John McDowell rejects the idea that non-conceptual content can rationally justify empirical claims—a task for which it is ill-fitted by its non-conceptual nature. This paper considers three possible objections to his views: he cannot distinguish empty conception from the perceptual experience of an object; perceptual discrimination outstrips the capacity of concepts to keep pace; and experience of the empirical world is more extensive than the conceptual focusing within it. While endorsing McDowell’s rejection of what he means by non-conceptual content, and (...) appreciating his insight into the experiential synthesis of intuition and conception (in particular, its role in grasping objects), I will argue that Edmund Husserl presents an even more comprehensive account of perceptual experience that explains how we experience the contribution of receptivity and sensibility and how they cooperate in perceptual discrimination. Further, it reveals “horizons”—a unique kind of contents, surplus content (rather than independent non-conceptual content)—beyond the synthesis of intuitive and conceptual contents through which objects are grasped. Such horizons play a constitutive role, making experience with its conceptual dimensions and justificatory potential possible; they in no way function like a bare given that is to fulfill some independent justificatory role. Whereas McDowell focuses on how experience does not take place in isolation from the exercise of conceptual capacities, Husserl complements his view by situating experience in a more encompassing whole and by elucidating the surplus-horizons that exceed the conceptual content of experience; play an inseparable, constitutive role within it; and indicate the limits of conceptual comprehension. (shrink)

Husserl is well known for his critique of the “mathematizing tendencies” of modern science, and is particularly emphatic that mathematics and phenomenology are distinct and in some sense incompatible. But Husserl himself uses mathematical methods in phenomenology. In the first half of the paper I give a detailed analysis of this tension, showing how those Husserlian doctrines which seem to speak against application of mathematics to phenomenology do not in fact do so. In the second half of the paper I (...) focus on a particular example of Husserl’s “mathematized phenomenology”: his use of concepts from what is today called dynamical systems theory. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungDie Unterscheidung von verschiedenen Gedächtnisformen und -systemen sowie die Beziehung zwischen Gedächtnis und Leiblichkeit stehen sowohl im Fokus der kognitionswissenschaftlichen, als auch der phänomenologischen Debatte. In diesem Artikel wird versucht, beide Ansätze zum Thema in einen Dialog zu bringen. Das Leibgedächtnis wird hier zunächst phänomenologisch als der konkreteste Ausdruck des impliziten Gedächtnisses bestimmt. Basierend auf Edmund Husserls Analysen zum Zeitbewusstsein und zur leiblichen Erfahrung werden folglich die Strukturen und die Dynamik des Leibgedächtnisses hervorgehoben. Dabei wird gezeigt, dass das Leibgedächtnis sowohl (...) in den Wahrnehmungsprozessen als auch in der Gestaltung des präreflektiven leiblichen Selbstbewusstseins eine unentbehrliche Rolle spielt. Schließlich wird die Relevanz der durchgeführten phänomenologischen Analysen im Rahmen der aktuellen Debatte über Gedächtnissysteme in den Kognitionswissenschaften diskutiert. (shrink)

‘‘Quid est ergo tempus? si nemo ex me quaerat, scio; si quaerenti explicare velim, nescio’’. Augustine’s statement made 1,600 years ago still rings true. Paul Ricoeur goes so far as to assert that it is impossible to grasp time conceptually (Ricoeur 1984: 11 ff.). Nevertheless, or perhaps due to these aporias, time remains one of the most significant and intriguing themes for human imagination and philosophy. Nearly a century ago Edmund Husserl raised the hopes for a comprehensive philosophy of time (...) with his Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, published much later in 1928 by Martin Heidegger (but put together in most part by Edith Stein). Husserl’s subsequent steps on the stairway to a philosophy of time remained unpublished until the recent volumes Husserl (2001, 2006). These publications have awakened new interest in Husserl’s philosophy of time, and two recent monographs reconstruct and interpret it with a focus on subjectivity. (shrink)

This paper explores the question concerning the relationship between basic and higher layers of experience and self-experience. The latter distinction implicitly presupposes the idea of a univocal foundation. After explaining the formal ontological law of foundation, an attempt is made to clarify how the idea of foundation may be suitable to understand the relationship among moments, or layers, of self-experience. To this aim, the phenomenological descriptions of self- and world-experience in dementia and schizophrenia are compared. The comparison between these two, (...) in many ways radically different, pathologies allows us to highlight both the potentialities and the limits of resorting to the foundational relationship for the description of lived experience. Taking the challenges coming from the description of dementia and schizophrenia into serious consideration, the meaning of the “stratified” account of self-experience will be eventually reassessed, and a way to complement the idea of foundation among layers will be proposed. (shrink)