies of conversation. Conversation requires taking cognizance of (1) the human good, (2) the specifics of the conversational context, and (3) one’s responsibilities for the other. This threefold understanding can provide directives for subverting the interlocutor’s expectation for the purposes of a given conversation. (shrink)

Irene McMullin’s Existential Flourishing (Cambridge University Press, 2018) weaves together virtue ethics and existential phenomenology: the influence of Heidegger and Levinas, in particular, is clear throughout. This paper provides a summary of McMullin’s elegantly argued position and raises a number of possible concerns, particularly regarding the interaction of Aristotelian and Phenomenological assumptions. I focus specifically on the role of the 2nd-person perspective, on the links between exemplars and socialisation, and on the problem of those who, as Nietzsche put it, “are (...) both evil and happy – a species on which the moralists are silent”. (shrink)

Contemporary accounts on fictional emotions, i.e., emotions experienced towards objects we know to be fictional, are mainly concerned with explaining their rationality or lack thereof. In this context dominated by an interest in the role of belief, questions regarding their phenomenal quality have received far less attention: it is often assumed that they feel “similar” to emotions that target real objects. Against this background, this paper focuses on the possible specificities of fictional emotions’ qualitative feel. It starts by presenting what (...) I call the “phenomenological question” about the qualitative feel of fictional emotions (section 1) and by showing that this is irreducible to questions about their cognitive, intentional, evaluative, and embodied nature (section 2). Drawing on some insights from early phenomenologists, the next two sections elaborate criteria to distinguish between real and sham emotions on the one side (section 3) and between genuine and non-genuine emotions on the other (section 4). Finally, I apply this orthogonal distinction to the particular case of fictional emotions (section 5). The paper argues that fictional emotions are neither sham emotions nor quasi-emotions, but full-fledged emotional experiences, despite them displaying the distinctive phenomenology of emotions experienced as non-genuine. In the particular case of fictional emotions, they are non-genuine because our psychology is in fact in a state dominated by aesthetic enjoyment. (shrink)

This paper discusses the relation between the later Husserl and the later Heidegger regarding their criticisms of modern science and technology. It is suggested that the overlap between both accounts is more significant than is standardly acknowledged. The paper first explores Heidegger’s ideas about the ‘essences’ of science and technology, how they allegedly determine the contemporary worldview, conceal our relation to being, and how Heidegger warrants his critical attitude toward this. It then discusses Husserl’s philosophical–historical assessment of the ‘idea’ of (...) modern science, which Husserl believed resulted in the decapitation of philosophical questioning. Although key differences in method, aims, and their proposed solution to the dominance of the technological-scientific worldview should not be overlooked, the paper suggests that core aspects of Heidegger’s analyses can be traced back to Husserl. (shrink)

Both Millikan’s brand of naturalistic analytic philosophy and Husserlian phenomenology have held on to teleological notions, despite their being out of favor in mainstream Western philosophy for most of the twentieth century. Both traditions have recognized the need for teleology in order to adequately account for intentionality, the need to adequately account for intentionality in order to adequately account for meaning, and the need for an adequate theory of meaning in order to precisely and consistently describe the world and life. (...) The stark differences between their accounts of these fundamental concepts stem from radically different conceptions of the world, the natural and life. I argue that Millikan’s teleosemantic approach relies on a teleology of determination by means of the lawfulness of nature that leaves no room for the freedom of self-determination, for reason, or for experience—for the reality of lived human life. In contrast to Millikan’s account, Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology situates teleology as a function of reason and first-personal experience, part of an extended account of intentionality and meaning according to which the full range of our making sense of the world is conceived as a rational activity that is itself a part of that world, and not an unnatural activity to be separated from it. While Husserl’s account of these issues is indeed symptomatic of what Millikan calls “meaning rationalism,” I argue that it is immune to the sorts of problems she claims will plague any such account, since these problems arise only against the background of a set of presuppositions about intentionality that Husserl does not share. Husserl’s position can itself be understood to be within the bounds of a suitably liberal conception of naturalism, and interpreting him in this way it has the added benefit—contra Millikan—of not divorcing teleology from reason, the latter construed as our first-personal striving to make sense of the world as we experience it—of life. (shrink)

I argue that Husserl’s transcendental account of the role of the lived body in sense-making is a precursor to Alva Noë’s recent work on the enactive, embodied mind, specifically his notion of “sensorimotor knowledge” as a form of embodied sense-making that avoids representationalism and intellectualism. Derrida’s deconstructive account of meaning—developed largely through a critique of Husserl—relies on the claim that meaning is structured through the complication of the “interiority” of consciousness by an “outside,” and thus might be thought to lend (...) itself to theories of mind such as Noë’s that emphasize the ways in which sense-making occurs outside the head. But while Derrida’s notion of “contamination” rightly points to an indeterminateness of meaning in an outside, extended, concrete lived world, he ultimately reduces meaning to a structure of signification. This casts indeterminateness in terms of absence, ignoring the presence of non-linguistic phenomena of embodied sense-making central to both the contemporary enactivist program and to the later Husserl, who is able to account for the indeterminateness of meaning in lived experience through his distinction between sense and more exact linguistic meaning. Husserl’s transcendental theory of meaning also allows for a substantive contribution to sense-making from the side of the perceived object—an aspect missing from Noë’s account. Thus, in contrast to Derrida and to Noë, Husserl accounts for sense-making in terms of both the lived body and the lived world. (shrink)

In this essay I address the question, “What is the subject matter of phenomenological research?” I argue that in spite of the increasing popularity of phenomenology, the answers to this question have been brief and cursory. As a result, contemporary phenomenologists lack a clear framework within which to articulate the aims and results of their research, and cannot easily engage each other in constructive and critical discourse. Examining the literature on phenomenology’s identity, I show how the question of phenomenology’s subject (...) matter has been systematically neglected. It has been overshadowed by an unending concern with phenomenology’s methodological identity. However, an examination of recent contributions to this literature reveals that a concern with articulating phenomenology’s subject matter has gradually increased, although such articulations remain preliminary. In light of this, I delineate, define, and illustrate three layers of phenomenological research, which I term “existentials,” “modes,” and “prejudices.” While the delineation of these layers is drawn primarily from classical phenomenological texts, they are defined and illustrated through the use of more contemporary literature. Following the articulation of this subject matter, I briefly consider some of the debates—both foundational and applied—that can be facilitated by the adoption of this framework. (shrink)

Heidegger claimed that Western philosophy ended, failed even, in the German Idealist tradition. In The Culmination, Robert B. Pippin explores the ramifications of this charge through a masterful survey of Western philosophy, especially Heidegger's critiques of Hegel and Kant. Pippin argues that Heidegger's basic concern was to determine sources of meaning for human life, particularly those that had been obscured by Western philosophy's attention to reason. The Culmination offers a new interpretation of Heidegger, German Idealism, and the fate of Western (...) rationalism. (shrink)

The aim of the paper is to provide a relational explanation of the sources of moral normativity, within a Neo-Kantian framework. To this purpose, the key notions employed are those of we-society and stance-taking, developed by Neo-Kantian philosopher Heinrich Rickert. Specifically, by resorting to such notions, the paper attempts to overcome two limits ascribed to the theory of moral normativity of Ch. Korsgaard: namely W. Smith’s objection of solipsism and S. Crowell’s problem of non-deliberate action, whereby Ch. Korsgaard’s identification of (...) the source of normativity in reflection would lead her theory to a form of solipsism and to failing to explain actions based on so-called ‘mindless coping’. In tackling these objections, the paper outlines a Rickertian inspired theory, according to which the sources of moral normativity can be explained on the basis of the heterological I-You relationship, which is the foundation of the we-society intended as a set of values, patterns of expectations, tacit consents, and procedural knowledge. (shrink)

Normative notions are central to Husserl’s account of intentionality: intending an object is a normative achievement, essentially admitting of fulfillment or disappointment. So is teleology: intentional conscious life is inseparable from a horizontal orientation toward “ideas in the Kantian sense.” How are they related? Is teleology essential for intentionality as a normative achievement? Or, in Husserl’s way of putting it, do relative truths “demand” ideal truths? This article explores some reasons for agreeing with Husserl that this is indeed the case. (...) In Sec. 2, I will identify a “normative turn” in Husserl’s account of the basic structure of perceptual intentionality and spell out the teleological character of this normative account. This sense of teleology is a minimal one. A more robust teleology, in the sense of an orientation toward infinite ideality, is then justified in Sec. 3 by virtue of its function in the constitution of genuine objectivity. In Sec. 4, I will turn to the noetic, especially the ego-oriented side of Husserl’s analysis, in order to clarify the normative force of infinite telos. All in all, I will argue that the normative and the teleological sides of the story are inextricably intertwined in Husserl’s account of intentional conscious life. (shrink)

Today the phenomenological concept of the lived body figures centrally in several philosophical and special scientific debates. In these wide and widening fields, the concept is used with multiple different meanings. In order to clarify and delineate the debates, this paper provides an explication of the phenomenological-transcendental methods. It argues that these methods help us remove the most fundamental ambiguities of the concept of embodiment by distinguishing between the main constituents of the lived body and by illuminating their mutual relations.

European Journal of Philosophy, Volume 30, Issue 1, Page 169-181, March 2022.

Following a brief summation of the phenomenological method, the paper considers three metaethical positions adopted by phenomenologists and the implications of those positions for a normative ethics. The metaethical positions combine epistemological and ontological viewpoints. They are non-intellectualism and strong value realism as represented by the axiological views of phenomenologists such as Scheler, Meinong, Reinach, Stein, Hartmann, von Hildebrand, and Steinbock; non-intellectualism and anti-realism as represented by the freedom-centered phenomenologies of Sartre, Beauvoir, and Merleau-Ponty; and weak intellectualism and weak value (...) realism as represented by Husserl and Drummond. The paper argues that only the third metaethical view can support a normative ethics that is consistent with the essential features of the phenomenological method, that allows for freedom in an agent’s choosing from a multiplicity of first-order goods, including vocational goods, practical identities, and life plans, available in the agent’s factical circumstances, and that provides norms governing the correctness of our actions and our obligations to others. The normative dimension is introduced, first, by the requirement that the fulfillment of first-order evaluations and choices be truthful, that is, that the evaluations be appropriate and the actions right. Second, transcendental considerations revealed in the phenomenological analysis of intentional experience disclose a notion of second-order goods of agency that universally bind agents in their exercise of freedom and their dealings with others. (shrink)

This special issue addresses the debate on personal identity from a phenomenological viewpoint, especially contemporary phenomenological research on selfhood. In the introduction, we first offer a brief survey of the various classic questions related to personal identity according to Locke’s initial proposal and sketch out key concepts and distinctions of the debate that came after Locke. We then characterize the types of approach represented by post-Hegelian, German and French philosophies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We argue that whereas the (...) Anglophone debates on personal identity were initially formed by the persistence question and the characterization question, the “Continental” tradition included remarkably intense debates on the individual or the self as being unique or “concrete,” deeply temporal and—as claimed by some philosophers, like Sartre and Foucault—unable to have any identity, if not one externally imposed. We describe the Continental line of thinking about the “self” as a reply and an adjustment to the post-Lockean “personal identity” question. These observations constitute the backdrop for our presentation of phenomenological approaches to personal identity. These approaches run along three lines: debates on the layers of the self, starting from embodiment and the minimal self and running all the way to the full-fledged concept of person; questions of temporal becoming, change and stability, as illustrated, for instance, by aging or transformative life-experiences; and the constitution of identity in the social, institutional, and normative space. The introduction thus establishes a structure for locating and connecting the different contributions in our special issue, which, as an ensemble, represent a strong and differentiated contribution to the debate on personal identity from a phenomenological perspective. (shrink)

This is a critical review of Van Mazijk, Corijn: Perception and Reality in Kant, Husserl, and McDowell.

There are two extreme poles in the literature on akrasia. Internalists hold that it's impossible to act intentionally against your better judgment, because there's a necessary internal relation between judgment and intentional action. To the contrary, externalists maintain that we can act intentionally against our better judgment, because the will operates independently of judgment. Critics of internalism argue that it fails a realism test—most people seem to think that we can and do act intentionally against our better judgment. And critics (...) of externalism argue that it flirts with incoherence by severing the intimate link between judgment and action. Drawing on resources from phenomenology, the cognitive sciences, analytic action theory, and recent “hybrid models” of skilled action, I argue that one route beyond this theoretical impasse is to understand akrasia as a form of skillful pre-reflective intentional action. This strategy, I argue, preserves the internalist insight that there is indeed an intimate relation between judgment and intentional action; and it also confirms the externalist claim that this relation is defeasible, but it does so without falling into incoherence. (shrink)

Husserl’s concept of an “historical apriori” is marked by a tension: It simultaneously departs from, and develops his long-standing commitment to philosophy as transcendental phenomenology. This paper looks at some reasons for this tension in the context of Husserl’s attempt to determine philosophy as a “tradition” in The Origin of Geometry. Husserl is convinced that philosophy is a scientific tradition, and the historical apriori serves in the analysis of the conditions that define a distinctively scientific “handing down.” The key here (...) is a kind of writing—mathematics—thanks to which the participants in the tradition can be certain that they are in essential connection with the “original” idealities of that tradition. But Husserl’s discovery about the individual philosopher’s relation to the philosophical tradition—namely, that it is always mediated by a kind of “poetic invention”—undermines his conviction that philosophy can be a scientific tradition. This is Husserl’s “existentialism.”. (shrink)

Once a marginal affair, applied phenomenology is now a vast and vibrant movement. With great success, however, comes great criticism, and critics have been harsh, accusing applied phenomenology’s practitioners of everything from spewing nonsense to assailing down-to-earth researchers with gratuitous jargon. In this article, I reconstruct the most damning criticisms as a dilemma: Either applied phenomenology merely describes experience, in which case it offers nothing distinctive, or it involves the kind of analysis characteristic of classical phenomenology, in which case it’s (...) only of interest to a small number of philosophers; either way, we should explore the experiential dimension by other means. Notwithstanding the enormous body of research in applied phenomenology, few authors have tried to explain what makes it an independent intellectual enterprise distinct from pure phenomenology, and none has defused this dilemma. Here I try my hand at both. After considering eight major approaches to applied phenomenology that fail to defuse the dilemma, I propose an approach that, I argue, does the job, one that understands applied phenomenology as a research program that brings the phenomenological method and the resources of at least one other discipline to bear on problems beyond the scope of any monodisciplinary approach. (shrink)

In this article I argue that phenomenal intentionality fundamentally consists in a horizonality structure, rather than in a relation to a representational content or the determination of accuracy conditions. I provide a distinctive modal model of intentionality that conceives of phenomenal intentionality as the enjoyment of a plus ultra that points beyond what is actual. The directedness of intentionality on the world, thus, consists in “pointing ahead” to possibilities. The principal difficulty for the modal model is logical: the most obvious (...) way of implementing such a structure results in an analogue of Russell’s paradox. However, this paradox can be avoided by fine-tuning the modal logic deployed in this setting. This way of fine-tuning the logic ultimately amounts to intuitive benefits. For, it captures the intensional character of intentionality, since the way that our mental states refer to things is conception-dependent. Moreover, the way I interpret the modal model leads to a conception of intentionality as a feature of dynamic, diachronic patterns in the way that mental acts subjectively appear, rather than as a synchronic property. We ought to think of intentionality as fundamentally a temporal, subjective determination. In a generalization on Sellars’ approach to concepts, I hold that phenomenally intentional mental presentations involve modal laws and are inconceivable without them. (shrink)

Phenomenological descriptions are supposed to be revelatory and coincide with the self-showing of the things themselves. These features of phenomenological descriptions lead to the peculiar character of their expression, which has the effect of making them difficult to communicate. That is, the problem with communicating the findings of phenomenological researches is a consequence of the descriptive nature of the endeavor and the disclosive character of phenomenological descriptions. In the Logical Investigations Edmund Husserl recognized that the problem has three facets: how (...) does one state the findings of phenomenological researches, how can one effectively communicate these findings, and how can these communications be persuasive? In this essay I elaborate on these problems and then show that Heidegger’s method of formal indication was designed to solve these problems just as Husserl understood them. We can thus take formal indication as a model for dealing with these problems—and for informing phenomenological discourse—because it solves them with a single strategy. (shrink)

In this paper, first, I will focus on the divergent interpretations of two leading Sellars’ scholars, Willem deVries and James O’Shea, as regards Sellars’ view on the being of the normative. It will be suggested that this conflict between deVries’ and O’Shea’s viewpoints can be resolved by the provision of an account of what I shall call ‘ready-tohand’ normativity, which incorporates the insights of both deVries’ and O’Shea’s interpretive perspectives, while at the same time going beyond them. It shall be (...) further argued that the resulting ‘phenomenologically’ informed view of normativity, pointing as it does towards its ideal integration not only with practical action but also with perceptual experience, in the form of what I shall call ‘kinaesthetic’ normativity, can potentially pose problems to Sellars’ own view on the matter, and, in particular, to the way normativity can allegedly be ‘stereoscopically fused’ with the ultimate ontology of the ideal scientific image. However, I shall argue that these problems are not unsurpassable: although the possibility of a specifically ‘kinaesthetic’ form of normativity seems to have eluded Sellars’ grasp, his views about the way in which the productive imagination is implicated in perceptual experience, do indeed provide the conceptual resources that make possible the stereoscopic fusion of this kind of normativity with the ontology of the ideal scientific image. (shrink)

Many of us have experienced a peculiar feeling of freedom, of the world being open before us. This is the feeling that is captured by phrases like “the freedom of the open road” and “free spirits,” and, to quote Phillip Larkin, “free bloody birds” going “down the long slide / To happiness, endlessly.” This feeling is associated with the ideas that my life could go in many different directions and that there is a vast range of things that I could (...) become. It arises in concert with a wide range of human experiences, including experiences of artistic creation, play, fun, and resistance to authority. This freedom of openness and spontaneity, which I call spontaneous freedom, is central to our ordinary talk about freedom. Yet it is a phenomenon largely ignored in discussions of freedom in contemporary moral philosophy. This is because moral philosophers are primarily concerned to identify the sort of freedom that is a prerequisite for moral responsibility, and so focus on deliberate, voluntary action rooted in rational choice. When moral philosophers do discuss spontaneous freedom, it is often to disparage it as, in the words of Harry Frankfurt, the freedom of “the wanton” whose liberty is merely that of “anarchic impulsive behavior.” My dissertation develops a theory of spontaneous freedom and of the role it does and should play in our lives, including our moral and political lives. I argue that, to do full justice to the human aspiration for freedom, moral and political theory must recognize the value of spontaneity. Through a study of characters from stories and films by Virginia Woolf, Saki, Akira Kurosawa, and Aman Sethi, I develop a phenomenological account of the nature of spontaneous freedom. I argue that we experience spontaneous freedom when we experience our actions as arising out of ourselves but not fixed in advance either by the decisions of other agents or by our own preexisting commitments or plans. I further argue that spontaneous freedom is valuable because it allows for the distinctive pleasure of feeling that one’s life is unforetold and that one is among the sources of novelty in the world, a feeling that is central to artistic creativity. It also affords solace from the anxiety associated with the inevitability of death. As with many experiences, like falling in love or seeing an alpine lake, experiences of spontaneous freedom are most valuable when they are veridical. But even the subjective experience of spontaneous freedom, I suggest, activates our awareness of and openness to possibility. Achieving this awareness, at least on occasion, is valuable because it provides us with a sense of our own psychological potential and sharpens a skill that contributes to practical deliberation. My claim that spontaneous freedom is valuable conflicts with a popular account of the self. According to that account—endorsed by a number of moral philosophers but most famously associated with Christine Korsgaard—the ideal self is one that is well-ordered, actively constituted through rational deliberation. Such integrity theories of the self are attractive because they provide an account of agency according to which ideal moral agents invariably endorse their own actions and beliefs. Integrity theories view freedom as involving rational, deliberative control of one’s actions. But I argue that integrity theories forbid well-constituted moral agents to seek out experiences of spontaneous freedom: such agents must act in a manner that they antecedently and reflectively endorse, while spontaneous freedom requires acting in a manner not antecedently fixed by one’s own decisions. Insofar as spontaneous freedom is a kind of freedom that we do and should value, my account exerts pressure on this standard view of agency and the self. My account of spontaneous freedom also has important political implications. One version of liberal theory holds that the only sort of political freedom worth having is the freedom of each individual to effectively exercise choice compatibly with every other individual doing likewise. On this picture, I have all of the freedom that I could want if I am able to choose autonomously and act in accordance with my choices. But I argue that a community that secures this liberal variety of freedom does not yet provide its members with all the freedom for which people rightly yearn. When public and private institutions arrange our circumstances in ways that make the courses of our lives predictable, our own choices about how to act may be largely settled by the plans and decisions of other agents. This in turn makes it difficult for us to regard our futures as open in the way that is characteristic of experiences of spontaneous freedom. States should promote spontaneous freedom by providing the material and social preconditions for us to feel that our lives could head in radically different and unanticipated directions. (shrink)

Technology always provides a new perception of the world. However, it is not clear when technology produces “mere” new informations and when it provides something more such as a production of new objects in our world which start to “live” around us. The aim of this paper is to study how technology shapes our surrounding world. The questions which we are going to answer are: Is it really adding new objects to our world? If yes, does every technology have this (...) potentiality? We are going to tackle the problem using a phenomenological and post-phenomenological approach focussing our attention on the perceptual level. Using Husserl’s philosophy we will study how technology are deeply involved in our perception and, thanks to post-phenomenology and its concept of “embodiment relations,” we will be able to determine which kind of technologies have the potentiality to change our surrounding world introducing and producing new objects in it. (shrink)

Normality, for Husserl, is said in many ways. While the most detailed treatments of this technical Husserlian concept are usually found in discussions concerning the constitutive dimension of the lived body and intersubjectivity, little attention has been paid to the notion of normality understood as the tacit regularity of nature. Indeed, the normal can also be understood as the causal background which is presupposed, tentatively, in the anticipation of uniform processes of change, as well as in poieticinstrumental experiences, that is, (...) in experiences involving the production and use of objects. The subject that elaborates, manipulates or uses objects is installed in nature. Hence, in our productive-instrumental confrontation with objects in the world, we operate under the assumption that the potentially mutable causal scene surrounding our acting life will retain its style. This assumption of normality is the world, in one of the many ways in which Husserl characterizes this concept. The world qua background of normality becomes thematic, retrospectively, precisely when it ceases to cooperate with the agent’s initiatives. This, on my view, is what lies behind Husserl’s assertion that the world is a “super-object” or “higher-level theme”. (shrink)