When Husserl discussed the phenomenology of willing, he concluded that the sole theoretical foundation of the intentionality of consciousness is insufficient to account for voluntary acts as they do not primarily represent their content as given entities, but instead create the willed during their performance. Nonetheless, Husserl did not suspend the theoretical foundation of intentionality, meaning that the theoretical concept of objectual intentionality juxtaposes a practical concept of performative intentionality. Recent results from the field of robot-assisted gait rehabilitation provided experimental (...) findings that may clarify this relationship, to the effect that the foundational structure of consciousness builds upon a heterarchical model of objectual and performative intentionality. A combination of phenomenological interview results, neural motor control, the functional design of the robot, and clinical data qualifies gait initiation as a non-objectifying act that creates its intentional object (i.e., the willed movement). In sum, the experimental findings support Husserl’s proposal of a genuine practical or performative intentionality that points to a heterarchical understanding of the relationship between representational and performative foundations of action consciousness. (shrink)

Clarifying the essential experiential structures at work in our everyday moral engagements promises both (1) to provide a perspicacious self-understanding, and (2) to significantly contribute to theoretical and practical matters of moral philosophy. Since the phenomenological enterprise is concerned with revealing the a priori structures of experience in general, it is then well positioned to discern the essential structures of moral experience specifically. Phenomenology can therefore significantly contribute to matters pertaining to moral philosophy. In this paper I would like to (...) contribute to the relatively small yet burgeoning field of phenomenological ethics. I endea­vour to do so by first identifying and consolidating the basic level of sense-bestowal, and then outlining the a priori structures of volition in order to demonstrate how such phenomenologically discerned structures are required for moral experience. Specifically, in section one I locate moral experience as at the level of meaning that is phenomenologically identified as the life-world, and then vindicate the life-world by illustrating how it is immune to naturalistic rationalisation. By thus both securing the level of meaning that is of concern and importantly delimiting the scope of our analysis, I proceed in section two to relate the volitional analyses of Aristotle, Husserl, and Heidegger. This relation is achieved thanks to a conceptual point of con­tinuity: ‘prohairesis’. By examining the function of this concept (as an intentional structure) and its phenomenological continuity, the ground is then prepared for further phenomenological analyses of the virtues. (shrink)

This paper offers a new philosophical account of vocations as deeply personal but at the same time also communal and generational forms of multimodal intending. It provides a reconstruction and a systematic development of Edmund Husserl’s scattered discussions on vocations. On these grounds, the paper argues that vocational life is a general human possibility and not determined by any set of material values, religious, epistemic or moral. Rather, vocations are distinguished from other complexes of intentional acts and attitudes by certain (...) structural features of their core valuations and volitions. (shrink)

The problem of distinguishing between willing and wishing and their significance for both the constitution of our consciousness as well as the constitution of our practical life runs all the way through the history of philosophy. Given the persuasiveness of the problem, it might be helpful to draw a sharp distinction between a metaphysical and a psychological or phenomenological approach to the problem. The first approach may be identified with the positions that Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche held, which (...) involved an identification of the will with reality/actuality in general, and which Heidegger tried to analyze in his later writings on the basis of his confrontation with Nietzsche. In this paper, however, I will not consider the metaphysical approach to the distinction; rather, I will focus on the second approach to distinguishing wishing and willing, which was initiated by Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics, and of which as we will see soon – Husserl and the early Heidegger are ultimately still heirs. Hence I will begin my consideration by recalling briefly the main claim in Aristotle’s discovery of the central position of will within our life. (shrink)

This article raises the question of whether there is one consistent theory of volitional acts in Husserl’s writings. The question arises because Husserl approaches volitional consciousness in his static and his genetic phenomenology rather differently. Static phenomenology understands acts of willing as complex, higher-order phenomena that are founded in both intellectual and emotional acts; while genetic phenomenology describes them as passively motivated phenomena that are implicitly predelineated in feelings, instincts, and drives, which always already include a characteristic element of striving. (...) Thus, according to genetic phenomenology, volitional acts are not founded on intellectual and emotional acts but rather influence those acts in their specific directedness. This article critically investigates four possible attempts to unite the two phenomenological approaches consistently and concludes that all these attempts are burdened with unsolved problems. It thus remains questionable whether Husserl has one consistent theory of volitional acts. (shrink)