Robert Sokolowski

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

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 give greater support to the latter possibility than would our phonetically based form of writing.

Husserl’s Idea of Phenomenology is his first systematic attempt to show how phenomenology differs from natural science and in particular psychology. He does this by the phenomenological reduction. One of his achievements is to show that the formal structures of intentionality are more akin to logic than to psychology. I claim that Husserl’s argument can be made more intuitive if we consider phenomenology to be the study of truth rather than knowledge, and if we see the reduction as primarily a modification in our vocabulary and discourse and not as simply a change in attitude. I briefly compare Husserl’s concept of philosophy with those of Plato and Kant.

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 picture, I am no longer just with what is immediately there. I am with the depicted as well as with what is itself there. It is as though a fourth spatial dimension suddenly came into play, not effacing but being added to the three that were and are there all along. A new horizon appears and is blended with the one in which I am engaged.

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 the influence he has exercised.

The first part of this essay presents Patrick Masterson’s exposition of the phenomenology of religion developed by Jean-Luc Marion, and his exposition of the Thomistic philosophy of religion. Masterson argues that phenomenology can be helpful as an analysis of faith and religious experience, but it remains within subjective immanence. It needs to be complemented by a metaphysical analysis that deals with causation and explanation, as Thomism does. The essay then makes three points: first, that phenomenology need not be limited to the merely subjective domain nor need it fail to speak about being; second, that Thomistic “cognitional existence,” as developed by Joseph Owens, can be fruitfully compared with the domain studied by phenomenology as the analysis of being as truth; third, that the “saturated phenomena” introduced by Marion and used by Masterson involve categorial articulation and hence some initiative on the part of the knower, even in matters of religious faith. The essay discusses issues such as the nature of philosophical discourse, the differences between the modern and the premodern understandings of appearance; and the nature of cognitional existence in words and images.