Husserl's View Research Articles

To Be and Perception--A preliminary study of Phenomenology of Architecture

The phenomenological philosophy founded by Husserl attempts to reflect on language as a fundamental cognitive tool through the method of suspension and restoration, and to break the binary opposition between subject and object, phenomenon and essence. In Husserl's view, language is not only a medium for interaction between humans and the world, but also the foundation for constructing human experience. This philosophical approach provides us with a brand new way of understanding the world, enabling us to go beyond traditional epistemological frameworks and delve deeper into the essence of human experience. Heidegger's existentialist phenomenology and Merleau Ponty's perceptual phenomenology are important branches that inherit and develop Husserl's phenomenology, and the exploration of architectural phenomenology is mainly based on these two branches. This article analyzes the mapping relationship between Norbert Schultz's place spirit and Steven Hall's architectural practice, respectively.

Husserl and the normativity of logic

AbstractIn this article, I analyze the evolution of Husserl's view on the normativity of logic and the corresponding changes in his phenomenological analysis of judgment. Initially, in the Prolegomena, Husserl claimed that the laws of pure logic are ideal and acquire normative status only as a result of application. Later, however, he revised this position and claimed that the same laws are at once ideal and normative. Sections 1 and 2 present textual evidence for attributing such a change of position to Husserl, which is not generally acknowledged in the literature. Section 3 critically examines Husserl's early position, with specific attention to the model of instantiation. Sections 4–6 identify three key stages in the development of Husserl's theory of judgment that lead to the normative conception of pure logic: (1) the critique of the dissociation of ideal content and assertive force; (2) the rejection of the instantiation model of proposition and the development of a new account in terms of identification; (3) the genetic‐phenomenological interpretation of proposition and the elaboration of the three‐layer structure of pure logic.

Presentations and evaluations: A new look at Husserl's distinction between objectifying and non‐objectifying acts

AbstractIn this paper, I take a fresh look at Husserl's key distinction between objectifying and non‐objectifying acts, which roughly amounts to a distinction between presentational and evaluative experiences. My goal is to provide a clear and unified reconstruction of Husserl's argument for the thesis that non‐objectifying acts are necessarily founded in objectifying acts, a thesis that is highly controversial in and beyond Husserlian scholarship. In the first section, I reconstruct Husserl's view in the Logical Investigations, according to which only objectifying acts establish an independent intentional relation to their objects, and argue that it is justified by the positing function of objectifying acts. In the second section, I address two problematic interpretations of this view and, after criticizing them, I present what I take to be Husserl's core argument for his position. In the third section, I turn to the revision of the view of the Logical Investigations that Husserl proposes in the wake of his transcendental turn, especially in Ideas I and II. On Husserl's revised view, all acts are objectifying, including emotional acts [Gemütsakte]. This revision has led scholars to consider Husserl's view aporetic. I propose an alternative interpretation that dispels the purported aporia. I conclude with some remarks on the costs and benefits of my reading, as well as the strengths and weaknesses of Husserl's view in general.

Husserl's Notion of “Secondary Experience” as an Alternative Basis for Social Epistemology

ABSTRACT The goal of this paper is to put on the map Husserl's discussion of “secondary experience” as an alternative basis for an epistemology of testimony. In current discussions about social epistemology, the majority of scholars characterize testimony as “the transfer of a belief.” On the contrary, in light of Husserl's notion of “secondary experience,” testimony is best characterized as a sharing of experience rather than a transfer of belief. Husserl discusses the notion of “secondary experience” in Appendix XII of Husserliana 15. In this paper I develop a systematic analysis of “secondary experience,” and I integrate Husserl's analysis of testimony in Appendix XII with his other analyses developed in the Cartesian Meditations, manuscripts written in the same period, and Experience and Judgment. In the conclusion of the paper I very briefly argue for the superiority of Husserl's view of testimony over the majority view.

Городская повседневность в фокусе социальных теорий XX века

The article provides an attempt at a theoretical understanding of the pheno-menon of urban everyday life. A brief justification is given for the relevance of studying urban life through the analysis of everyday life. The development of ideas about every-day life is examined, first in the philosophical works of E. Husserl, and then by A. Schutz, J. Hoffmann, A. Lefebvre and P. Sztompka. The position of each author is considered and criticized within the framework of the purposes of this article. Husserl's view of everyday life as the order of interrelationship of things in time and space pro-vides a basis for defining everyday life, but turns out to be too broad. In A. Schutz we discover the fundamental principle of the formation and reproduction of everyday life — the social distribution of knowledge. From the works of A. Lefebvre we take the understanding of everyday life as a common denominator for all spheres of human life and the idea of its cyclical dynamics. I. Goffman describes in detail the sphere of every-day interpersonal contacts “face to face”. P. Sztompka gives a number of defining fea-tures of everyday life - it is associated with relationships between people, which are re-peated in space and time, are not always conscious and sometimes ritualized. The result of the work is a description and definition of the concept of urban everyday life.

Social sensitivity and the ethics of attention

AbstractSocial sensitivity is a crucial aspect of interpersonal relationships, as it is intrinsic to the understanding of other selves as subjects situated in a social world. In revitalizing such a concept in the philosophical literature, this article examines the relation between habit, attention, and critical self‐awareness that lies at the core of social sensitivity. On the one hand, I reconsider the so‐called “passivity” of habit and tackle the role of attention as the power of varying point of view. On the other hand, I contrast Husserl's view of attentiveness with Murdoch's account of loving attention, arguing that social sensitivity centers on a type of striving that is closer to Husserl's methodology than Murdoch's approach to moral perfectionism.

Husserl on the overlap of pure and empirical concepts

AbstractThis essay clarifies Edmund Husserl's view of “pure” concepts, with a view to its contemporary metaphilosophical significance. It is argued that Husserl's conception of pure concepts is unique in that he allows overlap between pure and empirical concepts. This overlap leads to a potential for confusion between pure and empirical concepts which I label “amphiboly,” following Kant's use of the term. The essay begins by clarifying Husserl's view of the divergence in concept formation between empirical and pure concepts, and then articulates the specific properties of pure concepts that allow an empirical overlap. These properties include the modality and range of the extension of the concepts, the ordering of objects under the concept, and the mental faculty required to identify an object under the concept. Once we see the source of amphiboly in Husserl's view, it can be observed that many concepts of interest to philosophy, even outside phenomenology proper, are potentially subject to amphibolous uses. Thus, Husserl's view can be a general hermeneutical resource for clarifying the nature of philosophical concepts.

Phenomenology and the stratification of reality

AbstractPhenomenologists have no taste for desert landscapes. The early phenomenologists—Edmund Husserl, Max Scheler, and Roman Ingarden—adopt stratified views of reality on which spiritual objects like artifacts and persons are distinct from their underlying matter. Call this view “pluralism.” After describing Scheler, Ingarden, and Husserl's pluralism about goods, literary artworks, and images, respectively, I reconstruct a phenomenological case for pluralism from Husserl's work and defend it against an objection. The phenomenological method reveals a special subset of objects' essential properties: modes of givenness. On Husserl's view, there are necessary correlations between types of objects and the types of intentional acts through which they are given. Spiritual objects, unlike their matter, can only be given in acts belonging to the “personalistic attitude,” which has a motivational and expressive structure. My broader claim is that Husserl's phenomenology is a sophisticated metametaphysical view about the methodology of first‐order metaphysical inquiry.

Is There a Metaphysics of Consciousness Without a Phenomenology of Consciousness? Some Thoughts Derived from Husserl's Philosophical Phenomenology

AbstractThe paper first addresses Husserl's conception of philosophical phenomenology, metaphysics, and the relation between them, in order to explain why, on Husserl's view, there is no metaphysics of consciousness without a phenomenology of consciousness. In doing so, it recalls some of the methodological tenets of Husserl's phenomenology, pointing out that phenomenology is an eidetic or a priori science which has first of all to do with mere ideal possibilities of consciousness and its correlates; metaphysics of consciousness, on the other hand, has to do with its reality or actuality, requiring an eidetic foundation in order to become scientifically valuable. Presuming that, if consciousness is to be the subject-matter of a metaphysics which is not simply speculative or based on prejudice, it is crucial to get the phenomenology of consciousness right, the paper then engages in a detailed descriptive-eidetic analysis of mental acts of re-presenting something and tries to argue that their structures, involving components of non-actual experiencing, pose a serious problem for a materialistic or physicalistic metaphysics of consciousness. The paper ends with a brief comment on Husserl's broader view of metaphysics, having to do with the irrationality of the transcendental fact, i.e. the constitution of the factual world and the factual life of the mind.

Actualidad de la fenomenología en psicología

<p style="text-align: justify;">Si bien la fenomenología como proyecto filosófico en la versión de Husserl, abrió una serie de debates que llevaron a considerarlo un proyecto fallido, en términos metodológicos sigue ostentándose como una herramienta fundamental para la comprensión de los fenómenos en psicología; en esta misma disciplina, el aporte de Merleau-Ponty y su idea de la fenomenología de la percepción, proveniente de los experimentos de la Gestaltpsycologie, introduce una idea fundamental para aproximarse a entender la complejidad del fenómeno psicológico en tanto lo concibe más allá de la pura dimensionalidad científica sujeto-objeto, y lo instaura como un proyecto de sujeto en el mundo en una relación circular y ambigua. Lacan hará una crítica importante de esta visión que conviene recordar; sin embargo, la contribución de Merleau-Ponty sigue presentando posibilidades explicativas y comprensivas en tanto reconocemos en ella un sistema de relaciones constitutivas que se establecen entre la conciencia y el cuerpo, el sujeto y el mundo, entre el yo y el otro; relaciones que hacen de la fenomenología de la percepción un trabajo de análisis del sujeto. La dialéctica cuerpo-mundo hace de la conciencia perceptiva un medio mediante el cual el mundo es recreado y reconstituido a cada momento. En este sentido, este trabajo reintroduce el tema de la fenomenología en psicología, lo que permite salvar del pandeterminismo de la ciencia positiva y comprender al hombre como un campo abierto de posibilidades.</p><p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Palabras clave:</strong> Fenomenología, percepción, psicoterapia, investigación psicológica, conciencia, cuerpo.</p>

Husserl's view of the life-world and the world of science ()

Husserl's view of the life-world and the world of science ()

Foucault, Cavaillès, and Husserl on the Historical Epistemology of the Sciences

This paper discusses the origins of two key notions in Foucault's work up to and including The Archaeology of Knowledge. The first of these notions is the notion of “archaeology” itself, a form of historical investigation of knowledge that is distinguished from the mere history of ideas in part by its unearthing what Foucault calls “historical a prioris”. Both notions, I argue, are derived from Husserlian phenomenology. But both are modified by Foucault in the light of Jean Cavailles's critique of Husserl's theory of science. On Husserl's view, we demand that propositions holding of scientific objects be intersubjective and invariant, but this demand conflicts with our immediate experience, which is essentially bound to a subject's perspective. Thus the mathematical and physical sciences must utilise formal languages to fix these truths independently of the thoughts of a particular subject. This necessary procedure leads to the sedimentation of these formal systems: we forget their source in the concrete ...

Spielbedeutungen

Wittgenstein is often thought to be the father of the view that the meaning of a word is its use in a language.1 More specifically, as the doctrine goes, the meaning of a word is its use in accordance to a fixed rule. Therefore, in order to examine the workings of languages Wittgenstein examines language-games and calculi that are set up by means of fixed rules.2 The view has inspired many philosophers to set up formal systems, by means of which they analyze notions such as meaning and understanding. However, Wittgenstein also says that "the language-games are rather set up as objects of comparison which are meant to throw light on the facts of our language by way not only of similarities, but also of dissimilarities,"3 suggesting that in fact to him a language is not itself a language-game, but something else. Hence Wittgenstein's investigations can be viewed as attempts to clarify the differences between language-games and languages. Indeed, some interpreters take Wittgenstein to be undercutting the attempt to construe an idealized model like that as a "theory of meaning." Indeed, Wittgenstein can even be read to be striving to deny the possibility and appropriateness of any theorizing about meaning.4 With this in the background it is interesting to note that Husserl also discusses the notion of game-meaning [Spielbedeutung], which is the meaning signs have by virtue of the fixed rules of a game. As will be argued below, for Husserl game-meanings are fundamentally different from meaningful expressions. Before proceeding any further, let us make a note on the translation of the word Spiel, here translated as "game." The notion of Spiel could also be translated as "'play." However, "game" suits Husserl's notion better, since he is largely concerned with rule-governed games such as chess and arithmetic. On the contrary, "play" suggests freedom from rules, activity that is not "serious" and has its purpose in recreation. This other sense has been cherished by Schiller and Gadamer, for example. However Husserl's Spielbedeutung is something else, since it is related to games with strict rules and it has its roots in algorithmic calculations. For Husserl, except in his early writings, game-meaning is often an anathema rather than a positive part of his philosophy. This essay is devoted to understanding what Husserl means by Spielbedeutungen in the Logical Investigations. We will first discuss the roots of the notion of Spielbedeutung in Husserl's early writings. After that we will move to discuss what the Spielbedeutungen according to Husserl are. In the Logical Investigations Husserl divides all signs into either meaningful expressions or signs that merely indicate. Consequently, the natural starting point is to explore the question as to whether the signs endowed with Spielbedeutungen are indication-signs or whether they should be regarded as expressions, namely empty, symbolic representations. Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, the conclusion will be that they are neither. In the last section the significance of this conclusion will be discussed. As we shall see, it allows us to clarify what would be Husserl's view of meaning as rule-following. This conclusion also invites speculation as to why Husserl did not engage in further description of Spielbedeutungen. It will be suggested that the reason he did not engage in descriptions of inauthenticity is that his investigations have a normative character. The Roots The roots of the notion of Spielbedeutung are in Husserl's very first philosophical writings. In the Philosophie der Arithmetik (1891, hereafter PA) Husserl distinguishes between the authentic (eigentlich) and symbolic (symbolisai) approach to arithmetic, owing the distinction to Brentano's lectures.5 The authentic representation of number is based on concrete acts of consciousness in which we represent collections (Inbegriffe) of things. Due to the limitedness of our intellect we can have an authentic representation of numbers only up to about twelve. …

Time, Intentionality, and a Neurophenomenology of the Dot

The purposes of this paper are twofold: first, I wish to correct a systematic bias in Husserlian transcendental phenomenology. This bias is in favor of intuition of essences of meaning and against the intuition of essences of sensation. This bias is explained as a product of Husserl's mind‐body dualism. Second, I suggest the possibility of a neurophenomenology from a biogenetic structural point of view. This neurophenomenology merges the knowledge of essences derived from mature contemplation with knowledge of the structures of experience derived from neuroanthropology. After addressing these two issues I proceed to describe the sensorium from a neurophenomenological perspective, and the constituent element of perception, the dot. I hypothesize fat experience arises in the dialogue between prefrontal cortical processes and sensorial processes, that experience is constituted within a field of sensorial dots that arise and dissolve in temporal frames. I conclude that Husserl's view of the phenomenology of time is essentially correct and is both in keeping with findings from current neurophysiology, and amenable to a modem scientific view of consciousness and to many of the religious traditions encountered by ethnographers. The implications of a neurophenomenology for the anthropological study of consciousness are suggested.

Was Husserl a Nominalist?

Students of Husserl are divided when it comes to stating his theory of universals. Was Husserl a realist or a nominalist? On the realist side are philosophers like Dallas Willard who has argued that . . it is obvious that Ideas (universals, 'species', essences) and the viewing and analyzing thereof form the substance of his entire philosophy.' On the nominalist side there are those who would agree with Gustav Bergmann when he claimed that . . Husserl made two major mistakes. For one, he is a nominalist. ' The purpose of this article is to argue that Husserl was realist. There are a number of issues relevant to proving this point. But in my opinion, the most important issue in the debate about Husserl's view of universals is his doctrine of moments. By focusing on different ways of assaying a Husserlian moment, the main issues in the realist/nominalist debate will become clear and, I hope, the strength of the realist case will be enhanced.

A Critique of Two Recent Husserl Interpretations

In an article which appeared in The Philosophical Review Karl Ameriks argues in favour of the rather surprising thesis that Husserl, his own statements and a host of commentators and critics notwithstanding, was a realist, i.e., a philosopher who held that “there are physical objects which exist outside consciousness and are not wholly dependent on it” (498). More recently, Harrison Hall, in his contribution to the volume Husserl, Intentionality, and Cognitive Science, has argued that in Husserl's view there is no legitimate philosophical issue between realism and idealism, because philosophy is concerned exclusively with meanings. Both interpretations are careful, documenting each point with texts, and contain several elements that are illuminating. Yet they are fundamentally mistaken as regards their main thesis, as I shall argue in this paper.

Perceptual Meaning and Husserl

To be conscious is to be conscious of something. This widely accepted claim expresses what Husserl referred to as the intentional structure of consciousness. A primary goal of Husserl's phenomenology was to analyze and clarify the various elements that function this intentional structure. Early his work, Ideas I' (1913), Husserl distinguishes two of these central elements: noesis and noema (pl. noeses and noemata). The former, the noetic element, includes the act side of conscious experience, e.g., remembering, judging, perceiving, etc. The latter, or noematic element, includes the remembered precisely as it is 'meant' and 'consciously known', the judged as such, the perceived as such, etc. The noema is, according to Husserl, a correlate of every conscious act and is characterized as meaning (Sinn) in a very extended sense of the term.' My concern this paper is with the noemata that are correlated with acts of sense perception. What sort of thing is this element, the noema, as it functions perceptual experience? There has been considerable debate on the precise character of the perceptual noema. Traditional interpretations of Husserl's view held that the perceptual noema is the perceived object as it is experienced perspectively. As Aron Gurwitsch puts it, . . . the perceptual noema is the thing as it presents itself through the given particular perception, that is to say, the thing as appearing under a certain aspect, from a certain side, a certain orientation. . . . 5 On such a view, the perceptual noema was taken to

Husserl and Frege (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 121 his theory of truth in his later years, pieced togethcr from a variety of sources. Evident judgments have become the standard of truth, rather than correspondence with a state of affairs or, in the case of values, state of values. Whilc the changes arc certainly important to those concerned with ontology and theories of meaning, they appear to make little difference to Brentano's theory of ethics, as McAlister notes in her conclusion. She is, I think, correct in arguing that the changes do not furnish satisfactory answers to the two major points that were to be considered all along: whether evident judgments actually exist, and whether the theory accounts for all types of true judgments. McAlister quotes Brentano's 19o4 letter to Kraus in which he acknowledges that, as described in his theory, our knowledge of moral principles is not what would ordinarily be called empirical, but a priori. One assumes that she did not come upon any material showing that he followed out this line of reasoning, which would have meant forfeiting either the certainty of his principles or their ability to generate practical ethical guidelines. McAlister furnishes both German and English page numbers for Wahrheit und Evidenz, which had already been published in translation when she wrote this book. It would have been helpful had she added page references for translations which appeared later, in addition to the page numbers in the German editions. This would have enabled the interested non-German-speaking reader to easily locate passages. On page lo 4, and again later, there is an intriguing mention of"impounded letters" and a reference to a certain page, but in an unidentified location; enlightenment would have been welcome. Professor McAlister notes that accidents of history and Brentano's own distaste for preparing works for publication deprived him of the role he might have played in the course of philosophy. As Professor Chisholm and others have done for other aspects of Brentano's philosophy, she has helped us to see Brentano's ethics in a truer, and more favorable light and to judge what that greater role could have been. ELIZABETH HU6HES SCHNEEWIND j. N. Mohanty. Husserl and Frege. Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy . Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982. Pp. VII + 147. Anyone interested in such a question as what it is one grasps when one understands an expression will find reading this thoughtful and timely essay an unusually stimulating experience. Husserl and Frege is an outstanding critical contribution to persistent issues in the practice of philosophy today. The book consists of four chapters on historical matters, psychologism, theories of sense, and logic and the theory of knowledge. A brief conclusion is added together with an appendix (the only four letters extant of the Frege-Husserl correspondence), extensive notes, and an index. Mohanty aims to provide his readers with a more accurate picture of the relationship between two founders of the phenomenological and analytic strains in contemporary philosophy, to exhibit the interest in several philosophical issues they shared, and to suggest if not demonstrate how insights about mind and meaning might be integrated. 122 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 23:1 JANUARY 1985 Mohanty addresses his first concern largely in the opening chapter which is a revised version of his well-known 1974 article, "Husserl and Frege: A New Look at Their Relationship." Arguing against the views of Fr Dreyfus, and Kt~ng, Mohanty uses the Frege-Husserl correspondence and Husserl's early reviews of work in logic to make three points. Husserl arrived at the distinction between Vorstellung and Sinn independently of Frege. His rejection of logical psychologism in favor of a theory of objective logic was also independent of Frege's 1894 review of his Philosophy of Arithmetic. And while agreeing with Frege that a concept's extension presupposes its intension, Husserl developed a different understanding of logic than Frege's. Logic on Husserl's view is a pure, theoretical science whose cardinal concept is meaning rather than a normative science which turns on the concept of truth value. This is an excellent historical reconstruction and, if not entirely uncontroversial in its own right (see Follesdal's recent rejoinder...

Husserl and Frege on Meaning

NOTES AND DISCUSSIONS 377 present. But the negative criterion is all that is necessary in the present case, and not to accept it is the same as rejecting Descartes' terminology. But Professor Norton surely does not want to do this, at least not for the purposes of the paper under consideration, for then he would not have an argument against Descartes. Thus, his contention that the two claims about hidden faculties are inconsistent is incorrect because the one faculty would perform acts the substance itself can, while the other would have to accomplish something the substance cannot. To the best of my knowledge, Professor Norton has not discovered an essential inconsistency in the Meditations. By way of conclusion, I want to make a suggestion concerning the identity of the hidden faculty to which Descartes alludes in the first hypothesis. Given his statements about faculties and their relations to substance, the very hypothesis that there might be a hidden one should strike one as odd. However, since the first hypothesis concerns the origin of adventitious ideas, the following seems plausible: Even by Meditation III Descartes has not committed himself to the view that he does not have a body. He just does not know that he does. This point is established by my discussion of the central passage from Meditation II. It could quite well be that the hidden faculty to which Descartes alludes is the aspect of the body, particularly the imagination, involved in furnishing men with their ideas of the extended world. This aspect of human nature would be cognitively hidden because Descartes lacks sufficient evidence to justify believing in the existence of bodies. This conjecture is supported, I believe, by Descartes' discussion in the opening paragraphs of Meditation VI of imagination's role in man's perception of the independently existing world. Especially important is Descartes' suggestion that mind is formally involved in the concept of the imagination, though the converse is not true. In alluding to imagination under the guise of a hidden faculty, Descartes might be looking backward to his conclusions concerning mind and body in Meditation II and forward to his full theory of perception in Meditation VI. TED B. HUMPHREY Arizona State University HUSSERL AND FREGE ON MEANING Two recent articles have appeared which explore a paralleI between the views of Frege and Husserl.1 The point of comparison concerns Husserl's distinction between "noemata" and the intentional objects of mental acts and Frege's distinction between the Senses and the references of linguistic expressions. I do not want to raise any questions concerning the appropriateness of such comparisons. But I do want to question what appears to be their intended moral. Two recent commentators on Hussefl's theory of meaning conclude their discussion with the following observation: "To see phenomenology as a theory of intentionality via intensions is, in the final analysis, just to make sense of phenomenology. And that is just to give Frege the credit for lending Sense to Husserl.''2 Husserl's views 1 Daglinn Fr "Husserl's Notion of Noema," The Journal o[ Philosophy, LXVI (Oct. 16, 1969), 680-687; David Woodruff Smith and Ronald MeIntyre, "Intentionality via Intensions," The Journalo[ Philosophy, LXVIII (Sept. 16, 1971),541-561. 2 Smith and McIntyre, p. 561. 378 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY are ultimately intelligible, then, only if his theory of meaning is read in the light of the Fregean Sense/reference distinction. I should like to point out, first of all, that Husserl's view concerning such distinctions appears to have changed in a significant way between the period of the Logical Investigations and that of the ldeas; and, second, that while the change in Husserl's approach was in fact toward a more Fregean position, it was, just on that account, a change for the worse. Though from the point of view of semantic theory alone the development of Hussed's position may have been inconsequential, the ontological issues which it raises are considerable. Both the "earlier" and the "later" Husserl present a distinction which does indeed perform the function of Frege's distinction between Sense and reference. But no such distinctions can be finally accepted apart from some theory as...