This investigation will examine the transcendental primacy of the conscious being in the phenomenological grounding of neuroscience. It’s also going to propose a new understanding of the conscious being within the external actuality of behavior. This thesis will challenge the traditional understanding of the conscious as an internal property of the body, and propose that through behaving it can be conceived as the metaphysical principle of the world. First, I’m going to look at Husserl’s phenomenology to see how he treats (...) consciousness. Then, I am going to see if we can transcendentally ground consciousness outside Husserl’s egological definition and in the sphere of pure behaving. Thirdly, I’m going to investigate neuroscience from a transcendental phenomenological perspective. (shrink)

This paper argues for a Husserlian account of phenomenal intentionality. Experience is intentional insofar as it presents a mind-independent, objective world. Its doing so is a matter of the way it hangs together, its having a certain structure. But in order for the intentionality in question to be properly understood as phenomenal intentionality, this structure must inhere in experience as a phenomenal feature. Husserl’s concept of horizon designates this intentionality-bestowing experiential structure, while his concept of motivation designates the unique phenomenal (...) character of this structure as it is experientially lived through. The way experience hangs together is itself a phenomenal feature of experience. (shrink)

Alexei Krioukovs Studie widmet sich einem der sowohl interessantesten als auch in theoretischer Hinsicht schwierigsten Themen der zeitgenossischen Philosophie: dem Problem der Intersubjektivität. In praktischem Sinn handelt es sich dabei um die Beziehung zwischen Menschen (Subjekten). Was alltäglich nicht zu beweisen ist, bildet auf theoretischer Ebene ein grundsätzliches Problem: Wer sind die Subjekte der Intersubjektivität? Auf welche Weise, mit welchem Recht und mit welcher Methode kann man einen Bezug zwischen diesen Subjekten rechtfertigen? Alexei Krioukov geht detailliert auf diese Fragen ein (...) und diskutiert sie ausführlich anhand der Theorien von Husserl und Sartre. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to motivate the need for and then present the outline of an alternative explanation of what Dan Zahavi has dubbed “open intersubjectivity,” which captures the basic interpersonal character of perceptual experience as such. This is a notion whose roots lay in Husserl’s phenomenology. Accordingly, the paper begins by situating the notion of open intersubjectivity – as well as the broader idea of constituting intersubjectivity to which it belongs – within Husserl’s phenomenology as an approach (...) distinct from his more well-known account of empathy in the Fifth Cartesian Meditation. I then recapitulate and criticize Zahavi’s phenomenological explanation of open intersubjectivity, arguing that his account hinges on a flawed phenomenology of perceptual experience. In the wake of that criticism, I supply an alternative phenomenological framework for explaining open intersubjectivity, appealing to the methodological principles of Husserl’s genetic phenomenology and his theory of developmentally primitive affect. Those principles are put to work using the resources of recent studies of cognitive developmental and social cognition. From that literature, I discuss how infants learn about the world from others in secondary intersubjectivity through natural pedagogy. Lastly, the paper closes by showing how the discussion of infant development explains the phenomenon of open intersubjectivity and by highlighting the relatively moderate nature of this account compared to Zahavi’s. (shrink)

Dorion Cairns correctly interprets the preconstituted stratum of Edmund Husserl’s Fifth Cartesian Meditation to be the primordial ego and not the social world, as was thought by Alfred Schutz, who considered Husserl to be insufficiently attentive to the social world’s hold upon us. Following Cairns’s interpretation, which involves recovering and reconstructing strata that may never exist independently, one better understands how the transfer of sense animate organism involves automatic association, or somatic apprehension. This sense-transfer extends to any animate organism, not (...) just humans, and draws on extensive unreflected-upon similarities despite the distinctive fact that the other’s body is never given to oneself as is one’s own. Following Cairns’s interpretation, one can also understand the second epoché as an imaginative, reconstructive abstraction rather than as an example of failed ascesis. Consequently, Husserl appears as less intellectualized in his approach to empathy than often thought to be and more confident in the phenomenologist’s capacity to imagine and attend selectively to experience. (shrink)

Husserlian phenomenology, as the study of conscious experience, has often been accused of solipsism. Husserl’s method, it is argued, does not have the resources to provide an account of consciousness of other minds. This chapter will address this issue by providing a brief overview of the multiple angles from which Husserl approached the theme of intersubjectivity, with specific focus on the details of his account of the concrete interpersonal encounter – “empathy.” Husserl understood empathy as a direct, quasi-perceptual form of (...) intentionality through which the sense of the Other is constituted. Furthermore, his account of empathy is holistically integrated with his overall theory of intersubjectivity, including his discussions of the objectivity of nature, and the social, historical, and communal aspects of subjectivity. Husserl’s theory of empathy continues to cast a long shadow, influencing both the analytic and continental approaches to the problem of other minds, as well as contemporary account of social cognition in the cognitive sciences. (shrink)

Argues that a coherent theory of ethics requires an account of selfhood.

_Psychoanalysis Beyond the End of Metaphysics_ offers a new paradigm approach which advocates reengaging the importance of metaphysics in psychoanalytic theorizing. The emergence of the relational trend has witnessed a revitalizing influx of new ideas, reflecting a fundamental commitment to the principle of dialogue. However, the transition towards a more pluralistic discourse remains a work in progress, and those schools of thought not directly associated with the relational shift continue to play only a marginal role. In this book, Robin S. (...) Brown argues that for contemporary psychoanalysis to more adequately reflect a clinical ethos of pluralism, the field must examine the extent to which a theoretical commitment to the notion of relationship can grow restrictive. Suggesting that in the very effort to negotiate theoretical biases, psychoanalytic practice may occlude a more adequate recognition of its own evolving assumptions, Brown proposes that the profession’s advance requires a return to first principles. Arguing for the fundamental role played by faith in supporting the emergence of consciousness, this work situates itself at the crossroads of relational, Jungian, and transpersonal approaches to the psyche. Psychoanalysis Beyond the End of Metaphysics will be of significant interest to all psychodynamically oriented clinicians, alongside scholars of depth psychology and the philosophy of mind. It will also be helpful to advanced and postgraduate students of psychoanalysis seeking to orient themselves in the field at present. (shrink)

In an Appendix to his Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis dating from the early 1920s, Husserl makes the startling assertion that, unlike the mundane ego, the transcendental ego is immortal. The present paper argues that this claim is an ineluctable consequence of Husserl’s relentless pursuit of the ever deeper levels of time-constituting consciousness and, at the same time, of his increasing reliance on Leibniz’s model of monads as the true unifiers of all things, including minds. There are many structural (...) and substantive parallels between Leibniz’s monadic scheme and Husserl’s later views on the primal ego, and these points of convergence are laid out step by step in this paper. For both theorists, the monad is a self-contained system of being, one “without windows”; a monad’s experiences unfold in harmonious concatenations; a monad is a mirror of its proximate environs and comprises multiple perspectives; the unconscious is a repository of potential activation; and, most importantly of all, a monad knows no birth and death and hence is immortal. In his very last years, Husserl proposed a third ego level, below (or beyond) the mundane ego and transcendental ego - the primal ego. It is neither psychical nor physical; it permits the transcendental ego to carry out its constitutive activities, including the mundane ego’s birth and death in time; it is always in a process of becoming, and so it can never be in a state of only “having-been”, that is, dead: and hence the primal ego’s enduring cannot itself ever come to an end. Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology , Volume 7, Edition 2 September 2007. (shrink)

The recently published volume Rasmus Thybo Jensen and Dermot Moran have put together, The Phenomenology of Embodied Subjectivity, displays the richness that phenomenological approaches to embodiment have to offer, both in terms of the many insights of some of its major figures and as a style of inquiry that continues to be aptly deployed in diverse theoretical contexts. As such, the collection is accessible to a broad audience. The phenomenological perspectives represented are primarily those of Husserlian phenomenology and, to a (...) lesser extent, the existential phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, and Heidegger. In most cases, only general familiarity with these varieties of phenomenology is presupposed, although some contributors stay very close to the texts they aim to elucidate and the peculiar idiom of those texts. Though the primary theoretical orientation of the various contributions is phenomenological, many of the contributions either engage non-phenomenological philosophy (e. (shrink)