Pre-reflective Experience Research Articles

Ontology and Axiology

Philosophical discourse about value often begins with an exploration of our experience of value in its various manifestations. Attention to the phenomenology of value experience may certainly enrich our understanding of the values inhabiting our Lebenswelt. However, an exclusive concern with the phenomenology of values might also mislead one into precipitate conclusions about the nature of value itself. One important point here is that the way one articulates one's argumentation about the ontology of values should be different from-and its outcomes should not be determined by-the way one narrates the pre-reflective experience of values. The appreciation of this point may help us resolve what appears problematic in Professor Kupperman's discussion of Axiological Realism.' A first problem arises with Kupperman's conception of axiological realism. The best we are offered as a definition of his position is that 'if one accepts axiological realism, a judgment that X has high value counts as correct if and only if X really (in an opinion-independent way) has high value'.2 Kupperman's phrasing of this 'adverbial definition' indicates what axiological realism entails about judgments of high value; it does not reveal, though, in virtue of what this entailment holds.

Politics & The Invention of Reason

This essay draws loosely upon John Dewey's published and unpublished works to locate the origins of philosophy's inversion of the ontological relationship between prereflective experience and the thinking it occasionally elicits. Arguing that reason owes its birth to a formalized reification of the know-how embodied in the skills and products of antiquity's crafts, the author suggests that contemporary political theory is ill advised to turn to classical philosophy to defend the cause of democratic politics. Indeed, he sees the task of contemporary democratic politics as being not to rehabilitate the classical tradition but to overcome it, and he concludes by sketching a political reason that moves in this direction.

A Preview of Five Articles on Phenomenological Psychology

In introducing the five contributions to phenomenological psychology in this issue the phenomenological approach is described, on the one hand, as a naïve science which accepts the subject's explications of his own experience, but, on the other, as ambitious in that it strives towards a rigorous and systematic exposition. In order to make prereflective experience clear, it has always to struggle with the limitations of language.