A collection of all but two of the author's philosophical essays and lectures originally published or presented before August 1976.

Winner of 2002 Edward Goodwin Ballard Prize In a penetrating and lucid discussion of the enigmatic relationship between the work of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, Steven Galt Crowell proposes that the distinguishing feature of twentieth-century philosophy is not so much its emphasis on language as its concern with meaning. Arguing that transcendental phenomenology is indispensable to the philosophical explanation of the space of meaning, Crowell shows how a proper understanding of both Husserl and Heidegger reveals the distinctive contributions of (...) each to that ongoing phenomenological project. (shrink)

Inspired by Aristotle, Franz Brentano revived the concept of intentionality to characterize the domain of mental phenomena studied by descriptive psychology. Edmund Husserl, while discarding much of Brentano?s conceptual framework and presuppositions, located intentionality at the core of his science of pure consciousness (phenomenology). Martin Heidegger, Husserl?s assistant from 1919 to 1923, dropped all reference to intentionality and consciousness in Being and Time (1927), and so appeared to break sharply with his avowed mentors, Brentano and Husserl. Some recent commentators have (...) sided with Heidegger and have endorsed his critique of Husserl and Brentano as still caught up in epistemological, representationalist approaches to intentionality. I argue that Heidegger is developing Husserl, focusing in particular on the ontological dimension of intentionality, not reversing or abandoning his account. Heidegger?s criticisms of representationalism merely repeat Husserl?s. Furthermore, I argue that Husserl?s account of cognitive intentionality, which recognizes the importance of the disinterested theoretical attitude for scientific knowledge, has been underestimated and misunderstood by Heidegger, who treats scientific cognition as a deficient form of practice. In short, Heidegger is more dependent on Husserl than he ever publicly acknowledged. (shrink)

There is a remarkable unity to the work of Edmund Husserl, but there are also many difficulties in it. The unity is the result of a single personal and philo sophical quest working itself out in concrete phenomenological analyses; the difficulties are due to the inadequacy of initial conceptions which becomes felt as those analyses become progressively deeper and more extensive.! Anyone who has followed the course of Husserl's work is struck by the constant reemergence of the same problems and (...) by the insightfulness of the inquiries which press toward their solution. However one also becomes aware of Husserl's own dissatisfaction with his work, once so movingly expressed in a 2 personal note. It is the purpose of the present work to examine and revive one of the issues which gave Husserl difficulty, namely, the problem of an intro duction to phenomenology. Several of Husserl's writings published after Logical Investigations were either subtitled or referred to by him as "introductions to phenomenology. "3 These works serve to acquaint the reader with the specific character of Husserl's transcendental phenomenology and with the problems to which it is to provide the solution. They include discussions and analyses which pertain to what has come to be known as "ways" into transcendental phenomenology. 4 The issue here is the proper access to transcendental phenomenology. (shrink)

_Expanding Hermeneutics _examines the development of interpretation theory, emphasizing how science in practice involves and implicates interpretive processes. Ihde argues that the sciences have developed a sophisticated visual hermeneutics that produces evidence by means of imaging, visual displays, and visualizations. From this vantage point, Ihde demonstrates how interpretation is built into technologies and instruments.

_Expanding Hermeneutics_ examines the development of interpretation theory, emphasizing how science in practice involves and implicates interpretive processes. Ihde argues that the sciences have developed a sophisticated visual hermeneutics that produces evidence by means of imaging, visual displays, and visualizations. From this vantage point, Ihde demonstrates how interpretation is built into technologies and instruments.