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.

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.

The title of this book speaks of the "entanglements" in Wittgenstein's thought. The author claims that most of Wittgenstein's later philosophical criticisms are really criticisms not of philosophical discourse as such but only of his own earlier conception of philosophy as expressed in the Tractatus. In particular she claims that the classical Kantian transcendental philosophy escapes Wittgensteinian criticism; indeed Wittgenstein's own early philosophy, far from being a kind of transcendental philosophy, as Stenius and others have argued, would fall into what Kant would consider a precritical and dogmatic kind of thinking. Wittgenstein's early thought does not, she claims, question the possibility of our thoughts' being related truly to the objective world. It merely accepts a relationship between logic and being.

The two works on logic that Husserl published during his lifetime were Logical Investigations, which appeared in 1900–01 at the beginning of his career, and Formal and Transcendental Logic, which appeared in 1929 and was written just after he retired from teaching in 1928. The present volume contains lectures Husserl gave on logic and the theory of science during the years between these two publications. The main text of the book, comprising 330 pages, is a course he gave in Freiburg in 1917–18 during the winter semester. The course was originally given in 1910–11 when Husserl was at Göttingen, where it was repeated twice in 1912–13 and 1914–15. The volume also contains some fifty pages of supplementary texts, taken from materials that Husserl composed or used during the first presentation of the course in 1910–11. The critical apparatus is very extensive because it has to cover all the variations in the texts that arose as the courses were repeated. It should also be mentioned that the original version of this course drew on material that Husserl had discussed in earlier courses. Thus, the present volume gives a comprehensive picture of how Husserl’s thoughts on logic developed during his last years at Göttingen and his first years at Freiburg. The largest part of the book deals with the formal analysis of meaning and judgment.

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.

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

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.