The problem of distinguishing between willing and wishing and their significance for both the constitution of our consciousness as well as the constitution of our practical life runs all the way through the history of philosophy. Given the persuasiveness of the problem, it might be helpful to draw a sharp distinction between a metaphysical and a psychological or phenomenological approach to the problem. The first approach may be identified with the positions that Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche held, which (...) involved an identification of the will with reality/actuality in general, and which Heidegger tried to analyze in his later writings on the basis of his confrontation with Nietzsche. In this paper, however, I will not consider the metaphysical approach to the distinction; rather, I will focus on the second approach to distinguishing wishing and willing, which was initiated by Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics, and of which as we will see soon – Husserl and the early Heidegger are ultimately still heirs. Hence I will begin my consideration by recalling briefly the main claim in Aristotle’s discovery of the central position of will within our life. (shrink)

This paper treats of Husserl’s phenomenology of happiness or eudaimonia in five parts. In the first part, we argue that phenomenology of happiness is an important albeit relatively neglected area of research, and we show that Husserl engages in it. In the second part, we examine the relationship between phenomenological ethics and virtue ethics. In the third part, we identify and clarify essential aspects of Husserl’s phenomenology of happiness, namely, the nature of the question concerning happiness and the possibility of (...) a phenomenological answer, the power of the will, the role of vocation, the place of obligation, the significance of habituation, the necessity of selfreflection and self-criticism, the importance of sociability and solidarity, the impact of chance and destiny, and the specter of regret. In the fourth part, we establish the inextricable linkage between Husserl’s metaethics and his metaphysics. In the fi ft h part, we provide a provisional exploration of his conception of the connection between happiness and blessedness. We acknowledge that there is an extensive literature on Husserl’s phenomenological ethics, and our study has benefitted greatly from it, but we also suggest that our holistic approach critically clarifies his description of happiness, virtue, and blessedness by fully recognizing that his phenomenological metaethics is embedded in his phenomenological metaphysics. (shrink)

This paper argues that Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutical philosophy attempts to reopen the question of human transcendence in contemporary terms. While his conception of language as self-transcending is deeply Husserlian, Ricoeur also responds to the analytical challenge when he deploys a basic distinction in Fregean logic in order to clarify Heidegger’s phenomenology of world. Ricoeur’s commitment to a transcendental view is evident in his conception of narrative, which enables him to emphasize the role of the performative in literary reading. The meaning (...) of the self in time provides Ricoeur with a discursive basis for distinguishing his own position from that of Kant and other philosophers in the transcendental tradition. (shrink)

Pour contrer le scepticisme au sujet de la connaissance des valeurs, la plupart soutiennent avec John Rawls qu’une croyance comme celle qu’une action est bonne est justifiée dans la mesure où elle appartient à un ensemble de croyances cohérent, ayant atteint un équilibre réfléchi. Christine Tappolet s’inspire des travaux de Max Scheler et d’Alexius von Meinong pour défendre une conception opposée au cohérentisme. La connaissance des valeurs est affirmée dépendre de nos émotions, ces dernières étant conçues comme des perceptions des (...) valeurs. (shrink)

Clarifying the essential experiential structures at work in our everyday moral engagements promises both (1) to provide a perspicacious self-understanding, and (2) to significantly contribute to theoretical and practical matters of moral philosophy. Since the phenomenological enterprise is concerned with revealing the a priori structures of experience in general, it is then well positioned to discern the essential structures of moral experience specifically. Phenomenology can therefore significantly contribute to matters pertaining to moral philosophy. In this paper I would like to (...) contribute to the relatively small yet burgeoning field of phenomenological ethics. I endea­vour to do so by first identifying and consolidating the basic level of sense-bestowal, and then outlining the a priori structures of volition in order to demonstrate how such phenomenologically discerned structures are required for moral experience. Specifically, in section one I locate moral experience as at the level of meaning that is phenomenologically identified as the life-world, and then vindicate the life-world by illustrating how it is immune to naturalistic rationalisation. By thus both securing the level of meaning that is of concern and importantly delimiting the scope of our analysis, I proceed in section two to relate the volitional analyses of Aristotle, Husserl, and Heidegger. This relation is achieved thanks to a conceptual point of con­tinuity: ‘prohairesis’. By examining the function of this concept (as an intentional structure) and its phenomenological continuity, the ground is then prepared for further phenomenological analyses of the virtues. (shrink)

O artigo examina os componentes eidéticos da lógica formal que, nos Cursos sobre ética e teoria do valor, Husserl toma como norteadores para o desenvolvimento da ideia de uma ética analogamente formal. Mostra-se, primeiramente, que o aspecto teórico e o caráter a priori da lógica perfazem o primeiro fio condutor analógico para a descoberta de um caráter semelhante também no domínio ético. Além disso, com vistas a legitimar a ideia de uma ética a priori, Husserl busca transpor para a esfera (...) prática um análogo da refutação do ceticismo lógico. Finalmente, um terceiro fio condutor analógico conduz ao exame do caráter propriamente formal da ética. (shrink)

There are three steps in my description of the ground-problem of value: First, Husserl’s analysis of the crisis of reason is based on the systematic loss and phenomenological recovery of the intuitive evidence of the lifeworld. But if letter symbols are essential to formalizing abstraction, as Klein’s de-sedimentation of Vieta’s institution of modern algebra shows, then the ultimate substrates upon which formalization rests cannot be “individuals” in Husserl’s sense. The consequence of the essentiality of the letter symbols to formalization is (...) that no direct reference to intuitive evidence of individuals is possible from formal structures. Second, the crisis of reason in Marx’s Capital on commodities contains a parallel analysis of the contradictory relation between formalism and evidence. The value-structure of capitalist society expels qualitative value to subjective use and imposes a homogeneous standard on social representation of value such that quantitative values are not grounded in the experience of use which entails that the system of general value becomes a mere aggregate. Third, the problem of value, or formal axiology, is the core of a teleological convergence between phenomenology and Marxism. A short phenomenological description of the experience of value shows that practical activities generate valuations that are experienced with an intensity through which they aim toward social representation. The conclusion is that the social representation of value in capitalist society intervenes into the constitution of the community by the intensity of individuals’ value-experience to reduce its system of value to an unthematized simple aggregate of value-quantities. (shrink)

The article starts with a brief overview of the kinds of approaches that have been attempted for the presentation of Phenomenology’s view on the emotions. I then pass to Husserl’s unsatisfactory efforts to disclose the intentionality of emotions and their intentional correlation with values. Next, I outline the idea of a new, “normalized phenomenological” approach of emotions and values. Pleasure and pain, then, are first explored as affective feelings . In the cases examined, it is shown that, primordially, pleasure and (...) pain are recordings for our bodily and spiritual states resulting from our confrontation with beings and situations in the world. Delight and distress are, subsequently, approached as the first full-fledged emotive acts that animate or intentionally interpret pleasure and pain in specific ways. The elementary values of agreeableness and disagreeableness appear correspondingly to the latter in relation to the very pleasure or pain and to what has caused them. In other words, agreeable and disagreeable show how what we confront in the world weighs for us, what value it has for the embodied intentional consciousness, for its state and functioning as well as for its existentio-praxial possibilities in the lifeworld. (shrink)

Husserl develops his reflection on ethics mainly in his lecture courses. These lectures can be divided into two parts, according to a principle that is both chronological and pertaining to content, and following thus the respective editions in the Gesammelte Werke.1 The common aspect of the two different phases of Husserl’s research can be detected in the critical confrontation with Kant’s practical philosophy, starting with the question concerning the formality.

Peter Goldie has argued for the view that the intentionality of emotions is inseparable from their phenomenology, but certain criticisms have revealed his argument as problematic. I will argue that it is possible to address these problems, at least in the case of the emotion of fear, thereby vindicating IPE, by appeal to a Husserlian version of the perceptual account of emotions, centered on the idea that the contents of perceptual experiences are fulfillment conditions. Fulfillment means the achievement of a (...) kind of immediate, or “full”, experience of an object or some of its aspects. In the case of visual perception, suppose you are looking at an apple. If you turn it around, you will find yourself in full view of its back side, which was previously anticipated “emptily”, fulfilling or disappointing some of your anticipations in regard to it. On the Husserlian view, the success or failure of a visual perceptual experience consists in such fulfillments and disappointments. If we can provide an account of the intentionality of emotions along similar lines, it will necessarily involve the phenomenal contrast between fullness and emptiness, enabling us to support IPE. (shrink)

The article analyses the reception of Hume’s moral philosophy in the lectures and manuscripts of Edmund Husserl and in the published lectures of Franz Brentano, on which Husserl originally based his views. I first present the reasons that led Brentano to appreciate Hume’s sentimentalist background in moral philosophy and to criticize Hume’s relativism. I then show how Husserl, following the critique of psychologism in his Logical Investigations, builds on this starting point and attempts to show a possible contradictory nature of (...) Hume’s moral relativism. Finally, I consider whether Hume’s doctrine contains phenomenological insights that Husserl overlooks. (shrink)

RESUMEN El artículo sostiene que la concepción fenomenològica de la justificación epistémica y su modo de elucidar la objetividad depende de la vigencia de un cierto ideal de racionalidad como ideal ético que orienta nuestras acciones. Se trata de lo que Husserl denomina el ideal de renovación, que cumple una doble función: a) da cuenta de la tendencia normativa a la corrección sobre la que se asienta la comprensión husserliana de la objetividad, y b) da cuenta de la motivación sobre (...) la que se asienta la adopción de una actitud peculiar, la actitud fenomenológica o trascendental, que caracteriza al quehacer filosófico. ABSTRACT The article argues that the phenomenological conception of epistemic justification and its account of objectivity depends on the validity of an ideal of rationality as the ethical ideal that guides our actions. This is what Husserl calls the ideal of renewal, that fulfills a double function: a) it accounts for the normative tendency to self-correction on which the Husserlian understanding of objectivity is based, and b) it accounts for the motivation for the adoption of the properly philosophical stance, namely, the phenomenological or transcendental attitude. (shrink)