Natural Attitude Research Articles

The Ethics of Belief

April 3, 2010 (11:17 am) C:\Users\Milt\Desktop\backup copy of Ken's G\WPData\TYPE2902\russell 29,2 050 red.wpd 188 Reviews 1 A.yW. Brown, The Metaphysical Society (New York: Octagon, 1973), pp. 180–1. THE ETHICS OF BELIEF Sylvia Nickerson History & Philosophy of Science & Technology / U. of Toronto Toronto, on, Canada m5s 1k1 s.nickerson@utoronto.ca Timothy J. Madigan. W.yK. CliVord and “The Ethics of Beliefz”. Newcastle, uk: CambridgeScholars Publishing, 2009. Pp. [x], 202. isbn 1-84718-503-7. £29.99; us$44.99 (hb). The mathematician William Kingdon CliTord (1845–1879) is generally remembered as a potentially great man whose life was cut short before his genius was fully realized. During his lifetime CliTord was well known in London as a public intellectual and noted authority on science. He was also an iconoclast , a leader in the application of Darwinian principles to areas beyond biology , and a proponent of non-Euclidean geometry. Unlike other agnostics, CliTord did not mourn the loss of his religious belief, nor did he worry that a secularized society would bring about general social decay. While other scientiWc naturalists worried that a collapse of religion would destroy morality and lead to social disintegration, CliTord willingly ceded the universal truths religion oTered, embracing the uncertainty that scientiWc knowledge actually entailed. He even dared to call himself an atheist. However, CliTord’s death at age 34 curtailed the trace of his thought. What remains is consigned to his scant private notebooks and collected works. Perhaps it was the brevity of his life that has led to his neglect within the history of science; no comprehensive appraisal of his mathematical work has been written. CliTord’sbest-knownnon-mathematical statementisthat“itiswrongalways, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insuUcient evidence.” This was the statement he defended in his lecture “The Ethics of Beliefz”, which he delivered to London’s Metaphysical Society in 1876. The Metaphysical Society, founded in 1869 to promote discussion between religious believers and scientiWc rationalists, ceased operation in 1880 after members could not Wnd enough common ground to begin debate. The rationalist position CliTord argues in “The Ethics of Beliefz” stands on the far side of the spectrum within this discourse. CliTord’s immoderate stance, along with his use of biblical rhetoric to argue a secularist position, was calculated to provoke conservative intellectuals and institutions.1 When his essay appeared in the January 1877 issue April 3, 2010 (11:17 am) C:\Users\Milt\Desktop\backup copy of Ken's G\WPData\TYPE2902\russell 29,2 050 red.wpd Reviews 189 of Contemporary Review, it proved antagonistic enough that it led in part to the dismissal of James Knowles as editor. Timothy Madigan’s book W.yK. CliVord and “The Ethics of Beliefz”z provides an introduction to and analysis of CliTord’s ethical philosophy. His goal is to outline the historical context from which CliTord’s most famous essay arose, and to analyze the merits and demerits of its argument through the viewpoints of critics and freethinkers from the nineteenth century to the present. Madigan gives a brief history of the Victorian crisis of faith, CliTord’s mathematical work, and the biographical details of his life. He presents the argument CliTord makes within “The Ethics of Beliefz”, and outlines the critical response from his contemporaries , including founding members of the Metaphysical Society William George Ward and Richard H. Hutton, poet Matthew Arnold, physiologist George John Romanes, and American psychologist and philosopher William James. Madigan also discusses the positions argued by other rationalists in the 1870s,1880sandlater(Leslie Stephen, Karl Pearson, FriedrichNietzsche, Charles Peirce and Bertrand Russell) and by modern philosophers who have contributed to the rationalist/religionist debate (C.yS. Lewis, J.yL. Mackie, Michael Martin, Peter van Inwagen, Susan Haack, Anthony Quinton, and Lorraine Code). In Chapter 6 Madigan presents his own defence of CliTord’s ethics of belief. While early sections of the book provide a helpful summary of previously published work, I found Madigan’s discussion of CliTord’s writings on psychology and theory of mind particularly valuable (pp. 58–65). Madigan notes positively that CliTord’s contribution helped steer the early development...

The Relevance of Husserl's Theory to Language Socialization

This article suggests that the theory of language socialization could benefit from adopting some key concepts originally introduced by the philosopher Edmund Husserl in the first part of the twentieth century. In particular, it focuses on Husserl's notion of “(phenomenological) modification,” to be understood as a change in “the natural attitude” that humans have toward the phenomenal world, their own actions included. After providing examples of different kinds of modifications in interpreting language and listening to music, Husserl's notion of “theoretical attitude” (a modification of “the natural attitude”) is introduced and shown to be common in adult conversations as well as in interactions between adults and young children. A reanalysis of an exchange previously examined byPlatt (1986) between a Samoan mother and her son is provided to show the benefits of an integration of phenomenological and interactional perspectives on adult‐child discourse. Finally, it is suggested that the failure sometimes experienced by children and adults to adopt new ways of being may be due to the accumulated effects of modifications experienced earlier in life which make it difficult if not impossible to retrieve earlier, premodificational ways of being. [language socialization, phenomenology, jazz aesthetics, Samoan child language]

The Role of Umwelt in Husserl’s Aufbau and Abbau of the Natur/Geist Distinction

In this essay I argue that Husserl’s development of the nineteenth century Natur/Geist distinction is grounded in the intentional correlate between the pre-theoretical natural attitude and environing world (Umwelt). By reconsidering the Natur/Geist distinction through its historical context in the nineteenth century debate between Wilhelm Dilthey and the Neo-Kantians from the Baden or Southwest school, it is possible to understand more clearly Husserl’s appropriations and novel contributions. One of Husserl’s contributions lies in his rigorous thematization and clarification of the constitutive features proper to the natural and human sciences as they arise from the pre-theoretical experience of an environing world. This ordinary lived experience between the lived body and environing world is presupposed by and forms a unity with both Natur and Geist, thereby acting as the unified ground that is inclusive of naturalized Geist and a geistig nature. This unbuilding (Abbau) of the Natur/Geist distinction is necessary, according to Husserl, for the radical clarification of the respective methodologies of the natural and human sciences.

Social Epistemology: Theory and Applications

Epistemology has had a strongly individualist orientation, at least since Descartes. Knowledge, for Descartes, starts with the fact of one’s own thinking and with oneself as subject of that thinking. Whatever else can be known, it must be known by inference from one’s own mental contents. Achieving such knowledge is an individual, rather than a collective, enterprise. Descartes’s successors largely followed this lead, so the history of epistemology, down to our own time, has been a predominantly individualist affair. There are scattered exceptions. A handful of historical epistemologists gave brief space to the question of knowing, or believing justifiably, based on the testimony of others. Testimony-based knowledge would be one step into a more social epistemology. Hume took it for granted that we regularly rely on the factual statements of others, and argued that it is reasonable to do so if we have adequate reasons for trusting the veracity of these sources. However, reasons for such trust, according to Hume, must rest on personal observations of people’s veracity or reliability. 1 Thomas Reid took a different view. He claimed that our natural attitude of trusting others is reasonable even if we know little if anything about others’ reliability. Testimony, at least sincere testimony, is always prima facie credible (Reid, 1970: 240 –241). Here we have two philosophers of the 18 th century both endorsing at least one element of what nowadays is called “social epistemology.” But these points did not much occupy either Hume’s or Reid’s corpus of philosophical writing; nor were 1 Hume wrote: “[T]here is no species of reasoning more common, more useful, and even necessary to human life, than that which is derived from the testimony of men, and the reports of eye-witnesses and spectators ... [O]ur assurance in any argument of this kind is derived from no other principle than our observation of the veracity of human testimony, and of the usual conformity of facts to the reports of witnesses.” (Hume 1972: 11)

HUBUNGAN ANTARA PEMAHAMAN SEJARAH PERGERAKAN NASIONAL INDONESIA DENGAN SIKAP TERHADAP BELA NEGARA

This study was aimed at finding out how the relation between understanding of Indonesian national movement history and state nurture attitudes of students of State Senior High School of Gorontalo Municipality. The research hypothesis stated that there was a meaningful relation between understandings of Indonesian national movement history and state nurture attitudes. The study used the descriptive quantitative research method. The population was designated as all students of Year II of State Senior High School of Gorontalo Municipality of the precept year of 2006/2007. The sample consisted of 159 students, 15% of the total population of 1060 students. Sampling was done by way of multi-stage random sampling. Data collection was done by tests and questionnaires using the Likert scale. Data analysis was done using the correlation and regression statistical techniques. Results of the correlation analysis showed that, there was a meaningful positive relation between understandings of Indonesian national movement history and state nature attitudes (r. count = 0,424; t. count = 5,87 t. table = 1,96). Results of the regression analysis showed a coefficient measure of understanding of Indonesian national movement history and state nurture attitudes of F. count = 34, 44 F. table (2,157) = 3,91. The statistical figures showed that there was a horizontal relation between students understanding for Indonesian national movement history and their state nurture attitudes. It was concluded that Indonesian national movement history had a contribution in developing nurture state attitudes. Key Words: Indonesian national movement history, state nurture, nationalism.

„Społeczeństwo otwarte” jako konsekwencja stanowiska krytycznego racjonalizmu

This paper is an attempt at presenting the construct of open society as a consequence of the critical rationalist position. The above mentioned position was originally taken by Karl Popper on the basis of methodology of the (natural) sciences. If we accept this interpretation, which is quite different from Bryan Magee’s thesis (though at first glance seeming identical), it will be much easier to capture the factual “weaknesses” in Popper’s political philosophy. The historical context in which his reflections arose (especially his two books: “The Poverty of Historicism” and “The Open Society and Its Enemies”) was not without influence on his proposal, which the author treated as his personal contribution to the fight against the authoritarian and totalitarian ideology.

Fenomenología y realidad virtual: el reto de un nuevo mundo

I try to study in this paper the virtual reality called SecondLife making use of the phenomenological method. For this purpose I analyze what happens in the natural attitude where reality is the factual existence here-and-now, and against which the virtual reality bears a duplication of planes: the real-real thing and my digital copy. To analyze what sustains the concept of reality it is necessary to make use of the epokhe. By means of it, we find out the relation of a bodily subject to the world, in a sense that is not given in SecondLife, a virtual universe whose zero-point is just my avatar, that is, the physical object that represents me. The paper unfolds of the consequences of this contrast.

Patterns That Connect

Despite the rationalist approach to science over the past four centuries, some physicists hold that new ideas mirror metaphysical perspectives of the natural world. The implications of these recent scientific theories present significant and complex interpretative problems for researchers who adopt a more traditional or rationalist philosophical position. Through her artwork, the author provides a conduit for a visual interpretation of the former, more holistic approach. She uses innately recognized symbols that appeal to humanity's natural and spiritual understandings of the environment and the cosmos. This cross-disciplinary artwork parallels contemporary scientific insights into our natural environment and the physical world that characterize, for example, Bohm's conception of implicate order.

The Ecstatic Quotidian: Phenomenological Sightings in Modern Art and Literature. (Literature and Philosophy) by Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei

MLR, 104.2, 2009 539 The Ecstatic Quotidian: Phenomenological Sightings in Modern Art and Literature. By Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei. (Literature and Philosophy) University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. 2007. ix+268 pp. $55. ISBN 978 0-271-03227-6. The question ofwhether, or how, to value the quotidian has been a key strand in modernist and postmodernist culture, in a period when everyday experience has been put at risk by regimentation, technology, and other ills. This is a prime area for exchanges between philosophy and literature, and in her stimulating and wide ranging study Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei argues cogently thatphenomenology, literature, and the visual arts have often been in concert, homing in on moments when familiar routines are briefly suspended and we see the ordinary world in a differentway. Instances ofwhat she calls the ecstatic quotidian' come about when we step outside the familiarity induced by the 'natural attitude'. Yet it is crucial toGosetti-Ferencei's argument that such ruptures are not breaks with the every day but revelations of a tension latentwithin it.Heidegger understood Dasein to comprise both average everydayness' and moments that transcended it,seen not as extraneous but as part and parcel ofwhat makes up the quotidian. In a brilliant set of readings Gosetti-Ferencei creates pathways linking Husserl, Heidegger, Dewey, Merleau-Ponty, and Bachelard with Rilke, Frost, Proust, Sartre, Ponge, and Robbe-Grillet, beforemoving on to consider visual art. She demonstrates convincingly that the enduring vitality of childhood experience isoften a key factor inmoments when everyday life reveals itsVulnerability to transformation', and its capacity to be revivified but not necessarily transcended. Rilke's essay on dolls or Frost's 'Birches' reveal how childish play and fantasymaintain openness and recep tivity that can be drawn on in adult life. Likewise, the poetic image, understood by Bachelard to be 'inherently variational', and to engender what he called reten tissementy becomes inRilke or Frost an instrument of 'deep existential probing of imaginative variation' that can open up the folds of lived experience by prompting a shift inour perception. In the last three of seven chapters Gosetti-Ferencei moves, via Rilke's passion forCezanne, and Heidegger's famous analysis ofVan Gogh, into the realm of art, examining thework of Cy Twombly, the colour field' painting of Morris Louie and Barnett Newman, and finally the long tradition of trompe Vceil painting from Zeuxis to a video Still Life by Sam Taylor-Wood. Phenomenology helps us to understand what is at stake in theway Rilke attends to themodulations of colour in Cezanne's paintings, and practises a kind of seeing that apprehends the temporality of the painterly image, opening onto theWeltinnenraum where the mystery of the quotidian ismade palpable. In Twombly's work, the withdrawal from discourse enacted by his scribbles points to an ecstatic muteness rooted in the non-purposiveness of childhood play. If still lifes have always reflected art's fascination with the quotidian, the perceptual illusions engendered by trompe Vceil painting often jolt us into seeing the familiar differently. As Gosetti-Ferencei points out in conclusion, fertileexchanges between art, litera ture, and philosophy do more than remind us ofwhat we tend to forget: they can 540 Reviews help to heal and revitalize a shattered quotidian'. Her own book, an outstanding contribution to the dialogue of literature and philosophy, contributes magnificently to this end. All Souls College, Oxford Michael Sheringham Wanderers across Language: Exile inIrish and Polish Literature of theTwentieth Cen tury. By Kinga Olszewska. (Studies inComparative Literature, 12) London: Legenda. 2007. xii+186 pp. ?45. ISBN 978-1-905981-08-3. In her afterword Kinga Olszewska quotes Seamus Heaney (from The Government of theTongue (London: Faber, 1988), p. 161) about the need, in poets, to 'survive amphibiously, that is to say, 'in the realm of "the times" and the realm of their moral and artistic self-respect'. This, writes Heaney, is 'a challenge immediately re cognizable to anyone who has livedwith the awful and demeaning facts ofNorthern Ireland's history over the last couple of decades'. Much of the time,Olszewska, who has written about Heaney elsewhere but not in thisvolume, positions her argument between perceptions taken from The Government of the Tongue and, not infre...

Cross-Cultural Comparison of Student Attitudes toward Snakes

AbstractThere is an increasing amount of research focusing on the origin of the human fear of animals. However, other dimensions of human views of frightening animals have been largely neglected. This study investigated attitudes toward snakes. The Snake Attitude Questionnaire (SAQ), which consisted of 58 Likert-type items (Cronbach's α = 0.91), was administered in a sample of students from two countries (Turkey and Slovakia). Students showed negative attitudes toward snakes, especially within the Negativistic and Naturalistic dimensions. Turkish students showed more positive Scientistic and Naturalistic attitudes than Slovakian students, and females showed more negative attitudes toward snakes than males. Although biology majors had more positive attitudes, compared with nonbiology majors, knowledge of snakes and beliefs about untrue myths were similar between these two subgroups. Our research indicates that fear of snakes negatively influences other attitudinal dimensions (especially naturalistic and scientific attitudes) although no students had been injured by a snake. Keeping various pets at home was associated with less fear of snakes. Nature protection actions should combine direct contact with these controversial animals with interventions against belief in untrue myths about snakes.

Husserl’s transcendental philosophy and the critique of naturalism

Throughout his career, Husserl identifies naturalism as the greatest threat to both the sciences and philosophy. In this paper, I explicate Husserl’s overall diagnosis and critique of naturalism and then examine the specific transcendental aspect of his critique. Husserl agreed with the Neo-Kantians in rejecting naturalism. He has three major critiques of naturalism: First, it (like psychologism and for the same reasons) is ‘countersensical’ in that it denies the very ideal laws that it needs for its own justification. Second, naturalism essentially misconstrues consciousness by treating it as a part of the world. Third, naturalism is the inevitable consequence of a certain rigidification of the ‘natural attitude’ into what Husserl calls the ‘naturalistic attitude’. This naturalistic attitude ‘reifies’ and it ‘absolutizes’ the world such that it is treated as taken-for-granted and ‘obvious’. Husserl’s transcendental phenomenological analysis, however, discloses that the natural attitude is, despite its omnipresence in everyday life, not primary, but in fact is relative to the ‘absolute’ transcendental attitude. The mature Husserl’s critique of naturalism is therefore based on his acceptance of the absolute priority of the transcendental attitude. The paradox remains that we must start from and, in a sense, return to the natural attitude, while, at the same time, restricting this attitude through the on-going transcendental vigilance of the universal epoche.

Institutionalized nihilism: An outline of the academic function

This essay is a variation on the theme of academia and academic practices in Sande Cohen's work. It develops through reference to two systems of discourse: Cohen's semio-critical analysis of academic writing and its cultural and political implications; and writings on epistemology, social-psychology, and semiotics, not just in themselves relevant to the analysis of academia, but including some of those orientating Cohen's writing. Taking the discipline of history as the paradigmatic academic practice, it outlines the academic function as a technological device that authorizes and facilitates the wide range of cultural and political behaviour generated by the economic system of totalitarian capitalism. It argues that the academic function discloses itself not as knowledge seeking ‘truth’ but (in the Platonic sense) as sophistry with privileged currency and value in the socio-economic climate of information and opinion. The academic function, therefore, operates cognitively in terms of equivalence and identity: its language encodes it as a socially affirmative, natural attitude, as a common sense. Additionally, both by its claim to universality and by its internal logic of self-amplification, its authoritative expertise has a theological aura, a clerical posture. Its structure is narcissistic since the world the academic function reflects and interprets is a likeness of the techno-sphere it helps to maintain. It culminates in nihilism because the profuse production of expert opinion on heterogeneous topics results in the redundancy of meaning and the negation of all values except production for its own sake. Even so, as Nietzsche recognized, because it negates, nihilism can also liberate.

“We Won't Know Who You Are”: Contesting Sex Designations in New York City Birth Certificates

This article examines shifts in the legal, medical, and common-sense logics governing the designation of sex on birth certificates issued by the City of New York between 1965 and 2006. In the initial iteration, the stabilization of legal sex categories was organized around the notion of “fraud”; in the most recent iteration, “permanence” became the measure of authenticity. We frame these legal constructions of sex with theories about the “natural attitude” toward gender.

Are the Laws of Physics Inevitable?

Social constructionists believe that experimental evidence plays a minimal role in the production of scientific knowledge, while rationalists such as myself believe that experimental evidence is crucial in it. As one historical example in support of the rationalist position, I trace in some detail the theoretical and experimental research that led to our understanding of beta decay, from Enrico Fermi’s pioneering theory of 1934 to George Sudarshan and Robert Marshak’s and Richard Feynman and Murray Gell-Mann’s suggestion in 1957 and 1958, respectively, of the V–A theory of weak interactions. This is not a history of an unbroken string of successes, but one that includes incorrect experimental results, incorrect experiment-theory comparisons, and faulty theoretical analyses. Nevertheless, we shall see that the constraints that Nature imposed made the V–A theory an almost inevitable outcome of this theoretical and experimental research.

Nordic sex education: a case of Finland

Nordic sex education has been estimated by the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) to represent an advanced model of a comprehensive sex education in Europe. Finland is the only Nordic country where this education has been followed up by two national surveys directed to biology and health education teachers in 1996 and 2006 and by measuring adolescents'sexual knowledge in national sexual health knowledge quizzes in 2000 and 2006. Sex education survey to teachers covered 421 schools in 1996 and 518 schools in 2006. Sexual health knowledge quiz was participated in 2000 by 401 schools and 30241 students and in 2006 by 462 schools and 33819 students. In 2006 responses from teachers and students could be combined in 339 schools. The most important educational objectives of sex education were, based on teachers’responses, to educate students to responsibility and to provide them correct facts. Among boys sex education had much more important role in relation to their knowledge than among girls. Among girls the success in school was more important predictor of the higher level sexual knowledge than hours allocated to sex education in school. The level of students'sexual knowledge was promoted positively by teachers who: wanted to teach natural attitudes and tolerance toward sexuality, who found sexual issues easy to talk, who told students of her/his personal life, and who applied drama and role play methods and students’talks and lectures in the classroom

INTUITIONISM'S BURDEN: THOMAS REID ON THE PROBLEM OF MORAL MOTIVATION

Hume bequeathed to rational intuitionists a problem concerning moral judgment and the will – a problem of sufficient severity that it is still cited as one of the major reasons why intuitionism is untenable.1Stated in general terms, the problem concerns how an intuitionist moral theory can account for the intimate connection between moral judgment and moral motivation. One reason that this is still considered to be a problem for intuitionists is that it is widely assumed that the early intuitionists made little progress towards solving it. In this essay, I wish to challenge this assumption by examining one of the more subtle intuitionist responses to Hume, viz., that offered by Thomas Reid. For reasons that remain unclear to me, Reid's response to Hume on this issue has been almost entirely neglected. I shall argue that it is nonetheless one that merits our attention, for at least two reasons.In the first place, Reid's response to Hume's challenge to rational intuitionism bears a close affinity to the type of response that he offers to Hume's broadly skeptical challenge to realist views regarding our perception of the external world. Since Reid's strategy in the latter case is widely regarded as exhibiting significant promise, it is natural to wonder whether, when applied to the moral domain, this type of strategy displays similar promise.2I will suggest that it does. That is, I will suggest that since Reid's broadly nativist position in perception is one well worth considering, then so also is his broadly nativist account of moral motivation. Second, Reid's position regarding moral motivation represents an intriguing attempt to blend a broadly intuitionist view with important insights from the sentimentalist tradition. In this respect, Reid's view is a genuine hybrid position unlike that offered by other intuitionists such as Richard Price. The synthetic character of Reid's position, I claim, gives it a unique type of theoretical richness, since it incorporates some very attractive features of both rational intuitionism and sentimentalism.

Crisis as a Philosophical Beginning

When natural consciousness entrusts itself straightway to Science, it makes an attempt, induced by it knows not what, to walk on its head too, just this once; the compulsion to assume this unwanted posture and to go about in it is a violence it is expected to do to itself, all unprepared and seemingly without necessity. Hegel, Philosophy of Spirit, 30/15 What is the beginning of philosophy? How do we enter into philosophy? Husserl describes the transition to philosophy as an act of our free will; yet in his later works, he asks how this act could be motivated. One such motivation for turning to philosophy can be found in the experience of a crisis in the natural sciences that inspires historical reflections. Such reflections lead to wonder as the original motivation for philosophy in ancient Greece, wonder that can also be a form of crisis, but not the same as that occasioned by the current crisis of sciences. In contrast, it might seem as if there is no problem of motivation in Hegel's philosophy since he analyzes a contradictoriness within natural consciousness that leads into philosophy as a way to solve these contradictions. However, Hegel is also aware of the fact that for natural consciousness philosophy first seems an unnecessary form of violence. Moreover, Hegel explicitly discusses crisis as a possible motivation for philosophy, especially political crises in ancient Greece, which he depicts as ruptures between inner thought and outer reality. In this essay, I will show how Hegel and Husserl come to similar conclusions concerning possible motivations for philosophy as they both turn to the historical beginning of philosophy in ancient Greece. fact that they both discuss crisis as a motivation for philosophy calls for an investigation of the common structure of crisis, but also of differences between the different shapes of crisis that are diagnosed by Hegel and Husserl. I will first turn to Husserl since he raises the problem of motivation more explicitly; this will enable us to find similar problems and solutions in Hegel's philosophy. Crisis and Wonder in Husserl Way into Phenomenology In his early writings, Husserl suggests a way into phenomenology that he eventually designates as Cartesian because he takes up central insights from Descartes' philosophy. This way is more direct than others, but it has the disadvantage that one can easily fall back into the natural attitude, especially since Husserl does not address the question of how we are motivated to enter into the pursuit of philosophy in the first place. Husserl claims that the move to philosophy is an act of free will.1 Every way into philosophy has to begin with the natural attitude, the attitude in which we always already find ourselves. As long as we remain in the natural attitude, we are naively convinced that objects exist independently of our experience of them. Even in cases where we are mistaken, when we falsely posit the Being of the object, our conviction regarding the independent Being of objects in general is not shaken; we simply replace the mistaken judgments with a new, improved one. What this indicates is that no object given in perception is altogether isolated, but is surrounded by horizons that point to perceptual possibilities of other objects. These horizonal possibilities are never given exhaustively, for they are embedded in the overall world horizon. natural attitude can be characterized by the universal judgment The world is. Husserl first conceives philosophy as a science that would radically break from the natural attitude. Such a conception of science must then meet different conditions: Philosophy must be a type of universal science, a science that would take up beings in their totality; but it would also have to be a presuppositionless science, a science that takes nothing for granted and justifies itself absolutely. world's existence, however, can be doubted, as Descartes has already shown in his Meditations on First Philosophy, and therefore cannot serve as a secure foundation for Husserl's new science. …

Is Bad Faith Necessarily Social?

In a probing paper entitled "The Misplaced Chapter on Bad Faith, or Reading Being and Nothingness in Reverse," Matthew Eshleman challenges part of my intensive analysis of Sartre's "Bad Faith," arguing that bad faith is essentially a social phenomenon, and that social elements—the Other, in particular—play a "necessary role in making bad faith possible." Although I share many of Eshleman's interpretative points about the importance of the "social" in Sartre's account, I contend, here, with textual support, that Eshleman is too extreme, and slights the original bad faith to which human reality, in its very "upsurge" as consciousness or freedom, is "congenitally" (Spiegelberg) predisposed. My continued appeal to Sartre's concept of "initial," "fundamental," project, or "natural attitude" of consciousness to flee its freedom—what I have called ontological bad faith—becomes the crux of my critical counter-challenge to Eshleman's thesis.

Metaphysischer – Physikalischer – Ästhetischer „Raum“

Edmund Husserl characterizes the problem of equivocation as crucial whenever it comes to the point of differentiating between the genuine philosophical and the genuine scientific view on the world. According to Husserl, equivocation in the first respect is an inevitable result of the fact that the phenomenologist has to use the common language, which is bound to the natural attitude. The natural attitude belongs to science as such, but has to be avoided in philosophical ways of description. In the following article, the equivocation concerning the notion of „space“ stands for the problem in general. The phenomenological concept of „space“ refers to the aesthetic dimension of the notion, which is the basis of both, the philosophical, i.e. metaphysical dimension, and the physical, i.e. scientific dimension. Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer and Edmund Husserl discuss the notion of „space“ from different perspectives, each of which can be understood as contributing to the foundation of a sound inter-disciplinary dialogue between philosophy and the sciences.

There is no World without End (Salut): Derrida's Phenomenology of the Extra-Mundane

Patrick O'Connor's contribution brings us back to the question with which this issue started, namely whether, after Husserl, phenomenology can still profit from a thinking of the epoche. In There is no World Without End (Salut): Derrida's Phenomenology of the Extra-Mundane O'Connor brings out the radicality of Jacques Derrida's philosophy with respect to a thinking of 'world'. Developing key Husserlian and Heideggerian themes to broaden Husserl's phenomenological theory of consciousness, Derrida's early work, according to O'Connor, assesses the capacity of the phenomenological reduction to escape the mundane natural attitude. While working through phenomenology, Derrida still remains a post-phenomenological thinker, arriving at a more ontological albeit differential expression of phenomena. O'Connor then isolates the manner in which Derrida discusses phenomenological concepts such as the sensible and the intelligible, the natural attitude, immanence and transcendence, intentionality and finitude in order to reflect on how consciousness is pre-reflectively constituted by an irreducible intersection with the 'world' and the loss of world. O'Connor demonstrates that throughout his career, from his earliest work on genesis to his last works on spectrality and touch, Derrida always remained faithful to this centrality of a suspension of the phenomenologically mundane world.