Puzzles in Phenomenology

Abstract

From a classical phenomenological point of view, to reason is to have a conscious intentional experience. A conscious experience can be described as a predicative reconstruction of whatever reason might be concerned with while the intentional aspect can be deduced from the effort of disclosing specialized propositional insights into whatever reasoning is concerned with. Husserl argued that the task of phenomenology is to pave the way toward a science of consciousness in which reason as key feature of conscious life will be properly treated. However, contemporary phenomenology adopted an entirely different perspective on this matter. Conscious experiences are now described from a perspective reminiscent to traditional empiricism while the search for universal objectivity is abandoned in favor of contextual truths. The current situation raises several questions (a) how did we get here, (b) does making sense entail emotions, (c) does the emotivist reconsideration of consciousness solve the problem of objectivity, (d) should a future science of consciousness stress the role of emotions as a solution to subjectivism and yet to be considered a phenomenological science of consciousness. In this paper, I only begin to tackle these problems.