Eduard Marbach

The 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

[opening paragraph]: In recent years, David J. Chalmers has forcefully made a point that I consider to be extremely important for the study of consciousness, also from a Husserlian perspective. The point is that conscious experience is ‘an explanandum in its own right’ . In order to make progress in addressing the problem of the explanatory gap between physical processes and conscious experience, new approaches are therefore to be explored. As Chalmers has it, ‘a mere account of the functions stays on one side of the gap, so the materials for the bridge must be found elsewhere’ . Now, as I see it, the editors of this Special Issue pursue, precisely, the most promising avenue for adequately studying the problem of consciousness in such an exploratory spirit. For, in their excellent Introduction, they un- equivocally propose to include first-person, subjective experience as an explicit and active component of a science of consciousness, to be elaborated with appropriate methods by a research community. Jonathan Shear already put it very clearly elsewhere: ‘what is needed . . . is not so much new conceptualizations of science or new objective methodologies for exploring relationships of the phenomena of consciousness to physiology and behaviour . . . but new systematic methodologies for the exploration of the subjective phenomena of consciousness’ . Among such methodologies, the editors now include ‘the most important western school of thinking where experience and consciousness is at the very heart: Phenomenology as inaugurated by Edmund Husserl . . .’

There is widespread agreement among philosophers that we refer to, think or talk about non-existent objects in much the same way as we refer to, think or talk about other objects. This paper explores the case of objects of fiction in the perspective of Husserlian philosophical phenomenology. In this perspective, everything objective is dealt with as object of some consciousness and as presenting itself in subjective modes. Within the scope of this paper, the focus of the descriptive analysis will be on showing in some detail how conscious experiences of intentionally referring to something fictive in pre-linguistic intuitive acts of imagining something are to be articulated with regard to the object of consciousness, i.e. noematically, and with regard to the intentional act, i.e. noetically. Special attention will be given to the reflective finding of some consciousness being intentionally implied and thereby modified in the very performance of an intentional act of representifying (vergegenwärtigen) something in fiction and to the question of identity and individuation of objects in fiction. It will be argued that modifications occurring in representificational consciousness, which Husserl called ‘as-if’ or ‘quasi’ modifications, provide the key for understanding the phenomenology of fictional intentionality and reference.

This paper reflects on the relationship between Husserlian phenomenology and scientific psychology. It tries to show how phenomenological results have relevance and validity for present-day cognitive developmental psychology by arguing that consciousness matters in the study of the representational mind. The paper presents some methodological remarks concerning empirical or applied phenomenology; it describes the conception of an exploratory developmental study with 3 to 9-year-old children viewing a complex pictorial display; it then illustrates how a phenomenological interpretation of the data works; in conclusion, it sketches a view of realism about conscious experiences which is taken to be inherent in the phenomenological perspective of understanding the representational mind

The theory of so-called‘mental images’, which is put forward again in contemporary cognitive psychology, is criticized by way of elaborating the distinctly different intentional structures of the mental activities of‘remembering something’and‘representing something pictorially’(by means of a painting, photo, sculpture, etc.) It is suggested that psychology in its concept and theory formation could use profitably phenomenological-descriptive analyses of the different forms of intentionality as exemplified in the paper.