Edmund Husserl’s ultimate aim was to give an overall philosophical explanation of the totality of Being. In this endeavour, the term “absolute” was crucial for him. In this paper, I aim to clarify the most important ways in which Husserl used this notion. I attempt to show that, despite his rather divergent usages, eventually three fundamental meanings and coordinated levels of the “absolute” can be differentiated in his thought: the epistemological, the ontological, and the theological or metaphysical level. According to (...) Husserl, we can approach this ultimate level of the Absolute, through the method of phenomenological construction. A closer reading of Husserl’s texts shows that his conception of the absolute was astonishingly modern. The main features of the conception—on all three levels—were non-foundationalism, contextualism, openness, and circularity. Each level mutually founds and determines the others. It is a non-foundational Absolute, the moments of which constitute an organic and open totality which is essentially processual. In my interpretation, this theory opens a fruitful working area, which has enormous philosophical potential and is surprisingly up-to-date. (shrink)

This paper presents and evaluates the early Husserl’s account of typicality. In the Logical Investigations, Husserl holds that the meaning of ordinary language (common) names is sensitive to typicality: this meaning depends on typical examples which vary in different contexts and are more or less similar to one another. This seems to entail that meanings, which according to Husserl are concepts, are “fluctuating” (schwankend) and vague. Prima facie, such a claim contravenes his theory of ideal meanings, or concepts, which are (...) “fixed” (fest) and sharp. However, Husserl wants to save this theory. He claims that the fluctuation and vagueness in question are not to be found in the meaning itself, or the concept, but rather derive from the act of meaning. Thus, he apparently manages to make room for typicality in ordinary language while accepting only fixed and sharp meanings. After presenting Husserl’s theory, I evaluate it and ask whether he will still be committed, despite his own claims, to accepting prototype concepts to account for typicality in ordinary language. (shrink)

The main aim of this article is to offer a systematic reconstruction of Husserl’s theory of minimal mind and his ideas pertaining to the lowest level of consciousness in living beings. In this context, the term ‘minimal mind’ refers to the mental sphere and capacities of the simplest conceivable subject. This topic is of significant contemporary interest for philosophy of mind and empirical research into the origins of consciousness. I contend that Husserl’s reflections on minimal mind offer a fruitful contribution (...) to this ongoing debate. For Husserl, the embodied character of subjectivity, or consciousness, is essential for understanding minimal mind. In his view, there is an a priori necessary constitutive connection between the subjective and objective aspects of the body, between _Leib_ and _Körper_, and this connection is especially important for exploring minimal mind from a phenomenological perspective. Thematically, the essay has three main parts. In Sect. 2, I present an overview of how minimal mind is framed in contemporary philosophy of mind and empirical research. I then analyse Husserl’s conception of embodiment with regard to the problem of minimal mind in Sect. 3. Finally, I present a more detailed investigation into Husserl’s account of minimal mind, highlighting features from his descriptions of animal mind and consciousness in early infancy (Sects. 4 and 5 ). (shrink)

Adorno’s intensive criticism of phenomenology is well known, his entire early period during the 1920s and 1930s being marked by various polemical engagements with Husserl. This engagement finds its peak during his work at his second dissertation project in Oxford, a dissertation that was supposed to systematicaly expose the antinomies of phenomenological thinking while particularly focusing on Husserl’s concept of “eidetic intuition” or “intuition of essences”. The present paper will take this criticism as its starting point in focusing on two (...) highly specific aspects of Adorno’s interpretation: the opposition between eidetic intuition and the traditional theories of abstraction and its relationship to genetic phenomenology. In light of this criticism I subsequently show: 1. that, in his later work, Adorno’s understanding of eidetic intuition undergoes a significant revaluation; 2. that he reappropriates key elements of the eidetic method in his own procedure of physiognomic analysis, and 3. that his account of physiognomics is relevant for addressing the aforementioned incongruities of phenomenological eidetics itself. (shrink)

Husserlian Essentialism is the view, maintained byEdmundHusserl throughout his career, that necessary truths obtain because essentialist truths obtain. In this thesis I have two goals. First, to reconstruct and flesh out Husserlian Essentialism and its connections with surrounding areas of Husserl's philosophy in full detail – something which has not been done yet. Second, to assess the theoretical solidity of the view. As regards the second point, after having presented Husserlian Essentialism in the first two chapters, I raise a serious (...) problem for it in Chapter 3. In the remainder of the thesis I endeavour to solve the problem. In order to do so, I propose to amend both Husserl's theory of essence and his theory of predication. The bulk of the emendation consists in working out an account of essence and an account of predication that do not presuppose, or in any way imply, the claims that: 1) for a universal to be in the essence of an object, either the object or one of its parts must instantiate the universal; 2) for a universal to be truly predicated of an object, either the object or one of its parts must instantiate the universal. These claims, notice, apart from being what gets Husserl in trouble, are well entrenched not only in Husserl's, but in most theories of essence and predication. It is thus interesting to see what an alternative option may be – even regardless of the Husserlian setting in which I work it out. (shrink)

The thesis of this paper is that – in order to avoid trivializations – a Philosophy of Birth needs to elaborate a precise concept of transformation and distinguish it carefully from that of adaptation. While transformation goes beyond the limited self-referential perspective of an individual and, on the social level, of the gregarious identity, adaptation aims at strengthening or preserving the old self-referential equilibrium. Transformation is driven by what Zambrano has called, with an exceptionally happy expression, the “hunger to be (...) born completely”. Such a hunger pushes one to continue one’s own birth through the encounter with the Other. Transformation has a creative feature that is made possible by two factors: the surplus of the effect over the cause, and the priority of the real over the possible. These premises lead to a radical questioning of the primacy of the possible on the real, at least as it has been conceived so far in mainstream Western philosophy, with few exceptions, such as Schelling, Bergson and Scheler. In the first part of this text, I shall consider a new Philosophy of Birth in the light of the concept of transformation and in this regard deal with several core themes such as the hunger to be born completely, the new beginning, creative time, the priority of the real over the possible, the limits of finalism, the surplus of effect over cause, and the creative force that expresses itself in the act of ideation. In the second part, I shall analyze the relation between birth and death and focus especially on their intimate and reciprocal connection by referring to the image of the seed that, after falling on the ground, germinates and breaks its own integument. (shrink)

Artykuł prezentuje filozofie Kanta i Husserla w odniesieniu do Hartmannowskiego rozumienia irracjonalności. W metafizyce poznania Hartmanna irracjonalność, która odpowiada częściowej niepoznawalności bytu, okazuje się argumentem przeciwko idealizmowi, który zakłada całkowitą racjonalność naszego poznania ijego przedmiotu. W artykule autor pokazuje, że można wskazać podobieństwa między Kanta ideą niepoznawalności przedmiotu transcendentalnego, Husserla koncepcją transcendentalnej konstytucji świata i Hartmanna pojęciem gnoseologicznej irracjonalności. W transcendentalizmie Kanta irracjonalność implikuje asymetria między warunkami możliwości doświadczenia i warunkami możliwości przedmiotów doświadczenia, jako że niepoznawalność przedmiotu transcendentalnego i rzeczy (...) samej w sobie wskazuje, że nie wszystkie warunki przedmiotów są jednocześnie warunkami możliwości doświadczenia. Według Husserla świadomość transcendentalna nie jest racją wystarczającą świata w aspekcie jego Da- sein i Sosein, ponieważ fakt konstytucji świata jest faktem irracjonalnym i nie może być wyprowadzony z istoty świadomości. Autor próbuje wykazać, że analogia między Husserlem i Hartmannem w kwestii irracjonalności otwiera nowe możliwości interpretacyjne relacji między fenomenologią transcendentalną i Hartmannowską filozofią. (shrink)

The paper analyses Husserl’s critique of Kant’s regressive transcendental method while trying to show that at the basis of it is an opposite conception of the conditions of possibility of experience: whereas for Kant experience is structured by the subject through intellectual forms, for Husserl it has a structure before the intervention of the subject. Therefore–contrary to Iso Kern’s opinion–the contrast between Kant and Husserl cannot be traced back to mere methodical divergences.

RésuméGian-Carlo Rota est l’un des rares grands mathématiciens de la deuxième moitié du XX e siècle dont l’intérêt pour la logique formelle soit aussi ouvertement déclaré et ne se soit jamais démenti, depuis sa formation d’étudiant à Princeton jusqu’à ses derniers écrits. Plus exceptionnel encore, il fait partie des rares lecteurs assidus de Husserl à s’être aperçu que la phé-noménologie poursuivait un projet de réforme de la logique formelle. L’article propose d’attester l’existence d’un tel projet chez Husserl ; d’en examiner (...) la réappropriation et les prolongements chez Rota.Gian-Carlo Rota is among the few great mathematicians of the second-half of the XXth century whose interest in formal logic is openly declared and has never flagged, since his training as a student in Princeton up to his last writings. Even more exceptional, he belongs to the rare diligent readers of Husserl, who noticed that phenomenology was pursuing a project of reform of formal logic. This paper propose to testify to the existence of such a project in Husserl; to examine how it is taken over and continued by Rota. Gian-Carlo Rota è uno dei pochi grandi matematici della seconda metà del ventesimo secolo, il cui interesse per la logica formale è, dalla sua formazione come studente a Princeton al suo ultimi scritti, apertamente dichiarato e mai negato. Cosa ancora più eccezionale, Rota è uno dei rari lettori assidui di Husserl ad aver percepito che la fenomenologia stava perseguendo un progetto di riforma della logica formale. L’articolo propone di attestare l’esistenza di un tale progetto in Husserl e di esaminare la sua riappropriazione e le sue estensioni proposte da Gian-Carlo Rota.This article is in French. (shrink)

The paper aims to investigate the link between self-shaping and intersubjectivity from a phenomenological perspective. This means that two main topics are here at stake. On the one hand, the paper purports to argue that tackling the link between self-shaping and intersubjectivity from a phenomenological perspective is a meaningful and sound approach. On the other hand, the paper purports to argue that such an analysis enables us to bring to light an inherent linkage that tethers the topic of intersubjectivity to (...) the sway that other persons hold over one’s process of self-shaping. This influence will be gradually investigated. Firstly, Husserl’s stance on other persons as “variations of my self” will allow us to understand why other persons might hold sway over one’s process of self-shaping and self-knowledge. Secondly, exemplariness will turn out to be the way through which other persons might hold sway over one’s process of self-shaping and self-knowledge: Scheler’s stance on exemplariness will be examined since he makes us treat the question of exemplariness from the standpoint of the process of the formation of individuality: exemplars hold sway over such a process. So, we will rely upon the Husserlian thesis and the Schelerian thesis to argue for a thesis that goes beyond Husserl’s and Scheler’s perspectives: others as exemplars shed light on the eidetic possibilities of myself and others could become exemplars for me since they are variations of myself; that is, they exemplify untaken possibilities of myself. We will argue that exemplariness is the key to the link between the issue of intersubjectivity and the process of self-shaping. (shrink)

Between corporeality, space and imagination: forms of empathy in Husserl.The research is focused on the husserlian empathy, meant as a central moment in the constitution of the phenomenological subjectivity, as a genetic path, where the husserlian subject reveals itself as a being structurally bound with the others, from the Leib's level to the Geist's one. In particular, starting from the analysis of the Texts of HUA XIII-XIV-XV Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität, the unpublished manuscripts on intersubjectivity (E groups) and, of course, (...) Cartesian Meditations and Ideen II, we focus the attention on the primary levels of husserlian empathy, the ones bounded with physical and psycho-physical process. Therefore, if the aim is to understand which is the basic foundation for the access to the others, i.e. how the alter-ego could represent a real Mitsubjekt with a constitutive function in relation to the world, we must start from the most basically empathic dynamics, from the bodily origin of our relation with the others. The dissertation is composed of four chapters. The first one is titled Reduction and reductions: the function of the primordial abstraction and analyses in particular the problem of the primordial reduction, a moment of the husserlian phenomenology of intersubjectivity often misunderstood; on the contrary, it must be clarified as an essential methodological moment for the understanding of what joins and, at the same time, diversifies the egos. The primordial reduction is first of all detailed and differentiated from the other kinds of possible reductions and it's also analysed in relation to the still very discussed question of Ur-Ich. We also clarifies the meaning of "primordial empathy" and "primordial other" and, generally, we considere the "exit-modalities" from the primordial abstraction, that is the self-estrangement forms already owned by the subject in the primordial sphere. In this context we also pay attention to the difference between sich anders fingieren and sich Andere fingieren. The second chapter, titled Bodily analogy and empathy examines the central theme of the husserlian empathy, that is the analogy, with particular attention to the most original declination of the analogy: the bodily analogy. In the first part we define the nature of the husserlian analogy: first of all we show that the husserlian analogy is born in contrast with the Analogienschluss of T. Lipps and B. Erdmann and it's a kind of passive association, a pre-inferential one; secondly we propose an interpretation of the husserlian analogy in the sense of an analogy of participation. In the second part we examine the basic forms of analogical fulfilment, to show that the recognition of the others has not only a first activation in the passivity, but also various moments of fulfilment; these moments are examined through the differentiation between "proper empathy" and "improper empathy", to point out that empathy rises always in relation with bodily perception, meant not only as a Leibwahrnehmung, but also as a real Körperwahrnehmung. The third chapter is titled Analogy in movement: the exchange of positions and analyses the dynamic development of the husserlian analogy, to show that empathy must be founded on concrete possibilities of involvement in the other's point of view, meant not only in a metaphoric meaning, but first of all as a real space of the other. These possibilities are examined by Husserl through the different modulations that can be offered by the exchange of position and, in particular, through the consideration of the following representations: first of all the wie wenn ich dort wäre, that, thanks to an imaginative component, allows two subjects to have the same position at the same time; secondly the wenn ich dort bin, through which, on the fundament of the kinaesthetic Leib, two bodies can really have the same position, but in different times. In the second part of the chapter we examine the problem of the relationship between empathy and imagination and, generally, between empathy and the other possible forms of presentification, as memory, phantasy and Bildbewusst; in particular we underline how, in connection with empathy, we can find a specific form of imagination, determinable as a gebundene Phantasie. Finally the fourth chapter, Normality and deviations: how far can analogy go?, begins with a brief digression in another possible expression of the exchange of position: als ob ich er wäre, a formulation that refers to the constituted intersubjectivity and through which Husserl shows the involvement to the other's point of view; the other is now understood as a full personality, as a person with his peculiar relation with the surrounding world. After this brief digression, the analysis is focused on the fundamental problem of the normality-abnormality definition, which is a central pair for the empathy problem. Indeed Husserl himself has underlined how the whole phenomenology of intersubjectivity is based on the implicit presuppose of normality; however this presuppose must be explicitated and thematized. The normality shows then itself as an idealisation, because in the reality we can't find neither the average-man, nor the average-experience of the world. On these basis we distinguish two different concepts of abnormality: the first one is the "daily" abnormality, that remains in the normality sphere, and it's for example represented from the case of the colour blindness; the second one is the abnormality, that represents instead a real "break" with the normality sphere and that requires us to figure out if the exclusion of the real abnormal variations of subjectivity, such as animals or insane people, from the intersubjective constitution of reality is a really founded operation. (shrink)