Robert Sokolowski

In this book, Robert Sokolowski argues that being a person means to be involved with truth. He shows that human reason is established by syntactic composition in language, pictures, and actions and that we understand things when they are presented to us through syntax. Sokolowski highlights the role of the spoken word in human reason and examines the bodily and neurological basis for human experience. Drawing on Husserl and Aristotle, as well as Aquinas and Henry James, Sokolowski here employs phenomenology in a highly original way in order to clarify what we are as human agents.

WE OFTEN USE PHRASES like, "knowing the essence of a thing" or "getting to the essence of a thing," but such expressions may be misleading and may provoke unfortunate epistemological problems. They suggest that we somehow extract an essence from the thing and make it, like a new thing, the target of our knowledge. They suggest a kind of vision, acquisition, or possession of the essence itself. If we have such a picture in mind when we speak of knowing an essence, many problems ensue that make us skeptical about ever having such knowledge. We begin to ask how we manage to extract this essence, what sort of intuition or vision is involved, whether the grasp of the essence is sudden or gradual, how the essence exists and how it is related to the things that have it. The problem with the picture is that the essence seems to be taken as a rather substantial object in its own right, a new object toward which we turn, something that we can pull out from other objects, from the individuals that contain the essence. The picture makes us formulate the philosophical problem of essences in the wrong way.

Transcendental phenomenology is the mind’s self-discovery in the presence of intelligible objects. I differentiate the phenomenological sense of “transcendental” from its scholastic and Kantian senses, and show how the transcendental dimension cannot be eliminated from human discourse. I try to clarify the difference between prephilosophical uses of reason and the phenomenological use, and I suggest that the method followed by transcendental phenomenology is the working out of strategic distinctions. Its targets are the various blends of presence and absence that make up human cognition.

FERDINAND DE SAUSSURE says that a word is composed of two parts, a sound-image and a concept: "The linguistic sign unites not a thing and a name, but a concept and an acoustic image." The sound-image signifies the concept: the sound-image is the signifier, the concept is the signified. De Saussure is only one of a large company of thinkers who describe words in this way. Most philosophical and semiotic analyses of words claim that words have two components, a dimension of sounds and a dimension of concepts.

This book presents the major philosophical doctrines of phenomenology in a clear, lively style with an abundance of examples. The book examines such phenomena as perception, pictures, imagination, memory, language, and reference, and shows how human thinking arises from experience. It also studies personal identity as established through time and discusses the nature of philosophy. In addition to providing a new interpretation of the correspondence theory of truth, the author also explains how phenomenology differs from both modern and postmodern forms of thinking.

For all these reasons, it is helpful to have a volume such as the one under review, which gives the historical and textual background for Crisis. Ably edited by Reinhold N. Smid, who has been associated with the Husserl Archives at Cologne for many years, the volume contains papers from the period 1934-37, just before Husserl's death in 1938. Crisis itself was published in its present form only posthumously in 1954, but its first two parts appeared in the journal Philosophia, published in Belgrade, in 1936. The idea of composing this work came to Husserl after he gave two lectures in Prague on 14-15 November 1935. The lectures provided the nucleus for Crisis, and the typescript for them is published in thirty-three pages of this volume. It is interesting to note that the title for the typescript is "Psychology in the Crisis of European Science." Although psychology is extensively treated in Crisis, the issue of that science is not one of the themes that commentators usually discuss. It is helpful to see how central psychology was in Husserl's later thought. The point is that he must distinguish the philosophical study of man from the empirical psychological study if he is to avoid taking philosophy as merely a partial science and if he is not to betray the special mode of being of transcendental subjectivity. The study of man must not be carried out according to the "objectivist" methods of modern science.

Distinctions are set in obscurity and imagination. Distinctions are not made anywhere and anytime, nor are they made in no place and at no time; they are made in a situation in which they are called for. Distinctions push against an obscurity that needs the distinction in question. In the story about Jack and the doctor, the obscurity against which the distinction is made is included as part of the story; in the quotation from Chaucer the obscurity that provides the setting for the distinction is not mentioned—although you would find it if you were to read the Wife of Bath’s tale—but it is easy for us to imagine a setting in which the distinction between counseling and commandment ought to be made. When we entertain a distinction, such as "counseling is not commandment," "ignorance is not negligence," or "medical data is not medical care," we always experience or imagine an obscurity against which the distinction arises. When we think philosophically about executing distinctions, we must pay attention to the obscurity that lets the distinction occur.

EVERYONE IS INVOLVED in the question of being in one way or another. When we ask someone how to change the oil in an automobile, or what the diameter of the moon is, or how numbers are different from numerals, we are asking about being. Such interrogations, whether addressed to others or addressed by ourselves to ourselves, are particular questions about beings. But when as metaphysicians we raise the question of being, we do not pursue just one more of these particular investigations. We ask a question that is somehow essentially singular, a question that cannot be made into many. If our question were to become plural, it would be a sign that we have cut off only part of being for our study and that we allow still other questions of being to be raised concerning the parts we have left out. It would be a sign that we have turned being into a genus, into one kind among many. Somehow the question of being has to be complete and comprehensive in itself; it has to be one question; and it must get at issues that enable all the particular questions to arise and to be answered. It is not that the question of being has nothing to do with questions about automobile oil and the diameter of the moon and numbers and numerals; the question of being can be recognized in all these particular questions, but it cannot be reduced to being one like them.

Catherine Pickstock's book is about Catholic liturgy. What does it have to do with political theory and philosophy? Telos has recently been concerned with the problem of modernity — especially its rationalism and the domination of the sovereign state. Both of these problems have come to the fore with the fall of the Soviet Union in the East and the rise of postmodernity in the West. These same problems have their counterparts in theology. Modernity and postmodernity have not left the churches untouched. One of the most important consequences has been the reform of Catholic liturgy in the late 1960s. Up to that point Catholic liturgy had been, in the technical sense of the term, premodern