Steven Crowell

Following Marc Richir and others, László Tengelyi has recently developed the idea of Sinnereignis (meaning-event) as a way of capturing the emergence of meaning that does not flow from some prior project or constitutive act. As such, it might seem to pose something of a challenge to phenomenology: the paradox of an experience that is mine without being my accomplishment. This article offers a different sort of interpretation of meaning-events, claiming that in their structure they always involve what the late Heidegger called “measure-taking” (Maß-nehmen)—that is, an orientation toward the emergence of normative moments thanks to which what apparently eludes phenomenology becomes accessible in its inaccessibility. This is shown, first, on the example of conscience in Sein und Zeit and then on the example of the poetic image (Bild) in Heidegger’s later essays.

This paper responds to comments by Maxime Doyon and Thomas Sheehan on aspects of my book, Normativity and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger (Cambridge University Press, 2013). Among the topics discussed are the relations between phenomenology and analytic philosophy, the difference between a Brentanian and an Husserlian approach to intentional content, the normative structure of the intentional content of noetic states such as thinking and imagining, the implications of taking a phenomenological approach to Heidegger’s concept of “being,” Heidegger’s “correlationism,” and the normative character of Heidegger’s analysis of Angst, death, and conscience.

It is often held that, in contrast to Husserl, Heidegger's account of intentionality makes no essential reference to the first- person stance. This paper argues, on the contrary, that an account of the first- person, or 'subjectivity', is crucial to Heidegger's account of intelligibility and so of the intentionality, or 'aboutness' of our acts and thoughts, that rests upon it. It first offers an argument as to why the account of intelligibility in Division I of Being and Time, based on a form of third- person self-awareness, provides a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for intentionality. It then shows that Heidegger provides a further necessary condition in his analysis of the collapse of the one-self in Division II. This condition is 'conscience', which is both a genuine first- person mode of self-awareness and, it is argued, the origin of reason as that which distinguishes factic 'grounds' from normative 'justifications'