Husserl's Critique Research Articles

Scheinbare Wirklichkeit. Zur Idee einer phänomenologischen Philosophie

Presented are here the crucial presuppositions and building-blocks of a phenomenological philosophy. Inspired by Husserl's critique of scientific objectivism and his claim that the life-world as the world of our experience is the only real world, such a philosophy starts from the breaking of the spell of objective reality as the only and true actuality and the acknowledgment of the appearance-character of all actuality and of objective reality itself. It further requires reinterpretations of the notions of sensitivity, subjectivity and consciousness. Foundational for the sketched idea of phenomenological philosophy is the insight that all conscious life is necessarily determined by interests.

The Importance of Distinguishing between the Theoretical Attitude and the Natural Scientific Attitude in the Discipline of Psychology

Edmund Husserl's critique of using the natural scientific method to investigate meaningful human experience remains relevant to recent debates in psychology. Discursive Psychology (DP) claims to draw upon phenomenological insights to critique quantitative psychology for studying theoretical concepts rather than the actual practices of the lived social world. In this paper, I will argue that DP overlooks the important distinction that can be made between the theoretical attitude and the natural scientific attitude in Husserlian Phenomenology and hence, once again, loses sight of the meaningfully constituted life-world. In doing so, I will demonstrate the continued relevance of Husserl's critique of natural science to the discipline of psychology.

Commentary

In this article, I explore the limitations inherent in any attempt to create the kind of rapproachment between phenomenology and neuroscience attempted by Charles Laughlin and C. Jason Throop in this issue. A review of Edmund Husserl's disaffection with natural scientific explanations of consciousness, focusing specifically on Husserl's critique of psychologism, reveals the theoretical problems inherent in a neuroscience blind to the insights of phenomenology. A natural scientific foundation for consciousness entails the skepticism and relativism of psychologism, and, from the phenomenological point of view, such can be avoided only if the categories of natural science are radically founded in the phenomenological life-world. Under such a phenomenological founding, the illumination of human experience, both personal and interpersonal, becomes the most basic philosophic and scientific task.

Jacob Klein's Revisionof Husserl's Crisis

The stated intention of Edmund Husserl's phenomenology, especially as it gained increasing clarity in his late work, was to cure the "crisis of the European sciences" which was, or is, also the "crisis of European humanity." This intention must be limited by the historical and critical analyses that attempt to substantiate it to the same degree that these analyses themselves must be renewed and extended to measure up to the intention. Only such a mutual interrogation can decide whether the healing intention of phenomenology should be revised, extended or abandoned. The revision by Jacob Klein of the role of mathematics in the institution (Urstiftung) of modern science as described by Husserl is one major site for such mutual interrogation. Klein's revision is based on his account of "symbol-generating abstraction" that he traces to the reformulation of modern mathematics by Vieta and others.1 My concern in this essay is to follow out the implications of Klein's revision of Husserl for the problem of reification in social reality and the human sciences. Husserl's critique of modernity in The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology centers on the "mathematization of nature" whereby nature is interpreted as in reality mathematical and thus amenable to a form of knowledge that is fundamentally mathematical. On this basis, modern knowledge accomplishes a "mathematical substruction of the world" in which the world as a totality is understood as being fundamentally mathematical and all qualitative features are understood to be secondary effects rooted in human subjectivity. In order to understand the constitution of modernity it is necessary to understand the original formation and perdurance of the structures that pre-form subsequent experiences. Here phenomenology encounters the question of history, not simply as empirical history, but as transcendental history. It is in the context of clarifying the sense in which Galileo established the new science that Husserl introduced the term Urstiftungwhich can be translated as "primal establishment," but better as "institution."2 It is mainly a temporal structure in the sense in which it is different to be born after the introduction of compulsory public schooling than before it, but it contains a spatial dimension in the sense that such an introduction begins in some places before others whose "uneven development" then exerts an interactive "push and pull" between them.3 Transcendental history is concerned with the temporal inscription of the life-world such that subsequent empirical history takes a different form after rather than before its institution. The process of institution may be drawn out in empirical history but from the viewpoint of transcendental history it constitutes one historical event. During this event of institution, its full implications and consequences are not yet evident. Similarly, certain elements enter into the institution whose origin is simply passed over and whose validity is simply taken for granted due to its prior sedimentation in tradition. Thus, more is given in the instituting event than is visible at the time. An event in transcendental history will thus often take considerable empirical history for its institution to become a question worth investigation, let alone be completely clarified. Such was the case for the mathematization of nature by Galileo that Husserl began to investigate within transcendental history due to the problem that the contemporary crisis of the sciences posed for the relation of science and philosophy to human life.4 Immediately prior to his analysis of the mathematization of nature in Crisis, Husserl observed that the reshaping of philosophy at the beginning of the modern age was based upon the "immense change of meaning whereby universal tasks were set, primarily for mathematics (as geometry and as formalabstract theory of numbers and magnitudes)."5 Thus, it is not only the interpretation of nature in mathematical terms, nor this combined with the ontologization toward a mathematical world-which arguably was already present in Plato-but that this combination is based upon a different mathematics unavailable to the Greek or Medieval worlds. …

The world unclaimed: a challenge to Heidegger's critique of Husserl

The World Unclaimed argues that Heidegger's critique of modern epistemology in Being and Time is seriously flawed. Heidegger believes he has done away with epistemological problems concerning the external world by showing that the world is an existential structure of Dasein. However, the author argues that Heidegger fails to make good his claim that he has rescued the phenomenon of the world, which he believes the tradition of philosophy has bypassed. Heidegger fails not only to reclaim the world but also to acknowledge its loss. Alweiss thus calls into question Heidegger's claim that ontology is more fundamental than epistemology. The World Unclaimed develops its powerful critique of Being and Time by arguing for a return to Husserl. It draws on Husserl's insight that it is the moving and sensing body that discloses how we are already familiar with the world. Kinaesthesia provides a key for understanding our relation to the world. The author thus suggests that thinkers in the vein of Husserl and Kant -who, for Heidegger, epitomize the tradition of modern philosophy by returning to a worldless subject- may provide us with the resources to reclaim the phenomenon of the world that Being and Time sets out to salvage. Alweiss' fresh and innovative study demonstrates that it is possible to overcome epistemological skepticism without ever losing sight of the phenomenon of the world. Moreover, Alweiss challenges us to reconsider the relation between Husserl and Heidegger by providing a forceful defense of Husserl's critique of cognition.

A Realist Analysis of the Relationship between Logic and Experience

I undertake to explain how the well known laws of formal logic – Barbara Syllogism, modus ponens, etc. – relate to experience by developing Edmund Husserl's critique ofFormalism and Psychologism in logical theory and then briefly explaining his positive views of the laws of logic. His view rests upon his understanding of the proposition as a complex, intentional property. The laws of formal logic are, on his view (and mine), statements about the truth values of propositions as determined by their formal character and relationships alone. The laws thus understood explain how algorithms set up to mirror them can accomplish what they do to advance knowledge, even though they operate purely mechanically. Further, they explain the proper sense in which formal laws "govern," and may guide, processes of actual thinking. Husserl's theory is a realist theory in the sense that, on his interpretation, the laws of pure or formal logic hold true regardless of what any individual, culture or species may or may not think, or even if no thinking ever occurs.

La théorie husserlien du jugement

Husserl research has so far given relatively little attention to Husserl's lifelong effort to work out a phenomenologically grounded theory of judgment. During his years in Halle and Gottingen Husserl devoted a number of important lecture courses to this project. There further exists an extensive compilation for research manuscripts from the same years consisting of detailed studies of a variety of issues in the theory of judgment which for Husserl was an essential part of the phenomenological critique of reason. Starting from the theory of judgment in the Logical Investigations and Husserl's critique of Brentano's theory of judgment, the present article presents an overview of the major themes and insights of Husserl's phenomenological analyses of the act of judgment and its propositional correlate.

An essay in epistemic Kuklophobia: Husserl's critique of Descartes' conception of evidence

Etude de la critique husserlienne de la conception theologique de l'evidence, definie par Descartes a partir de la notion de justification epistemique. Comparant la critique et la conception de l'evidence developpees par la phenomenologie classique et par la phenomenologie contemporaine, l'A. montre que la critique hermeneutique des theories cartesiennes de la connaissance et de l'evidence se fonde chez Husserl sur la problematique de la circularite et sur une approche de l'epistemologie hantee par la peur des cercles (kuklophobia)

Commentary on Tom Rockmore's "Husserl's Critique of Hegel"

Commentary on Tom Rockmore's "Husserl's Critique of Hegel"

I. Psychologism, Functionalism, and the modal status of logical Laws

In a recent article (Inquiry, Vol. 19 [1976]), J. W. Meiland addresses the issue of psychologism in logic, which holds that logic is a branch of psychology and that logical laws (such as the Principle of Non‐Contradiction) are contingent upon the nature of the mind. Meiland examines Husserl's critique of psychologism, argues that Husserl is not convincing, and offers two new objections to the psychologistic thesis. In this paper I attempt to rebut those objections. In question are the acceptable criteria for determining the possibility or impossibility of systems of logic significantly different from our own. I argue that a criteriological application of our accepted laws of logic to this question commits a circular fallacy. I then argue that, even if we accept logical consistency as a criterion for possibility, a plausible argument for the possibility of valid alternative logics can be constructed by using the functionalist analogy between minds and automata. Finally, I attempt to rebut the claim that in...

The discourse of the past: phenomenology, structuralism and historical geography

Historical geography has to be predicated on a critical examination of past and present discourses, and this necessarily involves a rejection of positivist epistemology. This was, in more general terms, the basis of Husserl's critique, but two alternatives to this are the constitutive phenomenology of Alfred Schutz and the linguistic structuralism of Claude Lévi-Strauss. Both present major difficulties. Schutz fails to recognize the necessity of a hermeneutic understanding of past societies and cannot account for the genesis and temporality of meaning, while Lévi-Strauss provides for a formalism which is directed towards the structure of the human mind rather than the historically specific structures of particular discourses. The connections and contrasts between these two positions suggest several ways in which the examination of discourse might be constituted in order to contribute to a structural history.

Psychologism in logic: Husserl's critique

Psychologism in logic holds that logic is a branch of psychology. This view has been vigorously defended by John Stuart Mill and by a number of German philosophers of logic, notably Erdmann. Its chief critics have been Husserl and Frege and, to a lesser extent, Russell. Husserl set forth a profound and detailed critique of psychologism in Logical Investigations. This paper examines this critique. First, I explain why the psychologistic theory is attractive. Then I show that Husserl's critique is not convincing, partly because he does not take the theory in its most plausible form and partly because he ignores certain important distinctions (for example, between what a statement is about and what it is true in virtue of). Then I raise two new objections to the psychologistic theory. The purpose of this paper is to suggest that the psychologistic theory remains an important and serious position from which we can learn much about the status of logic.

Husserl's Critique of Hume's Notion of Distinctions of Reason

Husserl's Critique of Hume's Notion of Distinctions of Reason