Dermot Moran

This chapter begins with sketching briefly the emergence of intuition in rationalist philosophy. It focuses on the following problems: First, how are we to understand the defining characteristics of intuition in general, namely immediacy and singularity, and, furthermore, the characteristics of human intuition in particular, namely givenness, passivity and receptivity? Second, what, precisely, is given immediately in intuition? Third, in Immanuel Kant’s distinction between form and content, how can the pure forms of intuition (space and time) be themselves intuitions? The chapter discusses precisely Kant’s intention to overcome Locke and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz by introducing a new notion: intuitions as a separate ‘source of knowledge’. Another important feature of Kant’s departure from the Scholastic and rationalist tradition is his rejection of intellectual intuition, of the immediate apprehension of singular objects by intellect without the mediation of sensibility.

Husserl’s mature phenomenology offers a complex and multi-layered account of the constitution of the human person through a developmental analysis of different stages of constitution, from the constitution and integration of the lived body upward to the full, free, rational functioning of the mature human person. The mature human person is, for Husserl, in the fullest sense, a self-reflective Cartesian cogito, a self-conscious rational agent exercising conscious “position-takings”, judgings, desirings, and willings. At the same time, a person is an intersubjective social being, a member of a family, a group, a community, a nation, a participant in empathic interpersonal relations with others in the context of a social world, an environment, and a life-world, what Husserl calls socius. But, for Husserl, the self is also necessarily rooted in nature, and lives through its sensations, drives and tendencies, affections, feelings, emotions and motor capacities and especially through its voluntary movements and decisions (Husserl’s “I can”). The ego has moments of wakeful alertness but can also be sunk in sleep or dreaming. It has dispositions, habits, a hexis or habitus, which gives it a network of habitual actions, stances and motivations. Husserl’s account is an extraordinarily rich phenomenological account of the person that contains analyses comparable to psychoanalytic explorations of the unconscious, with which Husserl was barely familiar. In this paper I shall chart Husserl’s conception of the person and explore some tensions in it especially between its unconscious and conscious dimensions.

In this paper I trace the revival of Hegel in France and Germany in the early twentieth century and point especially to the crucial role of phenomenology in incorporating Hegel into their mature transcendental philosophy. Indeed, Martin Heidegger was responsible for a significant revival of Hegel studies at the University of Freiburg, following his arrival there in 1928 as the successor to Husserl. Similarly, Husserl’s student, Fink characterised Husserl’s phenomenology in explicitly Hegelian terms as “the self-comprehension of the Absolute”. The late Husserl seems to embrace the Hegelian vision when he presents his approach in the Crisis itself as a “teleological historical reflection”.

Gurwitsch is the philosopher of consciousness par excellence. This paper presents a systematic exposition of Aron Gurwitsch’s main contribution to phenomenology, namely his theory of the ‘field of consciousness’ with its a priori structure of theme, thematic field, margin. I present Gurwitsch as an orthodox defender of Husserlian descriptive phenomenology, albeit one who rejected Husserl’s reduction to the transcendental ego and Husserl’s overt idealism. He maintained with Husserl the priority of consciousness as the source of all meaning and validity but he rejected Husserl’s transcendental idealism in favour of a ‘levels of existence’ approach. Gurwitsch’s project was to show the continuity between Gestalt psychology and Husserlian eidetics. I explain his concepts of theme, thematic field, margin and horizon as a consistent development of Husserlian thought. I conclude by claiming that neither Gurwitsch nor Husserl fully appreciate how the horizons of an entity can support radical novelty and the application of entirely new contexts.

Stein’s early engagement with Husserl in Göttingen and Freiburg, first as his doctoral student and then as his research assistant, was decisive for her philosophical development. Husserl’s phenomenology shaped her philosophical thinking. Despite embracing, in the twenties, a Christian metaphysics inspired by Thomas Aquinas, she continued to engage with phenonenology through the nineteen thirties, even writing a short review of Husserl’s Crisis when it appeared in Philosophia in 1937. In this paper I outline Edith Stein’s personal engagement with Edmund Husserl and his phenomenology, and outline her phenomenology of empathy and embodiment, including her conception of individual personhood.

Edmund Husserl is the founder of phenomenology and the Logical Investigations is his most famous work. It had a decisive impact on twentieth century philosophy and is one of few works to have influenced both continental and analytic philosophy. This is the first time both volumes have been available in paperback. They include a new introduction by Dermot Moran, placing the Investigations in historical context and bringing out their contemporary philosophical importance. These editions include a new preface by Sir Michael Dummett

Edmund Husserl is the founder of phenomenology and the Logical Investigations is his most famous work. It had a decisive impact on twentieth century philosophy and is one of few works to have influenced both continental and analytic philosophy. This is the first time both volumes have been available in paperback. They include a new introduction by Dermot Moran, placing the Investigations in historical context and bringing out their contemporary philosophical importance. These editions include a new preface by Sir Michael Dummett

Responsibility has traditionally been associated with a project of appropriation, understood as the securing of a sphere of mastery for a willful subject, and enframed in a metaphysics of will, causality and subjectivity. In that tradition, responsibility is understood in terms of the subjectum that lies at the basis of the act, as ground of imputation, and opens onto the project of a self-legislation and self-appropriation of the subject. However, one finds in Heidegger and Derrida the reversal—indeed, the deconstruction—of such a tradition, and responsibility is approached instead as an exposure to an inappropriable: assumption of an inappropriable thrownness and finitude for Heidegger, ‘experience of the im-possible’ for Derrida. I will explore how responsibility can be thought from such inappropriable, in an experience that Derrida called ‘ex-appropriation.’ In the process, I will engage the very complex and tortuous relation of Derrida to Heidegger

This introduction presents a state of the art of philosophical research on cognitive phenomenology and its relation to the nature of conscious thinking more generally. We firstly introduce the question of cognitive phenomenology, the motivation for the debate, and situate the discussion within the fields of philosophy, cognitive psychology and consciousness studies. Secondly, we review the main research on the question, which we argue has so far situated the cognitive phenomenology debate around the following topics and arguments: phenomenal contrast, epistemic arguments and challenges, introspection, ontology and temporal character, intentionality, inner speech, agency, holistic perspective, categorical perception, value, and phenomenological description. Thirdly, we suggest future developments by pointing to four questions that can be explored in relation to the cognitive phenomenology discussion: the self and self-awareness, attention, emotions and general the...

Volume 2 covers one of the richest eras for the philosophical study of religion. Covering the period from the 6th century to the Renaissance, this volume shows how Christian, Islamic and Jewish thinkers explicated and defended their religious faith in light of the philosophical traditions they inherited from the ancient Greeks and Romans. The enterprise of 'faith seeking understanding', as it was dubbed by the medievals themselves, emerges as a vibrant encounter between - and a complex synthesis of - the Platonic, Aristotelian and Hellenistic traditions of antiquity on the one hand, and the scholastic and monastic religious schools of the medieval West, on the other