Editors’ AbstractDuring the 1992–1993 academic year, Harold Garfinkel (1917–2011) offered a graduate seminar on Ethnomethodology in the Sociology Department at the University of California, Los Angeles. One topic that was given extensive coverage in the seminar has not been discussed at much length in Garfinkel’s published works to date: Aron Gurwitsch’s treatment of Gestalt theory, and particularly the themes of “phenomenal field” and “praxeological description”. The edited transcript of Garfinkel’s seminar shows why he recommended that “for the serious initiatives of (...) ethnomethodological investigations […] Gurwitsch is a theorist we can’t do without”. Garfinkel’s ethnomethodological “misreading” is not a mistaken reading, but is more a matter of taking Gurwitsch’s phenomenological demonstrations of Gestalt contextures in phenomenal fields and transposing them for making detailed, concrete observations and descriptions of organizationally achieved social phenomena. Where Gurwitsch addresses the organization of perception as an autochthonous achievement, inherent to the stream and field of individual consciousness, Garfinkel extends and elaborates this field into the social world of enacted practices. The April 1993 seminar also is rich with brief asides and digressions in which Garfinkel comments about his use of Alfred Schutz, his attitude toward publishing, his relationship with Erving Goffman, and many other matters. (shrink)

This paper (in Finnish) concerns the ontological status of categories of entities. I argue that categories are not be considered as further entities. Rather, it is suffcient for entities belonging to the same category that they are in exactly the same formal ontological relations and have the same general category features.

This article draws on Husserl’s manuscripts from the 1920s and 1930s (especially on the as-yet unpublished D-manuscripts), arguing that each concrete experience is governed by an irreducible tension between two intersecting normative dimensions: primordial and intersubjective. Husserl’s ideas of normality and normativity have gained a lot of attention in recent years, but the normative aspects of primordial constitution have not been properly taken into account. By arguing for the “normative tension” between the primordial and the intersubjective, this article contributes to (...) filling in this lack. By doing so, it sheds new light on the debate concerning the relationship between genetic and generative phenomenology, challenging interpretations that exclusively render either the genetic-primordial or the generative-intersubjective as the constitutive absolute. (shrink)

In his late writings Husserl emphasizes how the semiotic properties of writing, and of mathematical formulae and diagrams, are crucial for the historical, cross-generational survivability of meaning and specifically indispensable to the operation of scientific knowledge. However, the demand for objectivity, exactitude, and repeatability insidiously interferes with the meaning that such signs seek to express. This leads to a duality of objectivity encapsulated in the notion “the sedimentation of meaning”. On this view, the transmission of objectivity established in an original (...) sense-constituting act cannot survive unless being deposited in some external form, which at the same time risks the original sense being irrevocably lost in a web of signification that amounts to nothing more than empty and meaningless symbol manipulation. I discuss Husserl’s analysis and propose that it is limited by its one-sided focus on the negative impact of modernity. I compare Husserl’s account with Heidegger’s even more radical critique of modern society as one where a so-called “technological” mode of “revealing” reigns supreme at the expense of eradicating other, and more authentic ways to apprehend the world. I critically reconstruct the respective position of both thinkers and show how they point not only to a criticism of the instrumentalization and formalization of knowledge in modern society, but that they are just as importantly highlighting essential semiotic properties of signs. (shrink)

This paper claims that there is an epistemological evidence of an unavoidable gap between purely formal sciences (sciences of essences) and the empirical sciences for which they provide the foundation. A second key theme is the way that all empirical sciences are grounded in a pure science of essences. At the same time, I endeavour to explain how the insights Weyl gleaned from Husserl played an important role in his scientific work, and to show how Einstein’s major work exhibit important (...) parallels to Weyl’s work, thereby establishing phenomenology both as an indirect historical influence and a systematic underpinning for Einstein’s work in theoretical physics. In so doing, this paper seeks to show how some of the most basic problems that Einstein addresses have a kinship not just to problems addressed in a completely different context by Husserl and his circle, but also to perennial problems in ontology and epistemology that go back to Kant, Hume and Leibniz. The conclusion highlights how phenomenology influenced Einstein, but also how Einstein’s work on relativity had an important influence on the work of the most important phenomenologist of the twentieth century, namely Husserl in his Crisis of European Sciences. (shrink)

In this paper we want to show how far the early, pre-critical Kant develops a theory of the constitution of space that not only anticipates insights usually attributed to the phenomenological theory of lived space with its emphasis on the constitutively central role of the human lived-body, but which also establishes the foundation for Kant’s Copernican turn according to which space is understood as ‘form of intuition’, implied in the activity of the transcendental subject. The key to understand this role (...) of the body lies in Kant’s understanding of the asymmetrical nature of a pair of hands, which despite being equal in size and structure, remain incongruent counterparts, and thus evade integration into a homogenous and purely self-referential form of space. (shrink)

During the 1992–1993 academic year, Harold Garfinkel offered a graduate seminar on Ethnomethodology in the Sociology Department at the University of California, Los Angeles. One topic that was given extensive coverage in the seminar has not been discussed at much length in Garfinkel’s published works to date: Aron Gurwitsch’s treatment of Gestalt theory, and particularly the themes of “phenomenal field” and “praxeological description”. The edited transcript of Garfinkel’s seminar shows why he recommended that “for the serious initiatives of ethnomethodological investigations (...) […] Gurwitsch is a theorist we can’t do without”. Garfinkel’s ethnomethodological “misreading” is not a mistaken reading, but is more a matter of taking Gurwitsch’s phenomenological demonstrations of Gestalt contextures in phenomenal fields and transposing them for making detailed, concrete observations and descriptions of organizationally achieved social phenomena. Where Gurwitsch addresses the organization of perception as an autochthonous achievement, inherent to the stream and field of individual consciousness, Garfinkel extends and elaborates this field into the social world of enacted practices. The April 1993 seminar also is rich with brief asides and digressions in which Garfinkel comments about his use of Alfred Schutz, his attitude toward publishing, his relationship with Erving Goffman, and many other matters. (shrink)

Pre-theoretical experience and the lifeworld are traditionally seen as a key reference for phenomenology. In the present paper I intend to point out their relevance for critical theory as well. To this extent, I start off with a brief overview of phenomenological approaches to pre-theoretical experience and their relationship to empirical research. In sketching out some of the overlaps between phenomenology and early critical theory in this regard, I then specifically focus on Adorno’s reflections concerning the role of an extended (...) concept of experience in both his sociological and his philosophical work. Outlining Adorno’s methodological appropriation of “unregimented experience” in the guise of what he terms “physiognomic interpretation” – a procedure intended as a corrective to both rigorous empirical research and philosophical aprioric reasoning – I try to show wherein Adorno’s own approach to the pre-theoretical diverges from phenomenology. Finally, I conclude with some reflections concerning the different functions experience acquires in traditional phenomenology and critical theory. (shrink)

Phenomenology, currently the most active philosophical movement on the European scene, has shown persistent concern for psychological problems and principles, and for the science of psychology in general. This concern has taken the form of various attempts to amend psychology according to phenomenological precepts and methods with the intent of providing it with a new metaphysical basis. Recent examples of this trend are the textbook of Snygg and Combs and the two books published in France by the philosopher, Merleau-Ponty.