NATIVISM, TRANSCENDENTALISM AND PHENOMENOLOGY: REVISITING THE NON-PLACEMENT OF THE SOURCE OF PHENOMENAL EXPERIENCE IN THE WORLD

The paper deals with transcendental turn in the development of the phenomenological philosophy witch the founder of phenomenology Edmund Husserl made in his work “Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. First Book: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology”. From this moment until the very end of his life, Husserl defined his philosophy as transcendental phenomenology. This is particularly evident in the title of his last unfinished treatise “The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy”. The author tries to clarify the historical and philosophical background of this turn and its influence on the phenomenology and other philosophical trends until now. On the one hand, the transcendental turn in the development of the phenomenological philosophy is the result of the long philosophical tradition that based on Descartes rationalism and Kantian transcendental philosophy and at the same time on the empiricism by Berkley and Hume. On the other hand, this transcendental turn is very important for the modern discussion about the problem of consciousness not only in the phenomenological research, but also in the contemporary philosophy of mind and cognitive sciences. For example, the “explanatory gap” problem as one of the most crucial consequence of the mind-body problem can be seen in a new light from the phenomenological point of view. So it is argued that phenomenology is one of the most elaborated version of the transcendental philosophy of experience, and that it is possible to create on the base of transcendental phenomenology the universal methodology of humanities and to bring something new even to the formulation of the fundamental problems of natural sciences.

The conceptual relationship between crisis (krisis) and critique (krinein) in post-Kantian philosophy, pronounced most forcefully by Husserl in the opening lectures of The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, is well known to most readers of contemporary philosophy. ‘The difficulty that has plagued human psychology’, Husserl writes, ‘[and] not just in our time but for centuries — its own peculiar ‘crisis’ —… leads [us] back to the enigma of subjectivity itself and thus is inseparably bound to the enigma of psychological subject matter and method ’ (Husserl, 1970). The question I will turn to in this discussion is whether the contemporary crisis announced under the term of the ‘post-secular’, referring in this sense to the decline of scientific method and the return of something akin to a ‘faith position’ expressed by certain contemporary philosophies, is remarkably different than the earlier crisis between the humanistic disciplines — including modern philosophy (Geisteswissenschaften) — and the positivistic sciences announced by Husserl in 1936 and, even earlier, the crisis between faith and reason during the period of the Enlightenment? In taking up this question — What’s this postsecular crisis all about? — I will turn to examine the writings of the contemporary French philosopher Alain Badiou around the somewhat emblematic figure of Saint Paul.

The article discusses the peculiarities and specific features of phenomenological approach developed in contemporary analytical philosophy. Despite the fact that the trust in phenomenological approaches continue to grow in analytical philosophy, it is necessary to recognize the presence of noticeable divergence between the classical transcendental phenomenology of E. Husserl and contemporary versions of phenomenology in analytical philosophy. The article examines some of these divergences. It is shown that, unlike the skepticism of transcendental phenomenology in relation to scientific methodology in the research of consciousness, the analytical tradition of phenomenology is oriented toward cooperative dialogue with science. Phenomenology in analytical philosophy places great hopes on the possibility of making consciousness a subject of joint research of neuroscientists and phenomenologists. The article claims that in the course of realization of this task, phenomenology in analytical tradition often starts to be interpreted from realistic and partly from naturalistic positions, and that does not meet the project of transcendental phenomenology. As an illustration of this idea, certain approaches of analytical phenomenology are considered, in particular: phenomena are interpreted from the point of view of logical and linguistic analysis, intentionality is connected with the activity of the brain and is located in the natural world, phenomenal consciousness is interpreted as the awareness of a high order, and the phenomena have a gradual nature and are often identified only with sensual experience, which implies a correlative correspondence of the substrate data of brain physiology. In that regard, there are reasons to interpret phenomenological theories that are funded by analytical tradition as an example of a specific phenomenology of non-transcendental origin.

This article presents a review of papers of the international scientific seminar “Transcendental Turn in Modern Philosophy — 8: Metaphysics, epistemology, transcendental cognitive science and artificial intelligence,” which was held on April 20–22, 2023 in Moscow. The topics reviewed were the following: “Transcendental Philosophy: Ontology, Metaphysics of Experience or Epistemology,” “Transcendentalism, Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence,” “Reception and Development of Transcendental (Phenomenological) Approach in Modern Philosophy,” as well as “Transcendental Phenomenology: Ontology and/or Gnoseology”. The author analyzes the presentations of the participants, grouping them around the following thematic and problematic nodes: the transcendental foundations of cognitive sciences, the understanding and status of the transcendental unity of apperception, the relationship between gnoseology and ontology in phenomenological research, receptivity and construction in forming the subject of knowledge, etc. This approach makes it possible to identify different, sometimes opposing positions of the participants on the same question and to outline ways to overcome the contradictions.

Husserl brings up the lifeworld notion in his discourse on overcoming the crisis of European sciences that results from the objectivism or naturalism of scientific research. He puts forward the concept of experiential world as he works on the foundation for socio-cultural sciences. Both concepts depict how the subject is not enclosed in itself, it is instead the subject in the world. Yet the distinction of lifeworld and experiential world reveals that Husserl thematizes this problem in two distinguished ways, the one has the transcendental phenomenology as background, the other the phenomenological psychology. My paper aims at an explication of these two different ways of how Husserl deals with the relationship between subject and the world and explores the possibility of an lifeworld discourse that looses itself from the transcendental bond.

Metaphysics of AbstractionSpeculative Photographs in the Anthropocene Bruno Lessard (bio) In the 1970s, New Topographics photographers such as Robert Adams, Frank Gohlke, and Lewis Baltz rejected the idea of pristine nature as found in the work of landscape pioneers such as Carleton Watkins or Ansel Adams. The photographers in the New Topographics exhibition focused on the man-altered landscape in their black-and-white images, avoiding the sublime and the monumental. In contrast, one can clearly discern in the series of late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century landscape photographers a visual quest different from that of the New Topographics. Indeed, facing the impossibility of documenting mundane landscapes and "nonplaces" as it had been done in the work of the New Topographics photographers, contemporary landscape photographers as diverse as David Maisel, Edward Burtynsky, James Balog, Daniel Beltrá, Peter Goin, Terry Evans, David T. Hanson, Richard Misrach, Mark Ruwedel, Tyrone Martinsson, Ian Teh, J. Henry Fair, and Mishka Henner have poignantly addressed our collective environmental predicament in the Anthropocene.1 The aforementioned landscape photographers, especially those interested in rediscovering the potential of aerial photography, have been engaged in a radical rethinking of the representation of the land in the Anthropocene, and they have contributed to a profound reconsideration of the aesthetics and politics of landscape photography itself, focusing on environmental issues such as global warming, pollution, and land devastation. Most importantly, they have refashioned the humanland relationship in images that have questioned the anthropocentric biases of the genre via their recourse to the aerial perspective afforded [End Page 20] by drones and other custom-made apparatuses. These recent technological innovations and strategies of representation demand a philosophy of photography for the Anthropocene. In this article, I propose to lay the foundation for this critical discourse around the Anthropocene and landscape photography by turning to speculative realism and its related developments in object-oriented ontology. As discussed below, object-oriented ontology, and the notion of the hyperobject in particular, can help to rethink contemporary landscape photography and the ontology of the photographic image itself. In the following pages, I stage a dialogue between three contemporary landscape photographers—David Maisel, Daniel Beltrá, and Edward Burtynsky—and continental philosophy by way of object-oriented ontology and hyperobjects. This discussion generates results to better understand both the fate of realism in landscape photography and the resurgence of realism in philosophical discourse. While realism as an aesthetic notion in the history of visual representation differs from the one found in debates over realism versus antirealism in contemporary philosophy, the aesthetic experiences proposed in the aerial, abstract photograph refract some of the concerns in the human and nonhuman experiences that the new philosophical realisms have produced. The Anthropocene thus offers an ideal case study to examine the type of artistic representation and philosophical conceptualization that realism has produced as both a type of photographic representation and a conceptual operator in continental philosophy. Realism, as an aesthetic and philosophical concept, is transformed in the new aesthetic experiences introduced in the Anthropocene era. In the twentyfirst century, numerous landscape photographers have used both the aerial shot to create a nonanthropocentric viewpoint and the abstract image to represent the land and hyperobjects in the Anthropocene. This predilection for abstraction prompts a reconsideration of the ontology of the photographic image in terms of speculation rather than figurative representation. Apprehending Hyperobjects Contemporary landscape photography, speculative realism, and object-oriented ontology inform each other, because they share similar obsessions.2 In the writings of thinkers as diverse as Karen [End Page 21] Barad, Jane Bennett, Ian Bogost, Donna Haraway, Graham Harman, and Timothy Morton,3 provoking reflections abound on the access to the natural world, the relationship between human beings and an environment populated by nonhuman entities, and the apprehension of reality generally speaking. In the work of photographers interested in documenting the Anthropocene, similar issues crop up in the discussion of representational content, which gives access to a world whose reality can be characterized as endangered in the context of climate change. The challenge for landscape photographers is to find the most appropriate visual strategies to make sense of our new reality, which takes the form of an unprecedented environmental...

Phenomenology represents a detailed and systematic attempt to understand the structures of first person lived experience. This article examines the relevance of Husserl’s writings and their introduction of the “phenomenological reduction” as the distinguishing characteristic of his transcendental form of phenomenology. A close examination of Husserl’s writings is given to highlight the centrality of the reduction for the justification of basic beliefs. It is subsequently shown how Husserl’s analyses of intentional acts have ongoing implications for the knowledge internalism versus knowledge externalism debate. This debate revolves around how knowledge is justified and how belief claims are warranted. Although the debate, in its modern form, can be traced back to the mid-twentieth century, Husserl’s methods were not introduced in dealing with internalist and externalist accounts of knowledge attainment until recently. Modern externalists, who for the most part are not phenomenologists, have subsequently largely condemned Husserl’s methods as promoting a strict Cartesian internalist justification of belief claims. These criticisms were met by attempts to characterize transcendental phenomenology as actually promoting something closer to externalism in epistemology. The following article attempts to show how Husserl’s phenomenology actively engages with problems related to the interiority of knowledge claims but in a radically different way from non-phenomenological approaches promoting internalism. Nonetheless, it is argued that transcendental phenomenology cannot be regarded as anything approaching a mainstream or even reworked “externalist” account of securing knowledge. Highlighting what Husserl calls “the paradox of subjectivity,” it is shown how his transcendental phenomenology develops a sui generis form of internalism. Since few modern internalists make use of Husserl’s texts, and post-Husserlian phenomenology has taken something like an externalist turn (as witnessed, for example, in recent interpretations of the writings of Heidegger and Sartre), it is argued that Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology should be taken more seriously by contemporary philosophers interested in knowledge internalism. These conclusions, subsequently, are relevant to promoting a better understanding of the justification of knowledge claims, both within and outside of the phenomenological program. Husserl’s writings are important to contemporary issues such as the theoretical understanding of the relationship between epistemology and philosophy of science (broadly conceived), as well as the relation of phenomenology to contemporary philosophy of mind.

The main academic issue in this article is how contemporary philosophy can contribute to the study of religion, particularly Islamic philosophy, by freeing religious thought from the constraints of dogmatic theology. This article discusses efforts to free God from the shackles of theology in the continental and analytic philosophical traditions. Beginning with Meister Eckhart’s prayer expressing a desire to be freed from God, this article traces the connection between Derrida’s deconstruction and logocentrism, which views God as an entity bound by the limitations of language. Based on the thoughts of Derrida, Lyotard, and Irigaray, this article argues that the desire for a God that transcends metaphysics is rooted in the limitations of language in describing the Divine. The research method used is a conceptual analysis of contemporary philosophical theories and their application in the context of Islamic philosophy. This research affirms that true thinking is not only about thinking about God but also about experiencing a direct encounter with Him, where human consciousness is surprised by His presence. The latest trends in philosophy show an effort to liberate Islamic philosophy from orthodox theology so that in the future, religious philosophy can develop by celebrating heterodox understandings and opening space for more diverse religious experiences.

The article examines the peculiarities of the approach of speculative realism to the analysis of the concepts of existence and object in the context of its criticism of Kantian and post-Kantian ontology, and especially the concept of correlationism, the dependence of the existence of objects on the perception of subjects, i.e. the postulation of the impossibility of the existence of the objective and the independent world from a man. The reasons for the emergence of speculative realism in contemporary French and English philosophy and why these philosophies are called post-continental philosophies are clarified with the help of the historical-comparative method and the method of analysis. In opposition to correlationism, speculative realism seeks to “break through” to a “non-human world,” that is, to a world that is non-anthropocentric and non-human-dimensional. Such a world would be, in fact, “alien” to man, because it would be filled with objects unknown to man and independent of him. Here the obvious goal of speculative realism is to grant freedom to objects through the destruction of correlationism.In addition, the article shows that speculative realism, as a phenomenon in contemporary philosophy, is not homogeneous. Object-oriented ontology, speculative materialism, and materialist phenomenology can be distinguished in it. All these sub-ontologies of speculative realism demonstrate semantic shifts in the understanding of object and existence, but they recognize the existence of objective reality or the reality of objects, regardless of what they mean by the latter, which they try to ground it, in order to give it a fundamental meaning. Therefore, common for these sub-ontologies is the name “speculative” or “metaphysical” realism.

Tekhne, or techne, is derived from the Greek term technê, meaning art, craft, technique, or skill, and plays an important role in Ancient Greek philosophy (in, for instance, Xenophon, Plato, Aristotle) where it is most often opposed to epistêmê, meaning knowledge. The legacy of the various Greek philosophical negotiations with, and distinctions between, technê and epistêmê leave a lasting mark on European thought and knowledge from the medieval period through to the early modern period and into modern philosophy from Emmanuel Kant onwards up to and including 20th-century phenomenology (Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger) and its subsequent legacy, particularly in French philosophy. So, for instance, in Plato’s Protagoras, the myth of Epimetheus and Prometheus describes the latter’s theft of the technê of fire as a result of the former’s forgetfulness with regard to the bestowal of attributes to human beings. Here technê emerges as skill or technique but also as a more general founding moment of humankind’s technical and technological capacities. In The Republic Plato opposes the knowledge of reality and truth (of ideal forms) to the representational status of dramatic poetry (as a technê poietike or productive technique) and by extension to arts and literature in general. In this context the latter have a degraded status in relation to knowledge or truth, and this sets the stage for attempts that will be made by later philosophy to distance itself from aesthetic form or literary discourse. In Aristotle technê emerges within the distinction between art as productive technique and theoretical knowledge on the one hand (theoria) and action on the other (praxis). Aristotle’s distinctions have an influential afterlife in the medieval period and into the early modern, in particular in Emmanuel Kant’s definition of art as a skill or capacity for the production of things. The legacy of this long negotiation of Greek technê as art, productive technique, technical skill, or technology finds its way into 20th-century German phenomenology; in Edmund Husserl’s account of the rise of the scientific worldview and instrumental rationality in The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (1938) and in Martin Heidegger’s discourse on technological modernity, art, and the philosophical-poetic saying of being as it is developed from the 1930s onwards. The legacy of German phenomenological thinking relating to tekhne, understood as a fundamental dimension of both artistic and technological production, has a particularly strong afterlife in post–World War II French structuralism, poststructuralism, and contemporary philosophy. The influence of Husserl’s understanding of technicity can be traced directly in various ways into the work of, for instance, Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida. Similarly, both Husserlian and Heideggerian discourse on tekhne find their way in the thinking of technology, ecotechnicity, and technics of contemporary philosophers such as Jean-Luc Nancy. Nancy’s discourse on the technicity of art yields an affirmation of the irreducible plurality of aesthetic techniques and, in particular, a reorientation of possible ways of understanding the place of literature in the age of digital information technology.

H. L. Dreyfus maintains that transcendental phenomenology is based on the ‘assumption’ that ‘everything can be understood from the point of view of a detached objective thinker’. Against this ‘assumption’, he emphasizes ‘the crucial role of human involvement’, which, he points out in following Merleau-Ponty, can be understood only in terms of ‘the body which confers the meaning discovered by Husserl’. At this point we ask whether involvement as experienced does not refer to consciousness experiencing it. Presently we shall raise the same question with respect to somatic body. In the second of his Meditations on the First Philosophy, Descartes has established the privilege of consciousness as the only and universal medium of access to whatever exists. Husserl has renewed and reaffirmed this Cartesian and Husserlian discovery. Constitutive phenomenology can well be characterized as the consistent and radical development of this privilege of consciousness into its last ramifications and consequences. It is this Cartesian and Husserlian principle which we wish to reassert over against all other trends in contemporary philosophy. The privilege of consciousness holds for the world as field of action, involvement, and decision no less than for the world taken as subject matter of uninvolved and disinterested contemplation and study. It holds for the world as a whole as well as for all mundane existence whatever, including the phenomenal body, the Ego as psychosomatic unity, and the human person in its socio-historical concreteness. Aron Gurwitsch

In this paper, I investigate the account of self-consciousness provided by Chinese Yogācārins Xuanzang (602-664CE) and Kuiji (632-682CE). I will explain how they clarify the transition from selfattaching to self-emptying through the articulation of consciousness (vijñāna). Current scholarship often interprets the Yogācāra account of consciousness either as a science of mind or as a metaphysical idealism. Both interpretations are misleading, partly because they perpetuate various stereotypes about Buddhism, partly also because they overlook the religious goal of realizing in practice the wisdom of emptiness and the non-egoistic compassion. Against the status quo, I argue that through their account of self-consciousness, Xuanzang and Kuiji advocate what can be referred to as transcendental idealism that stresses the correlation between subjectivity and objectivity. Yogācārins thus neither nullify the existence of subjectivity nor formulate subjectivity as a higher entity. The transcendental idealism yields a Buddhist phenomenology that is similar to and also different from Edmund Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology. In what follows I will first characterize Husserl’s phenomenology as an approach to consciousness at two levels (the descriptive level and the explicative level). Then, I elicit the Buddhist phenomenology from Yogācāra philosophy that is not only descriptive and explicative but also prescriptive. This three-level architectonic of consciousness, while reaffirming the importance of agency, further justifies the role of religious rituals and moral practices for Yogācāra devotees.

I am Jonardon Ganeri, philosopher working on mind, metaphysics and epistemology across the Eastern and Western traditions. AMA!

A recurrent problem in the philosophical debates over whether there is or can be nonconceptual experience or whether all experience is conceptually structured, mediated, or dependent is the lack of a generally accepted account of what concepts are. Without a precise specification of what a concept is, the notion of nonconceptuality is equally ill defined. This problem cuts across contemporary philosophy and cognitive science as well as classical Indian philosophy, and it affects how we go about philosophically “engaging Buddhism” in particular. Buddhist philosophers generally argue that our everyday experience of the world is conceptually constructed. For example, they argue that what appear to us to be stable, enduring entities possessing properties and belonging to kinds are fictions created by the imposition of concepts onto the incessant flux of momentary events. At the same time, “nonconceptual cognition” (nirvikalpa jñāna) marks the limits of conceptuality. But what precisely do “conceptual” and “nonconceptual” mean? Consider that “concept” is routinely used to translate the Sanskrit term, vikalpa; nirvikalpa is accordingly rendered as “nonconceptual.” But vikalpa has also been rendered as “imagination,” “discriminative construction,” “discursive thought,” and “discrimination.” Related terms, such as kalpanā (conceptualization/mental construction) and kalpanāpoḍha (devoid of conceptualization/mental construction), have also been rendered in various ways. Besides the question of how to translate these terms in any given Buddhist philosophical text, how should we relate them to current philosophical or cognitive scientific uses of the term “concept”? More generally, given that the relationship between the conceptual and the nonconceptual has been one of the central and recurring issues for the Buddhist philosophical tradition altogether, can Buddhist philosophy bring fresh insights to our contemporary debates about whether experience has nonconceptual content? And can contemporary philosophy and cognitive science help to illuminate or even resolve some older Buddhist philosophical controversies?

Introduction