This paper aims to address the relevance of the natural sciences for transcendental phenomenology, that is, the issue of naturalism. The first section distinguishes three varieties of naturalism and corresponding forms of naturalization: an ontological one, a methodological one, and an epistemological one. In light of these distinctions, in the second section, I examine the main projects aiming to “naturalize phenomenology”: neurophenomenology, front-loaded phenomenology, and formalized approaches to phenomenology. The third section then considers the commitments of Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology with (...) respect to the three varieties of naturalism previously discussed. I argue that Husserl rejected strong and weak forms of epistemological naturalism, strong methodological naturalism, and ontological naturalism. The fourth section presents the argument that Husserl endorsed a weak, conditional form of methodological naturalism. This point is illustrated with Husserl’s proposal of “somatology,” a natural science apt to study the corporeality of the lived body. The final section addresses the complementarity and respective limits of the transcendental phenomenological and the natural scientific frameworks. I argue that, on Husserl’s account, the function of transcendental phenomenology with respect to the natural sciences is to provide them with an epistemological foundation and an ontological clarification. I suggest that certain natural sciences can be understood, within the transcendental phenomenological framework, as “sciences of constitution,” that is, as sciences investigating the contribution of real structures acting as conditions of possibility for the occurrence of certain kinds of comprehensive unities in lived experience. (shrink)

I argue that we find the articulation of a problem concerning bodily agency in the early works of the Merleau-Ponty which he explicates as analogous to what he explicitly calls the problem of perception. The problem of perception is the problem of seeing how we can have the object given in person through it perspectival appearances. The problem concerning bodily agency is the problem of seeing how our bodily movements can be the direct manifestation of a person’s intentions in the (...) world. In both cases what, according to Merleau-Ponty, obscures a recognition of the phenomenon in question is a conception of our bodily capacities, i.e. our sensibility and our motility, which reduces these to the workings of mechanisms that are blind to meaning. I argue that both the problem concerning perception and the problem concerning bodily agency can be properly called transcendental. The problem of perception is transcendental because it concerns the very intelligibility of appearances and judgements with empirical content. The problem of bodily agency is transcendental in the sense that it concerns the very intelligibility of our bodily capacity to carry out intentions and by implication the intelligibility of our intentions as such. (shrink)

Several commentators have argued that with his concept of anonymity Merleau-Ponty breaks away from classical Husserlian phenomenology that is methodologically tied to the first person perspective. Many contemporary commentators see Merleau-Ponty’s discourse on anonymity as a break away from Husserl’s framework that is seen as hopelessly subjectivistic and solipsistic. Some judge and reproach it as a disastrous misunderstanding that leads to a confusion of philosophical and empirical concerns. Both parties agree that Merleau-Ponty’s concepts of anonymity mark a divergence from classical (...) Husserlian phenomenology. I will question this view and demonstrate that Merleau-Ponty’s discourse on anonymity remains Husserlian in two important senses: it analyses senses in terms of constituting selves and communities of such selves, and it accounts for the formation of experience by the temporal sedimentation of intentional activity. The argument proceeds in four steps. The first section argues against the widely spread notion according to which Merleau-Ponty’s anonymous subject is collective. In the second section, I offer an alternative reading by demonstrating that Merleau-Ponty uses the term “anonymous” primarily to characterize the lived body of a personal subject. In section three, I introduce Merleau-Ponty’s idea of trace and show that for him both the perceived thing and the perceiving body are traces and as such refer to earlier constitutive acts of alien subjects. I then argue that Husserl’s concepts of sedimentation are crucial for the understanding of this idea. Finally, in section four, I show how Husserl’s theory of depresentation informs Merleau-Ponty’s discourse on anonymity. (shrink)

Ever since the 1960s, media and communication studies have abounded in heated debates concerning the psychological and social effects of fictional media violence. Massive empirical research has first tried to tie film violence to cultivating either fear or aggressive tendencies among its viewership, while later research has focused on other media as well (television, video games). The present paper does not aim to settle the factual question of whether or not medial experiences indeed engender real emotional dispositions. Instead, it brings (...) into play the resources of genetic phenomenology in order to ask how the formation of such dispositions would be generally possible. Thus, it aims to further the discussion by overtly employing the framework of Husserl’s later genetic phenomenology to the field of emotional experience. By posing questions with regard to how fictional emotional experiences contribute to the formation of apperceptions and to the specificities of emotional sedimentation, it also points out some shortcomings in Husserl’s account by drawing from Freud’s dynamic theory of drives and emotions. (shrink)

There are two main approaches in the phenomenological understanding of the unconscious. The first explores the intentional theory of the unconscious, while the second develops a non-representational way of understanding consciousness and the unconscious. This paper aims to outline a general theoretical framework for the non-representational approach to the unconscious within the phenomenological tradition. In order to do so, I focus on three relevant theories: Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception, Thomas Fuchs’ phenomenology of body memory, and Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology of (...) affectivity. Both Merleau-Ponty and Fuchs understand the unconscious as a “sedimented practical schema” of subjective being in the world. This sedimented unconscious contributes to the way we implicitly interpret reality, fill in the gaps of uncertainty, and invest our social interactions with meaning. Husserl, however, approaches the unconscious in terms of affective non-vivacity, as a sphere of sedimentation and the horizon of the distant past which stays affectively connected to the living present. Drawing on these ideas, I argue that these two accounts can reinforce one another and provide the ground for a phenomenological understanding of the unconscious in terms of the horizontal dimension of subjective experience and a non-representational relation to the past. (shrink)