Critique Of Husserl Research Articles

Demythologising the Given: Schlick, Cornelius, and Adorno contra Husserl

After the attempt at collaboration between the Frankfurt School and the Vienna Circle failed in the late 1930s, Adorno stood at the forefront of critical theory’s polemics against ‘positivism’. Given these later polemical exchanges, some of the tendencies common to both movements have remained overlooked. Among these is their opposition to the phenomenological tradition. This paper focusses on certain features common to Schlick’s and Adorno’s critical responses to Husserl. The Machians, including Adorno’s supervisor Hans Cornelius, were targeted by Husserl’s onslaught against psychologism in 1900. The young Schlick’s Machian background had motivated his contribution to the Psychologismusstreit, in the context of which he launched a series of objections against Husserl’s ‘independence theory of truth’. Adorno’s later doctoral dissertation under Cornelius was also motivated by the effort to defend his master against Husserl’s objections. Schlick’s criticisms intensified in later works, where Husserl’s epistemology of intuition is seen as yet another instance of the widespread confusion between knowledge and acquaintance. Schlick’s warnings against Husserl’s turn towards the irrationalist fashions of his day find their echo in Adorno’s ‘Metakritik’. Apart from their broad agreement in how they understand Husserl’s positioning within his context, Schlick and Adorno also develop a similar criticism of Husserl’s account of intuition as failing in its aspiration to discover unmediated givenness, which it confuses with mediated conceptual knowledge. Unfortunately, while Adorno explicitly acknowledges Schlick’s critique of Husserl, he also misconstrues it as a scientistic rejection of metaphysical nonsense, thus failing to acknowledge the proximity to his approach.

Merleau-Ponty and Derrida on Husserl’s Origin of Geometry

Abstract: A number of claims made by Derrida concerning Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of Husserl will be carefully considered and evaluated here. First, Derrida’s claim that Merleau-Ponty’s mis-interprets Husserl’s letter to Lévy-Bruhl will be challenged. Secondly, Derrida’s claim that his criticism of Husserl’s phenomenology can be applied just as well to Merleau-Ponty’s will be challenged. Thirdly, it is a careful consideration of textual evidence that will be used to support these challenges. Finally, Merleau-Ponty’s late lectures will take us back to the Lévy-Bruhl letter and finally to Merleau-Ponty’s own phenomenology of language, one that integrates perception and language and yet that still privileges not eidetic essences or linguistic expression but perception as its primary term.

The groundlessness of sense: a critique of Husserl’s idea of grounding

The groundlessness of sense: a critique of Husserl’s idea of grounding

HUSSERL, AJDUKIEWICZ, AND BLAUSTEIN ON MEANING

The aim of this article is to investigate the reception of Husserl’s theory of meaning by Ajdukiewicz and Blaustein, two members of the analytically-oriented Lvov-Warsaw School, who, in different ways, were attracted to and confronted with Husserl’s phenomenology. The discussed hypothesis is that Ajdukiewicz’s interpretation of Logical Investigations, and his original theory of meaning influenced both Blaustein’s critical reading of Husserl’s theory of intentionality and his account of meaning-intention. After outlining the central elements of “First Logical Investigation” the paper shows how it is interpreted by Ajdukiewicz in his Lvov lectures on logic and in his directival theory of meaning. What emerges is a psychological-descriptive interpretation of Husserl’s concept of meaning, and a reconsideration of his theory of intentionality within the inferential structure of beliefs in premises that motivates a person who speaks a language to believe in conclusions of a certain form. This leads Ajdukiewicz to his own original conventionalist account of meaning which is based on the identification of three main directives of meaning that represent the matrix of a given language, i.e., the grid in which each meaning finds its place. These elements allow one to demonstrate how Ajdukiewicz’s interpretation resonates in Blaustein’s critique of Husserl in his early writings, where, in addition to a psychological-descriptive reading of phenomenology we also find a conventionalist conception of meaning acts and signitive presentations. According to Blaustein, a sign can represent an object only through the conventions arising from the directives of meaning that belong to a given natural language.

About time: Rainer Maria Rilke and the abyssal distance of Duino Elegies

ABSTRACT The speaker of Duino Elegies treats time as a threat to its sense of situatedness and privacy; a threat that taints all its modes of inhabiting and surviving in the world. This essay argues that Rilke’s foremost task in Elegies is to expose every aspect of subjectivity to such a threat. Arguing against the phenomenological readings of Rilke, that continue to misread the ‘open’-ness in his work as a non-dualist or an antediluvian gesture, this essay contends that the Rilkean ‘open’ is not a counterpoint to our everyday habitus nor does it untether the subject from its finite conditions of time and space, rather it creates a radical, and literary, necessity for finitude. The elegy form, with its traditional emphasis on loss and rehabilitation through memory and poetic authority, is refashioned by Rilke to a degree where what is lost is never allowed a birth into presence either in consciousness or in language. Drawing upon Derrida’s critique of Husserl, the essay argues that Rilke’s work is at its most singular precisely when it searches for a place within time and not despite it.

A Critical Analysis of Blaustein\u2019s Polemic Against Husserl\u2019s Method

The aim of the article is to define and investigate an interpretative framework for the philosophy of Leopold Blaustein, a student of Twardowski in Lwów (Lvov, Lviv) and Husserl in Freiburg im Breisgau. The author defends the thesis that it is justified to refer to Blaustein’s philosophy not as phenomenology sensu stricto, but as a phenomenologically-oriented descriptive psychology related but not equivalent to the project expounded by Husserl in the first edition of Logische Untersuchungen as well as in his project of phenomenological psychology (as formulated in 1925). The article traces Blaustein’s critique of Husserl’s phenomenological methods, putting it in the historical context of the discussion with Ingarden. Next, the author juxtaposes Blaustein’s understanding of psychology with Husserl’s project of 1925, which makes it possible to identify not only the differences between the two projects, but also their similarities. The article also raises questions about the scope of descriptive-psychological analyses.

Stein’s Critique of Husserl’s Transcendental Idealism

Stein claims that Husserl’s transcendental idealism makes it impossible to clarify the transcendence of the world because it posits that consciousness constitutes being. Inspired by Aquinas, Stein counters that making thinking the measure of being deprives what is of its epistemological and ontological independence from and primacy over what thinks. She contends that this approach inverts the natural relationship between the mind and the world. Given the complicated relationship between them, however, the question is whether Stein’s argument that Husserl lacked an adequate understanding of and appreciation for the phenomenon of transcendence is sound. In fact, Husserl’s treatments of “limit problems of phenomenology” in his manuscripts from 1908 to 1937, which were only recently published in Husserliana XLII (2014), show that he undertook extensive investigations of metaphysical, metaethical, and religious and theological questions. Tragically, Stein was prevented from gaining an even remotely complete picture of Husserl’s work. In this paper, therefore, I examine Stein’s critique of Husserl’s transcendental idealism in light of the fuller evidence.

CONRAD-MARTIUS: BEING, ESSENCE, EXISTENCE. IN DISCUSSION WITH ARISTOTLE’S, AQUINAS’ AND HUSSERL’S ONTOLOGIES AND METAPHYSICS

The article deals with Conrad-Martius’ conception of being and existence and explores it by contrasting it with the conceptions of Aristotle, Aquinas and Husserl within the framework of their respective ontologies and metaphysics. The article delves into the problems of both the hypostatization and the origin of being in particular. I claim that the hypostatization of being does not concern the Sachverhalt, as Jean Wahl claims, but the noema itself insofar as intentionality transcends what is constituted by consciousness and grasps the essence of the substance itself, whose existence is not absolutely but hypothetically posited. I will further show that even though Conrad-Martius rejects the transcendental reduction, she accepts the eidetic reduction and the positing of a sphere of original and given facts, which are not only absolutely given to consciousness, but also self-grounded and self-sustained. Conrad-Martius’ research traces the origin of these back to a transphysical realm, thus revealing the grounds for the Husserlian sphere of primal facts, which itself remains beyond the reach of phenomenological reflection. Hence Conrad-Martius’ and Husserl’s investigations encounter and complement each other at the point where the real bursts into reality and becomes available to consciousness. These reflections are organized as follows: The first part presents Conrad-Martius’ conception of a real-ontological phenomenology in order to examine her criticism of Husserl’s transcendental reduction. The second part deals with her real-ontological conception of the essence of reality or the “real-reality” and its hypothetically posed existence. The third part concerns the conceptions of being, analogia essendi and categorial being with recourse to Aristotle, Aquinas and Husserl and sets these in relation to Conrad-Martius’ own conception. The fourth part deals with her own understanding of the analogia essendi and of real being in order to shed light on the claim concerning the hypostatization of being. The fifth part explores Husserl’s positing of a sphere of primal facticity, Conrad-Martius’ conception of a real entity and its origin in a transphysical realm. The article finally summarizes the main results of these reflections.

La radicalisation de la phénoménologie chez Eugen Fink

My paper aims to lay out the main tenets of the philosophical project Eugen Fink unfolded in his post-war writings and argues that his enterprise is situated at the crossroads between two compatible yet distinct lines of inquiry: a phenomenology of mediality and a philosophical cosmology. The twofold orientation followed byFink’s radicalization of classical phenomenology can best be grasped if we pay heed to the double critical strategy he put in place in order to overcome what he deemed to be the shortcomings of Husserl’s phenomenology. In the first place, Fink undertakes a “phenomenological” critique of Husserl, showing that the paradigmatic models underlying Husserl’s analysis and, most notably, the preeminence granted to the “individuated thing”, drastically limit the field available for a phenomenological description. On this account, Fink’s critique aims at expanding the domain phenomenology can explore. However, in the second place, Fink points to the limits inherent to phenomenology as such, and advocates for the necessity of supplementing phenomenology’s descriptive analysis with a speculative approach. In this sense, his project of radicalizing phenomenology is tantamount to unveiling the speculative presuppositions undergirding and orienting any descriptive inquiry.

A Mereological Perspective on Husserl’s Account of Time-Consciousness

This paper approaches Husserl’s analysis of time-consciousness from a mereological perspective. Taking as inspiration Bergson’s idea that pure duree is a multiplicity of interpenetration, I will show, from within Husserlian phenomenology, that the absolute flow can indeed be described as a whole of interpenetrating parts. This mereological perspective will inform my re-consideration of the much-discussed issue of Husserl’s self-criticism concerning the schema of content and apprehension. It will also reveal a fundamental similarity between Husserl’s conception of the absolute flow and Sartre’s conception of lived temporality. This paper consists of four sections. Section 2 presents the basic elements of Husserl’s mereology. Section 3 introduces the difficulty encountered by Husserl’s early account of time that makes use of the schema. I will examine Barry Dainton’s criticism of Husserl’s theory of time-consciousness against the background of the older debate between Meinong and Stern, a debate that has informed Husserl’s own account. Section 4 distinguishes two common (but misguided) criticisms of the schema from Husserl’s own self-criticism, which is in turn divided into two steps. It is shown how the second step of this self-criticism implies the interpenetration of the absolute flow and responds to Dainton’s criticism. Finally, Sect. 5 concludes with some comparative remarks. I will show how Husserl’s notion of absolute flow, as mereologically interpreted, anticipates Sartre’s conception of consciousness as self-transcendence, as well as how it accommodates the apparently conflicting mereological intuitions of Aristotle and Bergson.

Sartre’s critique of Husserl

ABSTRACTThis paper articulates a new understanding of Sartre’s philosophical methodology in his early publications up to and including Being and Nothingness. Through his critique of Husserl across these works, Sartre develops an original and sophisticated variety of transcendental phenomenology. He was attracted to Husserl’s philosophy for its promise to establish the foundations of empirical psychology but ultimately concluded that it could not fulfil this promise. Through the analyses that led him to this conclusion, Sartre formulated a new kind of phenomenological reduction and a distinctive kind of transcendental argument to draw conclusions about mind-independent reality from phenomenological premises. His aims were to dissolve the traditional distinction between mind and world, to establish that the mind is accessible to empirical study, and to formulate the conceptual framework required to study the mind systematically. Sartre’s philosophy of psychology, therefore, drove the philosophical development of the methodological foundation of his philosophical project.

Sign and Hyle: Re-reading Derrida’s Critique of Husserl Through the Bernau Manuscripts

ABSTRACTDerrida’s philosophy starts with a law stated in The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy: “No analysis could present, make present in its phenomenon or reduce to the point-like nature of the element, instantaneous and identical to itself.” This “law” is derived from a critique of Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology, which, according to Derrida, demonstrates the impossibility of reducing phenomena to a single origin. In this paper, I argue that Derrida’s critique is based on an omission of the Bernau Manuscripts, within which Husserl explores the constitution of time consciousness that is not centred at a point-like present but rather at the concatenation of Hyle. This theory surpasses the presentism in Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time and hence becomes a potential response to Derrida’s criticism.

E. Husserlio egologinės sąmonės sampratos kritika E. Voegelino darbuose


 [straipsnis ir santrauka lietuvių kalba; santrauka anglų kalba]
 Nė viename iš savo darbų E. Voegelinas nėra detaliau susiejęs savo Husserlio fenomenologijos kritikos su vėliau išplėtota politine filosofija. Siekiant užpildyti šią spragą, straipsnyje aptariama Husserlio egologinės sąmonės koncepcijos kritika Voegelino esė rinkinyje „Anamnesis“ ir šios kritikos reikšmė jo brandžiajai politinei filosofijai, kurią geriausiai reprezentuoja „Naujojo politikos mokslo“ projektas. Remiantis šia analize teigiama, kad egologinės sąmonės kontekstų ribotumo įsisąmoninimas ir šio ribotumo peržengimas Voegelino filosofijoje reiškė pamatinę racionalaus klasikinio politikos mokslo sugrąžinimo sąlygą. Ne-objektinę, ne intencionalią (huserliškąja prasme) struktūrą turinčios patirtys ir jų eksplikacija Voegelino politinėje filosofijoje buvo tvarią visuomeninę ir politinę tvarką laiduojančių principų šaltinis, tuo pat metu suteikiantis galimybę įveikti vadinamąjį „vertybinį demonizmą“ socialiniuose moksluose.

Paul Ricœur’s Search for a Just Community. The Phenomenological Presupposition of a Life “with and for others”

The aim of this article is to examine how Ricœur’s critique of Husserl’s and Levinas’s notions of intersubjectivity informs his own alternative conceptualization of the intra- and interpersonal as a complex intertwining of moral selfhood and a just community. My first assumption is that law, as a prescriptive intervention in the social structure of our communal life, presupposes a phenomenology of our “being with others”. My second assumption is that Ricœur’s entire philosophical anthropology, and specifically his ideas on ethics, legality and justice, can be read as a prolonged response to Husserl’s solipsistic deadlock in the famous Fifth Cartesian Meditation. Taken together these two assumptions connect Ricœur’s early analysis of phenomenology with his complex reconceptualization of moral selfhood in Oneself as Another, culminating in the ethical maxim of “a good life with and for others in just institutions.”

Making sense of the lived body and the lived world: meaning and presence in Husserl, Derrida and Noë

I argue that Husserl’s transcendental account of the role of the lived body in sense-making is a precursor to Alva Noe’s recent work on the enactive, embodied mind, specifically his notion of “sensorimotor knowledge” as a form of embodied sense-making that avoids representationalism and intellectualism. Derrida’s deconstructive account of meaning—developed largely through a critique of Husserl—relies on the claim that meaning is structured through the complication of the “interiority” of consciousness by an “outside,” and thus might be thought to lend itself to theories of mind such as Noe’s that emphasize the ways in which sense-making occurs outside the head. But while Derrida’s notion of “contamination” rightly points to an indeterminateness of meaning in an outside, extended, concrete lived world, he ultimately reduces meaning to a structure of signification. This casts indeterminateness in terms of absence, ignoring the presence of non-linguistic phenomena of embodied sense-making central to both the contemporary enactivist program and to the later Husserl, who is able to account for the indeterminateness of meaning in lived experience through his distinction between sense (Sinn) and more exact linguistic meaning (Bedeutung). Husserl’s transcendental theory of meaning also allows for a substantive contribution to sense-making from the side of the perceived object—an aspect missing from Noe’s account. Thus, in contrast to Derrida and to Noe, Husserl accounts for sense-making in terms of both the lived body and the lived world.

Eugen Enyvvari’s road to Göttingen and back: A case study in the Transleithanian participation in early phenomenology (with an appendix of Edmund Husserl’s two unpublished letters to Enyvvari)

Despite attending Husserl’s classes, participating in the discussions of the Gottingen phenomenological circle, and writing prolifically on phenomenology, Eugen Enyvvari (1884–1959) seems to have been virtually ignored by phenomenological scholarship. I use an array of unpublished sources and a survey of his juvenilia to reconstruct Enyvvari’s biography and intellectual formation, including his confrontation with Melchior Palagyi’s critique of Husserl and Bolzano. Based on both his reports and records from the Gottingen University Archives, I attempt to establish the influences to which he could have been exposed in Gottingen. I rely on a careful micro-analysis of the development of Husserl’s notion of noematical meaning at the time of Enyvvari’s stay in Gottingen in order to asses Enyvvari’s specific contribution to phenomenology and his significance from the point of view of the general historiography of phenomenology.

Husserl and Levinas: The Ethical Structure of a Philosophical Debt

The article examines Levinas’s evolving relationship with Husserl. It shows how the critical dialogue with Husserl and, specifically, the transfiguration of Husserl’s key notion of “intentionality,” grounds the maturation of Levinas’s ethical thinking. It does so by unpacking the manner in which the Levinasian critique of Husserl is tied to a concept of “debt” through which Levinas understands his long-lasting relationship with the founder of phenomenology.

A Tale of Two Schisms: Heidegger’s Critique of Husserl’s Move into Transcendental Idealism

The history of the early phenomenological movement involves a tale of two schisms. The Great Phenomenological Schism originated between 1905 and 1913, as many of his contemporaries, for example, Pfänder, Scheler, Reinach, Stein, and Ingarden, rejected Husserl’s transformation of phenomenology from the descriptive psychology of his Logical Investigations (1900/19011) into the transcendental idealism of his Ideas I (1913). The Phenomenological-Existential Schism started between 1927 and 1933, as with Being and Time (1927) Heidegger moved away from Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology of consciousness toward an ontological analytic of existence. Yet these schisms were not unrelated developments. Closely following the documentary evidence to determine the exemplary nature of Heidegger’s critique of Husserl’s move into transcendental idealism, this essay establishes the inextricable linkage between the Great Phenomenological Schism and the Phenomenological-Existential Schism.

Merleau-Ponty and the Order of the Earth

In this essay, I reconstruct Merleau-Ponty’s implicit critique of Husserl in his lectures on Husserl’s concept of the earth as Boden or ground. Against Husserl, Merleau-Ponty regards the earth seen as pure Boden as an idealization. He emphasizes the ontological necessity for the earth as Boden to always hypostasize itself into the Copernican concept of earth as object. In turn, Merleau-Ponty builds this necessity into an essential feature of being, allowing himself to retrieve ontology itself from its status as external to being, and to make room for it within the structure of being: ontology is one of the ways in which experiences (such as that of the earth as Boden) become objectified, thereby allowing being to achieve its essential movement of hypostatization.

Phenomenology and social science: Alfred Schütz’s proto-sociology


 TThe paper surveys A. Schütz’s proto-sociological theory that carried on Weber’s sociological program by expanding it through Husserl’s constitutive phenomenology. The theory will be explicated through a focus on its phenomenological aspect. Schütz’s phenomenology is based on two elements. Firstly, it uses a phenomenological variant of action theory, namely the idea that argues for the given nature of intersubjective relationships. Secondly, it uses the criticism of Husserl’s tenets on intersubjectivity. Schütz’s theory about the relation of everyday and scientific understanding is influenced by expectations of social science. Therefore his theory transcends the limitations of other phenomenological theories that defy application in the area of social sciences. In addition, his model can has its own place in philosophical phenomenology. The paper, finally, surveys those trends in sociology that have carried on Schütz’s approach and managed to mingle aspects of phenomenology and sociology.