Husserl's Account Research Articles

Husserl’s Notion of Solitary Speech Reconsidered: In Conversation with Vygotsky

ABSTRACT This paper clarifies the phenomenon Edmund Husserl referred to as “solitary speech,” defending his account against the deconstructionist claim that it serves as a mere prop for his transcendental project. To do this, first, I examine how this idea has been misunderstood by Jacques Derrida in Speech and Phenomena. Second, I present Husserl's account of solitary speech as a strictly phenomenological-psychological analysis of a concrete unit of psychic experience, drawing on Husserl's broader view on the relationship between psychology and phenomenology. Third, I compare Husserl's account to Lev Vygotsky's empirical psychological account of “inner speech” to demonstrate their affinity, and to re-establish the misunderstood theme of solitary speech as a concrete linguistic and cognitive phenomenon. This not only corrects the deconstructionist bias but sets a proper approach to the phenomenon of solitary speech, which can contribute to a broader account of the linguistic and cultural formation of human consciousness.

The Ethical Attitude: A Husserlian Account of Striving to Be a Good Person

The Ethical Attitude: A Husserlian Account of Striving to Be a Good Person

Cultural appropriation: an Husserlian account

Cultural appropriation: an Husserlian account

From communication to communalization: a Husserlian account

From communication to communalization: a Husserlian account

The Abnormality of Discrimination: A Phenomenological Perspective

Over the years, phenomenology has provided illuminating descriptions of discrimination, with its mechanisms and effects being thematised at the most basic levels of embodiment, (dis)orientation, selfhood, and belonging. What remains somewhat understudied is the lived experience of the discriminator. In this paper I draw on Husserl's phenomenological account of normality to reflect on the ways in which we discriminate at the prereflective levels of perceptual experience and bodily being. By critically reflecting on the intentional structures undergirding discriminatory practices, I argue that discrimination is characteristic of a naïve normalising attitude which is habitually interested in securing a familiar experience of a static normality. I first demonstrate how this attitude problematically tends to reproduce, enforce, and further sediment discriminatory and exclusionary norms. Further, I provide an internal critique which problematises discrimination—without recourse to external normative standards—on three fronts: as epistemically unproductive, experientially obscuring, and normatively non-instantiating. In discriminatory acts we see an abnormal refusal to enrich, revise, and genetically establish new normative commitments, new ways of seeing, and a new normality.

A Phenomenology of the Work of Attention

ABSTRACT With the aim of showing what it takes to see the world and others as they are, this article provides a phenomenological account of what Iris Murdoch has memorably called “the work of attention.” I first show that Aron Gurwitsch’s analyses of attention provide a basis on which to reject a voluntaristic account of attention according to which seeing things as they are is as simple as directing one’s attention to something. Then, in order to elucidate the work that is involved in paying attention, I draw on Edmund Husserl’s descriptions of the activity characteristic of attentive consciousness. I then show how a Husserlian account of the work of attention can help make sense of Murdoch’s pessimistic claim that our consciousness is not “a transparent glass through which it views the world” while also indicating how we, by paying attention, can do better.

A Phenomenological Interpretation of "Veen's Time"

Abstract: To establish The Texture of Time as a notable philosophical achievement, this essay puts it in the context of transcendental phenomenology and elucidates "Veen's Time" by way of comparison to Husserl's theory of time-consciousness. Despite Nabokov's apparent disinterest in phenomenology, the monist stance, descriptive method and de facto epoché in The Texture of Time all point to it being a piece of phenomenological analysis. Veen's conception of the Present as a hollow is analogous to Husserl's notion of the absolute flow of time-constituting consciousness; by emphasizing the stillness of the Present, Veen even irons out a couple of rough edges in Husserl's account. The Past is not a mere extension of the Present, but an equally important panel of "Veen's Time" with its own structure that centers on the subject and the object as two identity poles. Finally, drawing on the concept of "protention," the future-facing element of the Present, Veen's dismissal of the Future as "a quack at the court of Chronos" is interpreted as attacking the conventional tripartite image of Time instead of the Future per se.

Sharing Time in We-Experiences: A Critical Merleau-Pontian Re-Reading of Schütz’ Tuning-In Relationship

Schütz’ tuning-in relationship designates sharing time as the ground of we-experiences, but the Husserlian account of time that he relies upon for this argument seems to undermine the very possibility of doing so. I argue that Merleau-Ponty’s conception of temporality offers a more plausible account of shared time via the ‘transferability’ of the body schema. Disability theorists and critical phenomenologists, however, would remind us that any account of we-experiences must recognize bodily difference. I argue that bodies of diverse motilities can come to share a body schema without risk of ‘forced time compliance’ if we jettison synchronization and embrace improvisation as a paradigm for schematic sharing: I use the example of collective free improvisation to illustrate flexible, emergent, and bidirectional body schemas that, I claim, circumvent the assimilationist tendencies looming in any account of we-experiences premised upon bodily sameness.

What is Phenomenological about Critical Phenomenology? Guenther, Al-Saji, and the Husserlian Account of Attitudes

Since Gayle Salamon’s 2018 article “What is Critical about Critical Phenomenology?”, phenomenologists and critical theorists have offered various responses to the question this title poses. In doing this, they articulated the following considerations: is renewed criticality targeting the phenomenological method itself, does it expand its subject matter to marginalized experiences, does it retool key phenomenological concepts? One aspect of this debate that has been left under-interrogated, however, is the word “phenomenology” itself. There is after all another question to ask in this context: what is phenomenological about critical phenomenology? Many avenues of response are of course possible. Phenomenology could most broadly be meant as an approach that concerns itself with what is given in experience in order to describe the structures of that givenness. From a Husserlian perspective, pure phenomenology is the science which concerns itself with phenomena in the full and diverse sense of the word—not as understood by specific natural or human sciences. What is distinctive of phenomenology is thus not what subset or type of phenomena it is interested in but how it relates to them, which, as Husserl introduces Ideas I, happens “in a completely different attitude.”

The Givenness of Other People: On Singularity and Empathy in Husserl

Other people figure in our experience of the world; they strike us as unique and genuinely other. This paper explores whether a Husserlian account of empathy as the way in which we constitute an intersubjective world can account for the uniqueness and otherness of other people in our experience. I contend that it can’t. I begin by explicating Husserl’s theory of empathy, paying particular attention to the reduction to a purely egoic sphere and the steps that ostensibly permit a subject to re-inhabit a world of others from out of this sphere. In querying Husserl’s theory, I consider a series of problems, raised by Zhida Luo, concerning the apparent centrality of bodily similarity in empathy. I sketch Luo’s solution, which involves a shift to tactile similarity. While it makes for a better theory of empathy, this solution isn’t sufficient to make room for the givenness of another person not originally predicated on similarity. To clarify what’s at issue here, I turn to the Husserlian pictures of empathy presented by Heinz Kohut and Edith Stein. I conclude with a remark about what might be required, given the inability of Husserlian empathy to make room for the experience of others as singular and other, for a picture of our phenomenal life to have a shape that accounts for the coexistence of empathy to others who are like oneself and hospitality to others as genuine others.

Constancy and Constitution

AbstractI argue for the following claims: (1) A core Husserlian account of perceptual constancy needs to be given in terms of indicative future‐oriented conditionals but can be complemented by a counterfactual account; (2) thus conceived, constancy is a necessary aspect of content. I speak about a “core Husserlian” account so as to capture certain ideas that Michael Madary has presented as the core of Edmund Husserl's approach to perceptual constancy, viz., that “perception is partly constituted by the continuous interplay of intention and fulfilment” and that this “gives us a way to understand the relationship between different appearances of the same object” (See Madary, M. (2012) “Husserl on Perceptual Constancy.” European Journal of Philosophy 20(1): 145–165.). I take myself to be developing, and perhaps correcting, Madary's view as I discuss the role of the core Husserlian ideas, and counterfactuals, in accounting for shape and color constancy, respectively. I bridge constancy and fulfilment‐conditional content by appealing to the Husserlian notion of constitution, which captures the process in which objectivity and, correlatively, intentional experience, are built up in the experiential flow.

And Don't Forget Phenomenology, Etc.

After 1967, for some twenty years it appears that Derrida has little to say about Husserl. In the late 1980s he returns to Husserl and reiterates his early critiques of the limitations of phenomenology in relation to European humanism. However, in the 1990s there is more than just a return to Husserl, there is also a re-evaluation, prompted by the publication of Derrida's 1953–1954 thesis on phenomenology. This article focuses on Derrida essay from 2000, ‘Et Cetera … (and so on, und so weiter, and so forth, et ainsi de suite, und so überall, etc.)’, which is both the development of a footnote from 1961 and a reminder to his readers to not forget the importance of phenomenology in the history of deconstruction. Focusing on the idealised status of the ‘etc.’ in phenomenology and Husserl's remarkable account of the syncategorematic ‘and’, Derrida's essay suggests that we must think of both ‘deconstruction … and phenomenology’ and of the tradition and legacy of phenomenology as a limit for deconstruction.

Husserl on rationality

AbstractEdmund Husserl devoted considerable effort to the development of a phenomenological theory of rationality, as, for instance, part four of Ideas 1 attests. After providing some necessary background, I will spell out the details of Husserl's account. Yet, as I will also argue, Husserl's official doctrine is untenable due to several ambiguities and internal tensions. Hence, my primary aim in this paper is to offer a modified phenomenological theory of rationality that avoids the problems of Husserl's original account.

Husserl, the active self, and commitment

In “On what matters: Personal identity as a phenomenological problem” (2020), Steven Crowell engages a number of contemporary interpretations of Husserl’s account of the person and personal identity by noting that they lack a phenomenological elucidation of the self as commitment. In this article, in response to Crowell, I aim to show that such an account of the self as commitment can be drawn from Husserl’s work by looking more closely at his descriptions from the time of Ideas and after of the self as ego or I and egoic experience as attentive experience. I specifically aim to sketch the beginning of a response to three questions I take Crowell to be posing to a Husserlian account of the person and personal identity: (1) What more than pre-reflective self-awareness can be attributed to the self on phenomenological grounds so that we can understand, phenomenologically speaking, how selves become persons? (2) How can what characterizes the self in addition to pre-reflective self-awareness be discerned in both our commitment to truth and our feeling bound by love and other emotive commitments that cannot be fully rationally justified, which Husserl acknowledges are both sources of personal self-constitution? And (3), do all selves become persons? In the paper I elaborate how my answers to the first two questions turn on the self not just being self-aware but active in a particular sense. And to begin to address the third question, I suggest that while any form of wakeful conscious experience is both self-aware and active, this activity of the self makes a difference for those who are socio-historically embedded in the way we are. Specifically, on the proposed Husserlian account, selves that are socio-historically embedded become persons in and through their active relating to what they attentively experience. In concluding, I indicate how this Husserlian account might compare to Crowell’s claim that “self-identity (ipseity) is not mere logical identity (A=A) but a normative achievement […] which makes a ‘personal’ kind of identity possible” (2020).

Perceptual confidence: A Husserlian take

AbstractIn this paper, I propose a Husserlian account of perceptual confidence, and argue for perceptual confidence by appeal to the self‐justification of perceptual experiences. Perceptual confidence is the intriguing view, recently developed by John Morrison, that there are not just doxastic confidences but also perceptual confidences, that is, confidences as aspect of perceptual experience, enabling us to account, for example, for the increasing confidence with which we experience an approaching human figure, while telling ourselves, as the viewing distance diminishes, “It looks like this just could be Isaac,” “It looks like this is probably Isaac,” “It looks like this is almost certainly Isaac.” I first present my Husserlian account with a focus on the notion of fulfillment, and the idea that the contents of perceptual experience are fulfillment conditions. I then show that this account can be complemented by PC. Finally, I develop a focus on the idea of perceptual self‐justification, diverting the perceptual confidence debate from its pre‐eminent concern with the relations between perceptual and doxastic confidences, and present an argument to the effect that there are perceptual confidences.

Recalcitrant Emotions: A Phenomenological View

In this paper, I sketch an account of emotion that is based on a close analogy with a Husserlian account of perception. I also make use of the approach that I have limned, viz., to articulate a view of the kind of “conflict without contradiction” (CWC) which may obtain between a recalcitrant emotion and a judgment. My main contention is that CWC can be accounted for by appeal to the rationality of perception and emotion, conceived as responsiveness to experiential evidence. The conflicts in question can be regarded as obtaining between different strands of evidence, and our perceptual and emotional experiences can be thus conflicted even among themselves, not only in the special case of a conflict with a judgment.

Husserl on Hallucination: A Conjunctive Reading

Several commentators have recently attributed conflicting accounts of the relation between veridical perceptual experience and hallucination to Husserl. Some say he is a proponent of the conjunctive view that the two kinds of experience are fundamentally the same. Others deny this and purport to find in Husserl distinct and non-overlapping accounts of their fundamental natures, thus committing him to a disjunctive view. My goal is to set the record straight. Having first briefly laid out the problem under discussion and the terms of the debate, I then review the proposals that have been advanced, disposing of some and marking others for further consideration later in the paper. A. D. Smith's disjunctive reading is among the latter. I discuss it at length, arguing that Smith fails to show that Husserl's views on perceptual experience entail a form of disjunctivism. Following that critical discussion, I present a case for a conjunctive reading of Husserl's account of perceptual experience.

Dallas Willard’s Contribution to Phenomenology

Dallas Willard’s contribution to phenomenology is presented in terms of his articles on, and translations into English of, Edmund Husserl’s early philosophical writings (i.e., those in the decade prior to Husserl’s 1900 publication Logical Investigations), which single-handedly prevented them from falling into oblivion, both literally and philosophically. Willard’s account of Husserl’s “negative critique” of formalized logic in those writings, and argument for its contemporary relevance, is presented and largely endorsed.

Introduction

Introduction

Husserlian Mereology and Intimate Community Membership

ABSTRACT This article provides an interpretation of Edmund Husserl's concept of personal community based on his formal mereology. Husserl's unique ontology of community is demonstrated, which opens up and informs a Husserlian account of the intentionality belonging to community membership. My focus here is exclusively on the intentionality of “intimate” community membership, appealing to Husserl's technical notion of intimacy as found in his theory of parts and wholes. I argue that Husserl's notorious account of some communities understood as “personalities of a higher order” is indicative of mereological intimacy.