Leopold Blaustein’s Descriptive Psychology and Aesthetics in Light of His Criticism of Husserl

Abstract

The author offers a critical discussion of the main concepts, arguments, and problems formulated by Leopold Blaustein—a student of Twardowski and Ingarden—who also studied under Husserl in Freiburg. Blaustein’s philosophy arises as a mixture of phenomenology and the Lvov-Warsaw School of logic’s analytical approach. This study shows how Blaustein redefined phenomenology as a descriptive psychology which serves to investigate types of lived experiences. Given this understanding of phenomenology, the author presents Blaustein’s engagement with Husserl’s content theory, where Blaustein tries to show that contents are dependent on the world, rather than on consciousness. The author seeks to display the limits of Blaustein’s reading of Husserl by showing that he did not adopt Husserl’s doctrine of constitution. However, Blaustein adopts this doctrine in his analysis of aesthetic experiences as dynamic processes. The study reconstructs Blaustein’s view of the structure of these experiences as imaginative presentations which serve to represent aesthetic objects. In this regard, the author defines the influences of Twardowski, Husserl and Ingarden on Blaustein.