In The Human Place in the Cosmos Max Scheler argues the question of philosophical anthropology must address three problems: the difference between man and animal; the Cartesian problem of the mind and body; and the essence of spirit. In a recent issue of Human Studies, two articles by Cristian Ciocan and Christian Ferencz-Flatz addressed the first of these problems through investigations of Husserl’s Nachlass. In this paper, I respond primarily to Ciocan by drawing on Scheler’s phenomenology and the implications this (...) has for understanding Husserl’s phenomenology. By looking at Husserl’s published comments, we can see how the attempt to differentiate between man and animal is bound up with his understanding of spirituality. This allows an alternative way of understanding normality and abnormality which shifts emphasises away from how far we can empathise with the Other to emphasise what it means to be normal or abnormal. This will allow us to address an ambiguity of Husserl identified by Ferencz-Flatz. (shrink)

Husserl famously retracted his early portrayal, in Logische Untersuchungen, of phenomenology as empirical psychology. Previous scholarship has typically understood this transcendental turn in light of the Ideen’s revised conception of the ἐποχή, and its distinction between noesa and noemata. This essay thematizes the evolution of the concept of mental acts in Husserl’s work as a way of understanding the shift. I show how the recognition of the pure ego in Ideen I and II enabled Husserl to radically alter his conception (...) of mental acts, coming to understand them all in terms of genuine acts in a way that had been essentially precluded for descriptive psychologists so long as the pure ego was denied. This reading challenges a widespread assumption in the secondary literature that “mental act” is a merely technical term or misnomer. (shrink)

This paper examines the concept of the world elaborated by Heidegger in the early Freiburg lecture courses of the years 1919 to 1923, in which he proposes a renewed conception of phenomenology through a comparison with Husserlian phenomenology. First, I show that although the theme of the lifeworld became central only in late Husserlian works, especially in _The Crisis of European Sciences_, Husserl began to deal with this concept before 1920, anticipating some fundamental issues of the _Crisis_, as it results (...) from the lectures of 1919 on _Natur und Geist_. Husserl had addressed the concept of the world already in the lectures of 1910/11, _The Basic Problems of Phenomenology_, and, subsequently, in the second book of _Ideas_, which was published posthumously, but which was known to the young Heidegger. Then, I discuss the way in which Heidegger revisited the issue of the world in the early Freiburg lecture courses by means of a critique of Husserl’s analysis, focusing on perceptual experience as “environmental experience” and on the “world-character” of life. Particular emphasis is placed on the distinction between “environing-world,” “with-world,” and “self-world,” which Heidegger introduces in the lectures of 1919–1920. Finally, I point out that the Heideggerian rethinking of the concept of lifeworld is closely connected to the recognition of the immanent historicity of life, while Husserl only later takes into account the historicity of the lifeworld. (shrink)

Jakob von Uexküll’s (1864-1944) account of Umwelt has been proposed as a mediating concept to bridge the gap between ecological psychology’s realism about environmental information and enactivism’s emphasis on the organism’s active role in constructing the meaningful world it inhabits. If successful, this move would constitute a significant step towards establishing a single ecological-enactive framework for cognitive science. However, Uexküll’s thought itself contains different perspectives that are in tension with each other, and the concept of Umwelt is developed in representationalist (...) terms that conflict with the commitments of both enactivism and ecological psychology. One central issue shared by all these approaches is the problem of how a living being experiences its environment. In this paper, we will look at Uexküll’s reception in French philosophy and highlight the different ways in which the concept of Umwelt functions in the work of Georges Canguilhem, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Gilles Deleuze. This analysis helps clarify different aspects of Uexküll’s thought and the deeper philosophical implications of importing his concepts into embodied cognitive science. This paper is part of a recent trend in which enactivism engages with continental philosophy in a way that both deepens and transcends the traditional links to phenomenology, including most recently the thought of Georg W. F. Hegel and Gilbert Simondon. However, no more than a brief outline and introduction to the potentials and challenges of this complex conceptual intersection can be given here. Our hope is that it serves to make more explicit the philosophical issues that are at stake for cognitive science in the question of experienced environments, while charting a useful course for future research. (shrink)