Dermot Moran

In his illuminating Aquinas Lecture Jacques Taminiaux offers a bold interpretation of certain contemporary European philosophers in terms of the way in which they react to and transform Husserl’s phenomenological reduction. He highlights issues relating to embodiment, personhood, and value. Taminiaux sketches Husserl’s emerging conception of the reduction and criticizes certain Cartesian assumptions that Husserl retains even after the reduction, and specifically the assumption that directly experienced mental acts and states are not given in adumbrations but present themselves as they are. Heidegger too does not escape a certain Cartesian dualism with his privileging of the individual authentic self over and against the inauthentic das Man. Taminiaux portrayspost-Heideggerian philosophy (specifi cally Arendt, Jonas, and Levinas) as responding to failures or dualisms haunting Husserl’s reduction. Taminiaux is right to insist on the importance of the reduction in Husserl and also, despite appearances, in Heidegger, but it is not clear that the meditations of Arendt, Jonas, and Levinas can really be seen as responding to failures in the reduction. Furthermore, Taminiaux downplays the centrality of Husserl’s commitment to transcendental idealism and his representation of the epochē and reduction as ways of breaking through the natural attitude to reach the transcendental attitude of the non-participating spectator.

Phenomenology as a tradition owes its name to Edmund Husserl, in his Logical Investigations (1900-1). It began as a bold new way of doing philosophy, an attempt to bring it back from abstract metaphysical speculation and empty logical calculation in order to come into contact with concrete living experience. As formulated by Husserl, Phenomenology is the investigation of the structures of consciousness that enable consciousness to refer to objects outside itself. It soon broadened into a world-wide and now century-old tradition. Phenomenological versions of theology, sociology, psychology, psychiatry and literary criticism, have all been engendered, so that phenomenology remains one of the most important traditions of contemporary philosophy. Phenomenology is currently extending into new areas such as gender, ethnicity, multiculturalism, and ecology. An effort has been made in these four volumes to include representatives of all the major tendencies within phenomenology and to provide documentation of the critical discussion of its central topics. Forthcoming titles in this series include Pragmatism (2005, c.4 Volumes, c.£495), Free Will (2005, c.4 Volumes, c.£495) and Aesthetics (2005, c.4 Volumes, c.£495)

In Being and Nothingness (1943) Sartre includes a grounding-breaking chapter on ‘the body’ which treats of the body under three headings: ‘the body as being for-itself: facticity’, ‘the body-for-others’, and ‘the third ontological dimension of the body’. Sartre’s phenomenology of the body has, in general, been neglected. In this essay, I want to revisit Sartre’s conception of embodiment. I shall argue that Sartre, even more than Merleau-Ponty, is the phenomenologist par excellence of the flesh (la chair) and of intersubjective intercorporeity while emphasising that touching oneself is a merely contingent feature and not ‘the foundation for a study of corporeality’.

Dermot Moran provides a lucid, engaging, and critical introduction to Edmund Husserl's philosophy, with specific emphasis on his development of phenomenology. This book is a comprehensive guide to Husserl's thought from its origins in nineteenth-century concerns with the nature of scientific knowledge and with psychologism, through his breakthrough discovery of phenomenology and his elucidation of the phenomenological method, to the late analyses of culture and the life-world. Husserl's complex ideas are presented in a clear and expert manner. Individual chapters explore Husserl's key texts including _Philosophy of Arithmetic_, _Logical Investigations_, _Ideas_ I, _Cartesian Meditations_ and _Crisis of the European Sciences_. In addition, Moran offers penetrating criticisms and evaluations of Husserl's achievement, including the contribution of his phenomenology to current philosophical debates concerning consciousness and the mind. _Edmund Husserl_ is an invaluable guide to understanding the thought of one of the seminal thinkers of the twentieth century. It will be helpful to students of contemporary philosophy, and to those interested in scientific, literary and cultural studies on the European continent

Introduction to Phenomenology is an outstanding and comprehensive guide to an important but often little-understood movement in European philosophy. Dermot Moran lucidly examines the contributions of phenomenology's nine seminal thinkers: Brentano, Husserl, Heidegger, Gadamer, Arendt, Levinas, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and Derrida. Written in a clear and engaging style, this volume charts the course of the movement from its origins in Husserl to its transformation by Derrida. It describes the thought of Heidegger and Sartre, phenomenology's most famous thinkers, and introduces and assesses the distinctive use of phenomenology by some of its lesser-known exponents, such as Levinas, Arendt and Gadamer. Throughout, the enormous influence of phenomenology on the course of twentieth-century philosophy is thoroughly explored. Clearly explaining technical terms and avoiding jargon, Introduction to Phenomenology is an indispensable introduction to the history and substance of this vital current in intellectual thought.