Tobias Keiling

Abstract: Spatial metaphors have peculiar prominence in accounts of rationality, such as in the phrase “space of reason” made prominent by Wilfrid Sellars and John McDowell. This article attempts to understand the potential of such comparisons of reason to space, taking Wittgenstein’s metaphor of “logical space” as exemplary. As Hans Blumenberg observes in his reading of Wittgenstein and in contrast to its stated aim, the account of “logical space” in the Tractatus does not achieve a final delimitation of reason. Wittgenstein’s discussion of different forms of rationality rather leads him to consider a plurality of spaces. Asking how these different spaces or fields of meaning can be congruent at all, Wittgenstein is led to consider the indeterminacy of space itself in contrast to the different localizations it allows.

Steven Crowell’s rich book is an eminent advance in the interpretation of Husserl and Heidegger, in thinking about the nature of phenomenology as a way of philosophical inquiry, and in accessing the contribution phenomenology can make to philosophy in general. Just as its predecessor Husserl, Heidegger, and the Space of Meaning (2001) has not stood uncontested—the review by Taylor Carman, for instance, is very critical—Crowell’s new book on normativity is also likely to spur debate. But such debate should be most welcome, because it will serve to renew discussion on the project and prospect of phenomenology no less than it will address the intentions of its past proponents. ...

To honor the 50th anniversary of the publication of Truth and Method, this paper discusses the phenomenological foundations of the hermeneutical clatm to an eminent epistemological relevance of art. While Gadamer, following the early Hcidegger, tends to conceive such relevance as the contnbution of art to historical self-understanding, the attempt is made to integrate art into philosophy through a reeximanation of phenomenological method. An interpretation of the London Leerures not only shows the close resemblance of Husserl's later account of phenomenological method as ,the method of zig-zag' to Heidegger's and Gadamer's accounts of understanding. Furthermore, the idea of method being closely tied to the evident experience of things as ,exemplary objects' used as ,transeendental guiding threads' for phenomenology prefigures Heidegger's account of the truth of artworks in 'The Origin of the Work of Art'. In conclusion, I argue that the truth of art can be integrated into phenomenological method by conceiving artworks not as transitory sedimentations of self-understanding but as phenomenological models, which as objects of interpretation allow one to access and explicate the phenomenological givenness of earth and world.