In the texts collected in the second volume of the Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins, Husserl extensively discusses experiences of joy (Freude). By considering Husserl’s examples related to joy not as mere illustrations, but as a guiding thread for the identification of experiential structures, this article shows how these examples are not only significant for the general theory of intentionality of affective and emotional non-objectifying acts, but also provide valuable insights into the specific phenomenon of joy itself. Specifically, the article (...) demonstrates how the distinction between joy, sensory pleasure, and liking provides insights into the intentional structure of joy as a responsive affect. On the basis of these distinctions, the article raises the normative question about the appropriateness of affective and emotional responses. It argues that the appropriateness of joy should be assessed from two perspectives: in relation to the value that justifies an affective response and in relation to a personal motivational nexus. From the former perspective, joy can be normatively assessed. However, when only considering the latter perspective, joy cannot be assessed according to objective normative standards. Finally, building on these findings, the article explores how the phenomenology of joy and motivation may be connected to the specific experience of depth and discusses the role of joy for a phenomenological investigation of the personal self. (shrink)

Das vorliegende Buch präsentiert eine phänomenologische Analyse der verschiedenen Formen zwischenmenschlicher Gewalt und ihrer oft unterbelichteten Beziehungen. Auf der Grundlage einer Transformation der Phänomenologie und im Rekurs auf den aktuellen Diskurs der Gewaltforschung entwickelt es einen methodologischen Rahmen für eine nicht-reduktive Analyse von Gewalt, der in angewandten phänomenologischen Fallstudien erprobt wird. -/- Gewalt war bislang vorwiegend in den Human und den Sozialwissenschaften ein zentrales Thema, wurde aber nur allzu selten zum Gegenstand genuin philosophischer Reflexion. Um dieses Desiderat aufzugreifen und die (...) Bedeutung philosophischer Reflexion für den Diskurs über Gewalt zu demonstrieren, entwickelt das vorliegende Buch einen phänomenologischen Ansatz zur Analyse zwischenmenschlicher Gewalt. Seine Intention besteht darin, ein Korrektiv zu den konventionellen, allzu einseitig verfahrenden instrumentalistischen, essentialistischen oder funktionalistischen Erklärungen von Gewalt vorzulegen. -/- Im Anschluss an eine kritische Reflexion auf zentrale Aporien des Gewaltdiskurses, denen es sich zu stellen gilt, integriert der Autor relevante Theoreme klassischer Phänomenologie mit neueren Ansätzen in einen umfassenden Analyserahmen. In drei „Fallstudien“ wird dieser Rahmen in konkreten Phänomenanalysen angewandt und der ihm zugrunde liegende weite Gewaltbegriff auf die Probe gestellt. Das Buch schließt mit einem Entwurf einer „relationalen Phänomenologie“, die es erlaubt, die vielfach unterbelichteten bzw. ausgeblendeten Beziehungen zwischen den verschiedenen Formen von Gewalt ins Auge zu fassen. (shrink)

Presenting the first step-by-step commentary on Husserl’s Ideas I, Marcus Brainard’s Belief and Its Neutralization provides an introduction not only to this central work, but also to the whole of transcendental phenomenology. Brainard offers a clear and lively account of each key element in Ideas I, along with a novel reading of Husserl, one which may well cause scholars to reconsider many long-standing views on his thought, especially on the role of belief, the effect and scope of the epoché, and (...) the significance of the universal neutrality modification. (shrink)

Habit and habitualisation play an important role in Husserl's phenomenology, yet one aspect of habituality has been somewhat overlooked, namely the dimension of authenticity/inauthenticity. While authenticity in Heidegger has received a lot of attention, inauthenticity in Husserl is less well researched, although, as I will show, it is of equal importance to his overall theorising. The central aim of this paper is to explore the authenticity/inauthenticity-distinction in the various domains of habitualisation and to establish its fundamental importance for Husserl. In (...) the first, introductory part of this paper I offer a few remarks on how to understand and categorise Husserl's transcendental take on habits; I also introduce the important distinction between authentic and inauthentic habits and authenticity and inauthenticity in general. In the second part I present the problem of mechanisation as a form of inauthentic habitualisation as it appears in Husserl's phenomenologies of ethics and, more importantly, science. The third part concludes the paper with a reflection on how phenomenology is programmatically aimed against any form of inauthenticity, and on how it might or might not achieve this goal. (shrink)

Husserl envisages transcendental phenomenology as a radically founding science that lays bare the higher-order experiences whereby logic and a theory of science become constituted. On the other hand, according to a usual presentation of Hegel’s philosophy, phenomenology is “logic’s precondition,” and science presents itself as its “result.” This alleged precedence of Hegel’s phenomenology (with its experiential and historical horizons) regarding logic may be a motif behind the current affinities recently traced between Hegelian and Husserlian notions of phenomenology that highlight their (...) views on experience, history, and the lifeworld. This paper offers instead a reconsideration of aspects of their philosophies mostly challenged or dismissed since the rise of positivism: a reappraisal of their views on the relationship between phenomenology, logic, and philosophy as an “absolute” system of sciences. The argument is made that the irreconcilable difference between their projects ultimately stands on the radical contrast between Hegel’s speculative-conceptual method and system of sciences and Husserl’s foundational science and method as experiential-phenomenological all the way through. Despite this methodological abyss, this paper vindicates their affinities in their refusal to segregate science from life, and their attempts to overcome modernity’s inherited fragmentation of culture by providing an all-unifying approach to philosophy. (shrink)

The principal differences between the contemporary philosophic traditions which have come to be known loosely as analytic philosophy and phenomenology are all related to the central issue of the interplay between predication and perception. Frege's critique of psychologism has led to the conviction within the analytic tradition that philosophy may best defend rationality from relativism by detaching logic and semantics from all dependence on subjective intuitions. On this interpretation, logical analysis must account for the relationship of sense to reference without (...) having recourse to a description of how we identify particulars through their perceived features. Husserl' s emphasis on the priority and objective import of perception, and on the continuity between predicative articulations and perceptual discriminations, has yielded the conviction within the phenomenological tradition that logical analysis should always be comple mented by description of pre-predicative intuitions. These methodological differences are related to broader differences in the philosophic projects of analysis and phenomenology. The two traditions have adopted markedly divergent positions in reaction to the critique of ancient and medieval philosophy initiated by Bacon, Descartes, and Hobbes at the beginning of the modern era. The analytic approach generally endorses the modern preference for calculative rationality and remains suspicious of pre-modern categories, such as formal causality and eidetic intuition. Its goal is to give an account of human intelligence that is compatible with the modern interpretation of nature as an ensemble of quantifiable entities and relations. (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)

Object-hood is central to Husserl’s work, yet he employs several different notions of object-hood without clarifying the differences; his work thus offers rich and nuanced reflections on object-hood, but in a theoretically underdeveloped, at times even paradoxical, form. This paper aims to develop Husserl’s theory of objects systematically. In order to achieve this I distinguish five object-concepts operative in Husserl’s phenomenology and prove that they are not co-extensional. I also argue that they form a layer in terms of transcendental constitution, (...) one implying the other. I conclude the paper by exploring Husserl’s paradoxical claim that the absolute is not an object. From these considerations, two meta-phenomenological lessons emerge: object-hood is not total ; yet we cannot escape objectification while engaged in phenomenological reflection. (shrink)

Both Husserl and Haugeland develop an account of constitution to address the question of how our mental episodes can be about physical objects and thus, through the intentional relation, bridge the gap between the mental and the physical. The respective theories of the two philosophers of very different background show not only how mental episodes can have empirical content, but also how this content is shaped by past experiences or a holistic background of other mental episodes. In this article I (...) first outline and then contrast their positions in order to show how the notion of constitution can be adopted to address major problems of contemporary philosophy of mind, especially the question of how the mind can be related to its physical environment. (shrink)

The concept of moral individualism is part of the foundational structure of most prominent modern moral philosophies. It rests on the assumption that moral obligations towards a respective individual are constituted solely by her or his capacities. Hence, these obligations are independent of any ἔθος, of any shared ethical sense and social significations. The moral agent and the individual with moral status are construed as subjects outside of any social relation or lifeworld significations. This assumption has been contested in the (...) last decades by diverse authors with very different approaches to moral philosophy. In the last years, an increasing number of philosophers like Cora Diamond and Alice Crary, but also phenomenologists like Paul Ricœur, Klaus Held, and Bernhard Waldenfels question the presupposition that individual capacities are the agent-neutral and context-neutral ground of moral considerations. This critique of moral individualism in different contemporary discourses shows a striking similarity between Wittgensteinian and phenomenological philosophers as their critical inquiry of prominent theories like the ones by Immanuel Kant, John Rawls, Peter Singer or Tom Regan is derived from mostly implicitly efficacious Aristotelian theorems. Telling examples are the ἔθος as pre-given normative infrastructure, the ἕξις as individual internalization of the ethos, the φρόνησις described as a specific practical know-how in contrast to scientific knowledge, and not at least the definition of the human being as ζῷον πολιτικόν. However, the Aristotelian sources of this movement have not yet been scrutinized systematically. This paper aims, first, to reveal the significance of these sources to make them visible and, second, to contribute to the notion of the topicality of Aristotelian philosophy in current debates on ethics. (shrink)

A história intelectual do século XX tem sido escrita ao longo de um cenário que vê, na morte de Merleau-Ponty em 1961, a linha de divisória entre uma geração existencial e fenomenológica e o evento do estruturalismo imediatamente subsequente. A publicação das notas de leitura de Merleau-Ponty sobre o texto A origem da geometria, de Edmund Husserl, tem mostrado quão frágeis são os alicerces desta leitura simplificadora. Na verdade, enquanto a tradução e introdução de Derrida ao texto de Husserl, de (...) 1962, tornavam-se um texto fundamentador para a geração estruturalista, introduzindo uma reflexão sobre a historicidade e a materialidade da idealidade, foi apenas em 1998, com a publicação das notas da conferência de Merleau-Ponty no Collège de France, em 1959, sobre o mesmo tópico, que se tornou claro quão próximo está o primeiro Derrida do último Merleau-Ponty. Assim como Derrida, Merleau-Ponty identificou, na tensão husserliana entre arqueologia e teleologia, o problema básico da fenomenologia, introduzindo a questão da história e a do meio de transmissão cultural. Comparar tais leituras em seu contexto específico não apenas permite um retrato mais complexo dos debates intelectuais da época, mas também mostra como, com a interpretação de Merleau-Ponty sobre A origem da geometria, a "diferença" de Derrida antecede-se e admite outra genealogia. (shrink)

The persistent occurrence of a locution that turns out to be far from trivially used, and the translation hurdles related to it are the core elements of this contribution. The term in question is subject-matter, which is used by John Dewey in many of his writings and of which he provides an explicit conceptualization in Art as Experience. Focusing on this term and its hyphenation allows to emphasize and shed new light on important aspects of Dewey’s thought, in that: it (...) is increasingly technicalized in Dewey’s writings; it holds “antecedence” or “primacy”; in its double-barreled employment it keeps together the twofold meaning of “inherent matter” and “addressed matter”; and finally it epitomizes a number of traits shared by the notion of Lebenswelt, hence affording a programmatic and experimental comparison between the two. (shrink)

Given the undeniable influence of the linguistic turn, it is common to characterize epistemology in the twentieth century as centrally concerned with meaning. But many of the early twentieth-century figures who helped to inspire that turn did not characterize meaning exclusively in terms of language. In response to contemporary accounts that tend to limit the scope of meaning to the semantic, pragmatic or conceptual, I use the work of Husserl and Wittgenstein to argue for the importance of non-linguistic aspects of (...) lived experience (Erlebnis) to the theory of meaning, situating the project historically as a legacy of Kant's Critical epistemology and systematically in terms of contemporary debates about the role and status of nonconceptual content. -/- I argue in Chapter One that a robust theory of meaning must take account of the way the conditions of the possibility for meaning are determined by intrinsically value-bearing features of everyday experience, features that are not themselves inherently linguistic or conceptual. Most contemporary nonconceptualist accounts of perceptual experience fail to adequately theorize the role of the nonconceptual on its own terms, reducing nonconceptual elements of experience to that of mere "fodder" for conceptualization and ignoring the epistemic role the nonconceptual plays in determining structural conditions of possibility. This can be overcome through a transcendental-constitutional approach that examines the full range of experiential structures--including those not mediated by language or concepts--by which meaning is constituted. -/- Tracing a series of parallel developments in the theories of meaning of Husserl and Wittgenstein in Chapters Two through Five, I argue that--despite important differences--both authors' later conceptions of meaning necessarily include accounts of its relation to an inexact, non-linguistic dimension of experiential life: the lifeworld (Husserl) or form(s) of life (Wittgenstein). What appears from the standpoint of linguistic and conceptual analysis to be an unfortunate inexactness is in terms of the later conceptions of both philosophers not the result of incomplete analysis, but of a recognition of the ontological primacy of the lived and fundamentally social phenomenon of meaningfulness that characterizes our experience in a way that outstrips conceptual and linguistic representation. (shrink)

This paper tries to motivate three desiderata for historical epistemologies: (a) that they should be reflective about the pedigree of their conceptual apparatus; (b) that they must face up to the potentially relativistic consequences of their historicism; and (c) that they must not forget the hard-won lessons of microhistory (i.e. historical events must be explained causally; historical events must not be artificially divided into internal/intellectual and external/social “factors” or “levels”; and constructed series of homogenous events must not be treated as (...) quasi-organisms). Ian Hacking’s work on styles of reasoning and Lorraine Daston’s and Peter Galison’s investigation into epistemic virtues are used to identify the costs of neglecting these desiderata. (shrink)

El presente texto describe, en primer lugar, en qué medida la fenomenología del gesto en Heidegger implica un primer momento que consiste en el “silencio” como rechazo de toda aproximación temática a la corporalidad y un segundo momento que radica en una aproximación performativa, en la cual el gesto no es solo un movimiento corporal, sino la auto-realización del pensar mismo como gestación de sentido. En segundo lugar, a través de un manuscrito titulado “El nacimiento del habla”, se muestra hasta (...) qué punto la fenomenología del gesto como gestación en Heidegger entraña un doble peligro, a saber, la subsunción de su transposición aliterativa bajo una inscripción etimológica, y un acercamiento edípico a la natalidad de la diferencia ontológica. (shrink)