In this paper, I contend that there are at least two essential traits that commonly define being an I: self-identity and self-consciousness. I argue that they bear quite an odd relation to each other in the sense that self-consciousness seems to jeopardize self-identity. My main concern is to elucidate this issue within the range of the transcendental philosophies of Immanuel Kant and Edmund Husserl. In the first section, I shall briefly consider Kant’s own rendition of the problem of the Egosplitting. (...) My reading of the Kantian texts reveals that Kant himself was aware of this phenomenon but eventually deems it an unexplainable fact. The second part of the paper tackles the same problematic from the standpoint of Husserlian phenomenology. What Husserl’s extensive analyses on this topic bring to light is that the phenomenon of the Ego-splitting constitutes the bedrock not only of his thought but also of every philosophy that works within the framework of transcendental thinking. (shrink)

This paper argues that Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutical philosophy attempts to reopen the question of human transcendence in contemporary terms. While his conception of language as self-transcending is deeply Husserlian, Ricoeur also responds to the analytical challenge when he deploys a basic distinction in Fregean logic in order to clarify Heidegger’s phenomenology of world. Ricoeur’s commitment to a transcendental view is evident in his conception of narrative, which enables him to emphasize the role of the performative in literary reading. The meaning (...) of the self in time provides Ricoeur with a discursive basis for distinguishing his own position from that of Kant and other philosophers in the transcendental tradition. (shrink)

The article shows that Michel Foucault's account of the sexual body is not a naive return to a prediscursive body, nor does it amount to discourse reductionism and to the exclusion of experience, as some feminists have argued. Instead, Foucault's idea of bodies and pleasures as a possibility of the counterattack against normalizing power presupposes an experiential understanding of the body. The experiential body can become a locus of resistance because it is the possibility of an unpredictable event.

Given the undeniable influence of the linguistic turn, it is common to characterize epistemology in the twentieth century as centrally concerned with meaning. But many of the early twentieth-century figures who helped to inspire that turn did not characterize meaning exclusively in terms of language. In response to contemporary accounts that tend to limit the scope of meaning to the semantic, pragmatic or conceptual, I use the work of Husserl and Wittgenstein to argue for the importance of non-linguistic aspects of (...) lived experience (Erlebnis) to the theory of meaning, situating the project historically as a legacy of Kant's Critical epistemology and systematically in terms of contemporary debates about the role and status of nonconceptual content. -/- I argue in Chapter One that a robust theory of meaning must take account of the way the conditions of the possibility for meaning are determined by intrinsically value-bearing features of everyday experience, features that are not themselves inherently linguistic or conceptual. Most contemporary nonconceptualist accounts of perceptual experience fail to adequately theorize the role of the nonconceptual on its own terms, reducing nonconceptual elements of experience to that of mere "fodder" for conceptualization and ignoring the epistemic role the nonconceptual plays in determining structural conditions of possibility. This can be overcome through a transcendental-constitutional approach that examines the full range of experiential structures--including those not mediated by language or concepts--by which meaning is constituted. -/- Tracing a series of parallel developments in the theories of meaning of Husserl and Wittgenstein in Chapters Two through Five, I argue that--despite important differences--both authors' later conceptions of meaning necessarily include accounts of its relation to an inexact, non-linguistic dimension of experiential life: the lifeworld (Husserl) or form(s) of life (Wittgenstein). What appears from the standpoint of linguistic and conceptual analysis to be an unfortunate inexactness is in terms of the later conceptions of both philosophers not the result of incomplete analysis, but of a recognition of the ontological primacy of the lived and fundamentally social phenomenon of meaningfulness that characterizes our experience in a way that outstrips conceptual and linguistic representation. (shrink)

Quentin Meillassoux’s 2006 After Finitude offered a sharp critique of the phenomenological project, charging that phenomenology was one of the “two principal media” of correlationism—ultimately reducible to an “extreme idealism.” Meillassoux grounds this accusation in an account of givenness that presupposes that “every variety of givenness” finds its genesis within the positing of the subject. However, this critique fails to hit its mark precisely because it presupposes an account of intuitive givenness that is entirely foreign to the phenomenological project. Quite (...) against Meillassoux’s conflation of givenness, the world-for-us, and the positing subject—the very centre of the phenomenological project is the recognition that intuitive givenness cannot be reduced to the constructive activity of the subject. Givenness is marked by a heterogeneity; givenness refers to what is given to us, not to what emerges from us. (shrink)

This article elaborates on Christopher Norris's claim that certain aspects of Derrida's work are amenable to formalisation in modal-logical terms. Norris contends that any adequate analysis of the logic behind Derrida's work must provide an account of the notions of possibility, necessity, and necessary possibility, particularly as they are related to Derrida's notion of iterability. This article examines the further hypothesis that Derrida's understanding of modality, according to which possibilities must be accounted for even if they are never realised, might (...) even better be described in terms of possible worlds. In possible-worlds semantics, the conceptual meaning of a statement is constituted by the set of alternative contexts in which that statement is true. This article argues, however, that possible-worlds semantics would be unthinkable without the experience that one referent can be substituted for another. The possibility of this experience is best described in Derridean terms. Read through Derrida's thought of the trace, the properly semantic substitutions may come to be seen as dependent on the substitution of the thing for itself; on what Derrida calls ‘the substitution of the unique for the unique’. (shrink)

The question of the psychologism of the theory of number developed by Husserl in his Philosophy of Arithmetic has long been debated, but it cannot be considered fully resolved. In this paper, I address the issue from a new point of view. My claim is that in the Philosophy of Arithmetic, Husserl made, albeit indirectly, a series of arguments that are worth reconstructing and clarifying since they are useful in shedding some light on the psychologism issue. More specifically, I maintain (...) that the clarification of these arguments, along with other arguments that Husserl presented against alternative theories of number as well as with some contemporary distinctions concerning the notion of ontological dependence, allows us to determine that Husserl’s theory of number is psychologistic in a minimal and precise sense: it entails a generic ontological dependence of numbers upon the mind. (shrink)