This dissertation explores and argues for the import of the imagination (Phantasie) in Edmund Husserl's phenomenological method of inquiry. It contends that Husserl's extensive analyses of the imagination influenced how he came to conceive the phenomenological method throughout the main stages of his philosophical career. The work clarifies Husserl's complex method of investigation by considering the role of the imagination in his main methodological apparatuses: the phenomenological, eidetic, and transcendental reductions, and eidetic variation - all of which remained ambiguous despite (...) his extensive programmatic discussions. The work illuminates and clarifies aspects of the Husserlian phenomenological method never before explored. -/- In order to clarify Husserl's eidetic method of inquiry, I propose a new way of thinking about the imagination - as direct intuitive presentation (eigentliche anschauliche Vorstellung) and as horizonal-nexic level of consciousness exhibiting the neutrality, freedom, and possibility as its essential features. Following Husserl's studies of the imagination, I propose a three-level model of consciousness (realizing, imagining, and eidetic) and explore the dynamic flexibility of each level (as horizon within which acts such as judgments or memories can unfold). This model of consciousness allows for a rethinking of the sources and conditions for the possibility of eidetic phenomenological inquiry - topics Husserl was mostly silent about. -/- Through a rethinking of the model of consciousness, I propose a tight and substantial relationship between the natural (everyday) and artificial (methodological, theoretical) attitudes. I argue that the structure and systems of possibilities pertaining to the artificial attitude - i.e., our actual as well as possible methodological tools - are structurally and well as informationally bound to the structure and system of possibilities pertaining to the natural attitude. In order to explore the nature of the relationship between these two attitudes I argue that we must take a closer look at the structure and abilities of imagining consciousness - the sole nexic-horizonal level that can function both naturally and artificially. This insight regarding the nature of consciousness clarifies Husserl's transcendental idealism in its intimate connection to the everyday. Understanding Husserl's philosophical stance is thus purged of all possibility of mistakenly labeling it as entailing immanent detachment, solipsism, or Platonic idealism. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to examine the problematic frontier that separates the phenomenology of the body and the phenomenology of animality. The main difficulty is to differentiate phenomenologically not only between embodiment and animality, but also between specifically human embodied experience and what is accessible to us through empathy in relation to the corporeality of the animal. I will tackle these questions by considering relevant textual material from the writings of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. On the one (...) hand, I will show that although embodiment and animality are convergent on the level of the naturalistic attitude in Husserl’s Ideas II, they are divergent as soon as we place ourselves in the personalistic attitude, where the body enters into a different conjunction—namely, with the idea of person and of the spiritual world. On the other hand, Heidegger claims that, in spite of the abysmal bodily kinship with the animal, there is an essential difference between the human body and the animal organism, thus opposing the tendencies to humanize the animal and to animalize the human. (shrink)

In this paper I show how Merleau-Ponty comes to identify the natural attitude and the original experience of the world, thus distinguishing his approach sharply from Husserl’s. I conduct my analysis along the line of Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of some fundamental concepts in Husserl’s phenomenology. In particular, I identify the origin of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological perspective in his ontological interpretation of the Husserlian concepts “empirical” and “transcendental”. This move entails an implicit ontologization that undergirds his late endeavors towards a new ontology. Merleau-Ponty (...) considers the phenomenological couple empirical/transcendental as a reformulation in a “post-substantialistic” key of Descartes’ conceptual pair res extensa/res cogitans, also recast in terms of matter/spirit and, with a small but not irrelevant semantic shift, fact/meaning. In the paper I show how on this ground Merleau-Ponty can come to affirm the insuperability of the natural attitude and the correlative impossibility to transcend original experience. (shrink)

In this paper I analyse the role of naturalism and objectivism in everyday life according to Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. Whereas Husserl attributes the naturalistic attitude mainly to science, he defines the objectivist attitude as a naiveté which equally applies to the natural attitude of everyday life. I analyse the relationship between the natural attitude and lived experience and show Husserl's hesitation regarding the task of phenomenology in describing the lived experience of everyday life, since he considers this experience to be (...) too objectivistic. I use Merleau-Ponty's work to argue that objectivism is an essential characteristic of lived experience and that phenomenology should therefore find ways to integrate it into its descriptions while simultaneously suggesting ways to overcome its rigidity in order to renew perception. I finally propose that the project of the naturalisation of phenomenology could be one of the ways to connect lived experience to the objectivism of everyday life. (shrink)

The recent move to naturalize phenomenology through a mathematical protocol is a significant advance in consciousness research. It enables a new and fruitful level of dialogue between the cognitive sciences and phenomenology of such a nuanced kind that it also prompts advancement in our phenomenological analyses. But precisely what is going on at this point of ‘dialogue’ between phenomenological descriptions and mathematical algorithms, the latter of which are based on dynamical systems theory? It will be shown that what is happening (...) is something more than a mere ‘passing of the baton’ from phenomenology to mathematics. For this sophisticated naturalization to prove a worthy endeavour it must produce more than just correlation, it must prove some form of interrelation to the extent that phenomenology is deterministic. But such interrelational and deterministic requirements are the start of a slippery slope, and it will be argued that this slope only loses more friction once a further demand of formal and precise descriptions is made of phenomenology. Such deterministic and formally precise demands misconstrue phenomenology’s ideal goal of a unification of genuine/originary reason and truth. Not a deductive and definitive discipline, phenomenology is rather from the outset descriptive and critical. Phenomenology’s descriptive beginnings will thus be employed as an essential barrier to the naturalization of phenomenology. (shrink)

In this essay I argue that Husserl’s development of the nineteenth century Natur/Geist distinction is grounded in the intentional correlate between the pre-theoretical natural attitude and environing world ( Umwelt ). By reconsidering the Natur/Geist distinction through its historical context in the nineteenth century debate between Wilhelm Dilthey and the Neo-Kantians from the Baden or Southwest school, it is possible to understand more clearly Husserl’s appropriations and novel contributions. One of Husserl’s contributions lies in his rigorous thematization and clarification of (...) the constitutive features proper to the natural and human sciences as they arise from the pre-theoretical experience of an environing world. This ordinary lived experience between the lived body and environing world is presupposed by and forms a unity with both Natur and Geist , thereby acting as the unified ground that is inclusive of naturalized Geist and a geistig nature. This unbuilding ( Abbau ) of the Natur/Geist distinction is necessary, according to Husserl, for the radical clarification of the respective methodologies of the natural and human sciences. (shrink)

Throughout his career, Husserl identifies naturalism as the greatest threat to both the sciences and philosophy. In this paper, I explicate Husserl’s overall diagnosis and critique of naturalism and then examine the specific transcendental aspect of his critique. Husserl agreed with the Neo-Kantians in rejecting naturalism. He has three major critiques of naturalism: First, it (like psychologism and for the same reasons) is ‘countersensical’ in that it denies the very ideal laws that it needs for its own justification. Second, naturalism (...) essentially misconstrues consciousness by treating it as a part of the world. Third, naturalism is the inevitable consequence of a certain rigidification of the ‘natural attitude’ into what Husserl calls the ‘naturalistic attitude’. This naturalistic attitude ‘reifies’ and it ‘absolutizes’ the world such that it is treated as taken-for-granted and ‘obvious’. Husserl’s transcendental phenomenological analysis, however, discloses that the natural attitude is, despite its omnipresence in everyday life, not primary, but in fact is relative to the ‘absolute’ transcendental attitude. The mature Husserl’s critique of naturalism is therefore based on his acceptance of the absolute priority of the transcendental attitude . The paradox remains that we must start from and, in a sense, return to the natural attitude, while, at the same time, restricting this attitude through the on-going transcendental vigilance of the universal epoché. (shrink)

In this paper I sketch a systematic reconstruction of Husserl’s fundamental concept of “attitude”. I first explore Husserl’s account with respect to the three faculties of intellect, will, and emotivity [Gemüt], which also define the three basic kinds of attitude. The attitude assumed by the subject plays at this level the important role of articulating and unifying, according to an overall direction, various underlying moments of a complex act. I then focus on the specific intellectual, viz. cognitive attitudes and highlight (...) the difference between the naturalistic attitude (which characterizes the natural sciences) and the personalistic attitude (which characterizes the human sciences). I then consider the notion of the natural attitude and argue that the personalistic attitude represents the systematic core of it. The natural attitude may be defined as the human attitude, i.e., as the attitude in which subjects posit themselves exclusively as human subjects belonging to the world , which is itself unceasingly posited as being. In the final part of the paper I explore the function of the phenomenological reduction insofar as it opens up a possibility of self-understanding that breaks with the natural, human self-apprehension and discloses subjectivity in its transcendental dimension. This opens up a radically new attitude, the phenomenological, which should not be confused with a first-person perspective within the framework of the natural attitude. (shrink)

Pierre Bourdieu famously dismissed phenomenology as offering anything useful to a critical science of society – even as he drew heavily upon its themes in his own work. This paper makes a case for why Bourdieu’s judgement should not be the last word on phenomenology. To do so it first reanimates phenomenology’s evocative language and concepts to illustrate their continuing centrality to social scientists’ ambitions to apprehend human engagement with the world. Part II shows how two crucial insights of phenomenology, (...) its discovery of both the natural attitude and of the phenomenological epoche, allow an account of perception properly responsive to its intertwined personal and collective aspects. Contra Bourdieu, the paper’s third section asserts that phenomenology’s substantive socio-cultural analysis simultaneously entails methodological consequences for the social scientist, reversing their suspension of disbelief vis-à-vis the life-worlds of interlocutors and inaugurating the suspension of belief vis-à-vis their own natural attitudes. (shrink)

The paper aims to capture a form of naturalism that can be found “built-in” in phenomenology, namely the idea to take science or mathematics on its own, without postulating extraneous normative “molds” on it. The paper offers a detailed comparison of Penelope Maddy’s naturalism about mathematics and Husserl’s approach to mathematics in Formal and Transcendental Logic. It argues that Maddy’s naturalized methodology is similar to the approach in the first part of the book. However, in the second part Husserl enters (...) into a transcendental clarification of the evidences and presuppositions of the mathematicians’ work, thus “transcendentalizing” his otherwise naturalist approach to mathematics. The result is a moderately revisionist view that takes the existing mathematical practices seriously, calls for reflection on them, and eventually gives suggestions for revisions if needed. (shrink)