•  32
    Husserl (review)
    Review of Metaphysics 36 (2): 459-460. 1982.
    This is an intelligent and useful collection of works by Husserl. The editors have assembled twenty-one short works; some appeared first as essays, some are manuscripts, some are letters, some are extracts from larger works. Most important, they cover a wide range of topics and thus make up a rather colorful collection. Five are brief "introductions" to phenomenology: Husserl's inaugural lecture at Freiburg ; his introduction to the English edition of Ideas ; his Encyclopedia Britannica article …Read more
  •  27
    Einleitung in die Logik und Erkenntnistheorie (review)
    Review of Metaphysics 40 (4): 779-781. 1987.
    This book is the edition of a course given by Husserl in the Winter Semester of 1906-07 at Goettingen. The volume contains a long and informative introduction by the editor, the course itself, which extends for 355 pages, two sets of supplementary texts, which extend for almost 100 pages, and textual-critical remarks and tables of contents. The materials are not dramatically new, but they do shed light on Husserl's development and on the meaning of his teachings in Ideas I and in his well-known …Read more
  •  15
    The Theory of Will in Classical Antiquity (review)
    Review of Metaphysics 37 (3): 624-626. 1984.
    Albrecht Dihle is professor of classics at Heidelberg. This book is a development of the Sather Classical Lectures given at Berkeley in 1974. It is an important and informative work, rich in detail, clear in argument, and filled with erudition. Dihle begins by contrasting the Hellenistic philosophical understanding of nature with the Jewish religious understanding of the cosmos. The pagan philosophers saw nature and the world as an ordered whole and sought to conform their minds and their lives …Read more
  •  15
    Structuralism and Hermeneutics (review)
    Review of Metaphysics 37 (2): 422-423. 1983.
    T. K. Seung criticizes the structuralist program of trying to discover the formal elements underlying language, thinking, and social structures. He also criticizes the post-structural doctrine of writers like Derrida and De Man who renounce the quest for structure and assert the absence of univocity, pattern, presence, and identity in language, thinking, and social behavior.
  •  35
    The first volume of Husserl's Ideen was published in 1913. Until then Husserl was known as the author of Logical Investigations, which had been published in 1900-1901 and which had generated a philosophical movement after its own image: one marked by anti-psychologism, by a detailed analysis of the phenomena of consciousness, by an interest in logic, by a kind of common-sense realism. The developments in Goettingen and Munich were examples of the influence of Husserl's early work. But the appear…Read more
  •  46
    Formal and Material Causality in Science
    Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 69 57-67. 1995.
  •  32
    Mental Representation and Consciousness (review)
    Review of Metaphysics 49 (1): 144-147. 1995.
    One of the major points in Husserl's philosophy is his insistence that consciousness is structured. He denies that consciousness is simply an undifferentiated awareness and that all the differences occur in the content or object of consciousness. He claims that consciousness itself is articulated; it has parts ordered into different kinds of wholes. The most vivid examples of this articulation are found in "representational" forms of consciousness such as remembering or imaging an experience. Le…Read more
  •  23
    The work of Aron Gurwitsch
    Research in Phenomenology 5 (1): 7-10. 1975.
  •  3
    Book reviews (review)
    with Joseph Beatty and Debra B. Bergoffen
    Man and World 11 (1-2): 199-223. 1978.
  • Presence and Absence, A Philosophical Investigation of Language and Being
    Revue Philosophique de la France Et de l'Etranger 169 (4): 462-462. 1979.
  • Moral action, a phenomenological study
    with Richard Norman and Gabriele Taylor
    Revue Philosophique de la France Et de l'Etranger 177 (2): 224-227. 1985.
  •  32
    Knowing Essentials
    Review of Metaphysics 47 (4). 1994.
    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…Read more
  •  41
    The Question of Being
    Review of Metaphysics 43 (4). 1990.
    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 …Read more
  • Hermann Noack "Husserl" (review)
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 35 (3): 435. 1975.
  •  14
    Theology and Deconstruction
    Télos 1998 (110): 155-166. 1998.
    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 un…Read more
  •  60
    Exorcising concepts
    Review of Metaphysics 40 (3): 451-463. 1987.
    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 …Read more
  • Possibility, Necessity, and Existence: Abbagnano and His Predecessors (review)
    Interpretation 22 (2): 289-294. 1995.
  •  17
    Logische Untersuchungen Ergänzungsband (review)
    Review of Metaphysics 61 (2): 425-426. 2007.
  •  56
    Visual Intelligence in Painting
    Review of Metaphysics 59 (2): 333-354. 2005.
    Philosophers have long agreed that thinking is expressed in the use of language, that we “think in the medium of words.” It is also true, however, that we think in the medium of pictures, and it is likely that these two ways of thinking are interrelated; certainly, we could not think in pictures if we did not have words, and perhaps we could not use words, in principle, unless we were also engaged in some sort of picturing, at least in our imagination. An ideographic language like Chinese would …Read more
  •  127
    Introduction to Phenomenology
    Cambridge University Press. 1999.
    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 p…Read more
  •  152
    7. Husserl's Concept of Categorial Intuition
    Philosophical Topics 12 (9999): 127-141. 1981.
  •  24
    Referring
    Review of Metaphysics 42 (1). 1988.
    WHEN WORDS APPEAR THEY INTERRUPT the dense continuity of things. Pictures do so as well, but in a different way. The things surrounding me form a dense continuum: my attention can move from one thing to another without leaving what is immediately there. I can go from the table to the rug to the chair to the lamp and to the wall. But if at some point I come to a picture, this plain sequence is broken, and although it may quickly be picked up again, it is interrupted by the picture. When I hit the…Read more
  •  30
    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 Belgra…Read more
  •  30
    Parts and Moments (review)
    Review of Metaphysics 38 (1): 140-142. 1984.
    This book explores a dimension in Husserl's thought that is, unfortunately, usually neglected, the analysis of formal structures in thinking. It examines such topics as formal ontology, formal logic, logic and mathematics, set theory, and, most of all, the theme of parts and wholes. Moreover the book does not just comment on Husserl's treatment of these topics; it pursues them as philosophical issues, shows how Husserl's position can be compared with that of other thinkers, and traces some of th…Read more