Dermot Moran

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

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.3 (2003) 422-423 [Access article in PDF] Robin Small, editor. A Hundred Years of Phenomenology: Perspectives on a Philosophical Tradition. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2001. Pp. xxix + 191. Cloth, $79.95.The stated aim of this collection of thirteen essays (mostly new—four are reprints) by philosophers resident in Australia is to offer selective perspectives on the phenomenological tradition, correcting misunderstandings and highlighting aspects overlooked in standard commentaries. Presumably, it also wants to exhibit contemporary Australian writing in the phenomenological tradition, and situate phenomenological claims in terms graspable by analytic philosophers.Robin Small's introduction, taking Husserl's conception of eidetic intuition as fundamental, sketches the rise of phenomenology. The collection is then divided into three parts. Part One ("Approaching the Sources") focuses on the sources of phenomenology (Husserl and Heidegger) and opens with a thoughtful essay by Max Deutscher, reprinted from the Canadian Journal of Philosophy (1980), which is replied to by Maurita Harney. Three further, not particularly distinguished, essays deal with the issues of realism, relativism, [End Page 422] and the relation between Ryle and Husserl. Part Two ("Following the Tradition") deals with new themes arising in Heidegger, Sartre, and Derrida, while Part Three ("Making Connections") explores the relation between phenomenology and other disciplines, chiefly sociology, anthropology, and literature. A final essay by Jocelyn Dunphy Bloomfield examines the relevance of phenomenology in the Australian context.The collection is interesting but uneven. Some of the essays are out of date: Small's essay on Ryle and Husserl originally appeared in 1981 and Purushottama Bilimoria's paper, "Heidegger and the Japanese Connection," first published in the Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology (1991), is in need of updating given the upsurge of interest in Husserl in Asia in recent years. Deutscher's "Husserl's Transcendental Subjectivity" is helpful in that it introduces Husserl's transcendental idealism through unusually prosaic analogies. He suggests that the transcendental attitude can be grasped in familiar experiences such as "keeping silence" during an awkward or embarrassing moment or adopting a detached or removed stance. An actor on stage can express anger without being angry. The transcendental attitude is such a detached spectator attitude; it is the capacity we have to judge and appraise ourselves (8). Moreover, it is in this attitude that we come to recognize our commitments to others. Deutscher resists the temptation to separate radically the ordinary living in the world from the detached contemplation of it. There never can be total but only intermittent detachment from the life-world; nevertheless the transcendental epoché is important in that it allows us the chance to gain self-awareness about our situation, about our "forms of life." While Deutscher does a terrific job demystifying one of Husserl's central and much misunderstood concepts, he is at risk of oversimplifying and worse of psychologizing Husserl's insights.Richard Campbell's essay on Heidegger's conception of truth as aletheia is also particularly noteworthy in that it is a philosophically sophisticated attempt to cut through Heidegger's somewhat inflated jargon and expresses his central intuitions about truth. Campbell goes to some trouble to elucidate and disambiguate what Heidegger is saying. Furthermore, he believes Heidegger is wrong in his interpretation of Plato; Plato is doing precisely the opposite of what Heidegger says he is doing. Deutscher's essay on Sartre, informed by an analytic rigor and sensitivity to ambiguity, gives a very clear account and partial defence of the relations between positional consciousness of the object and non-positional self-consciounsess. He is critical of Sartre's sweeping concept of the "in itself" and points out that in reality there are many diverse "in-itselves" with different real properties. Crittenden, too, has an interesting essay on Sartre's conception of "the look." Sartre understands the other as the one who looks at (and thereby seeks to objectify me) whereas for de Beauvoir, the other (in the particular case: woman) is the looked at and objectified. The article on sociology and phenomenology attempts to show the relation between their methods...

The phenomenology of Edmund Husserl had a permanent and profound impact on the philosophical formation of Paul Ricoeur. One could truly say, paraphrasing Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s brilliant 1959 essay ‘The Philosopher and his Shadow’,that Husserl is the philosopher in whose shadow Ricoeur, like Merleau-Ponty, also stands, the thinker to whom he constantly returns. Husserl is Ricoeur’s philosopher of reflection, par excellence. Indeed, Ricoeur always invokes Husserl when he is discussing a paradigmatic instance of contemporary philosophy of ‘reflection’ and also of descriptive, ‘eidetic’ phenomenology. Indeed, I shall argue in this chapter that Husserl’s influence on Ricoeur was decisive and provided an eidetic, descriptive methodology which is permanently in play, even when it has to be concretized and mediated by hermeneutics, as Ricoeur proposes after 1960.

This work is a substantial contribution to the history of philosophy. Its subject, the ninth-century philosopher John Scottus Eriugena, developed a form of idealism that owed as much to the Greek Neoplatonic tradition as to the Latin fathers and anticipated the priority of the subject in its modern, most radical statement: German idealism. Moran has written the most comprehensive study yet of Eriugena's philosophy, tracing the sources of his thinking and analyzing his most important text, the Periphyseon. This volume will be of special interest to historians of mediaeval philosophy, history, and theology.

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.

The contributors cover a wide range of philosophical writers and texts to which the label “idealism” has been or might reasonably be attached. These include Plato, the Roman Stoics, the Neoplatonism of Plotinus, Augustinian Neoplatonism, Johannes Scottus Eriugena, the Arabic _Book of Causes_, George Berkeley, Immanuel Kant, and classical German idealism. "This is a rich, subtle, thought-provoking collection on central, though neglected topics in idealism and its history, offering fresh and important insights into both familiar and less familiar major figures, views, and issues. Most important, perhaps, are its presentation and assessment of non-subjective forms of idealism, as well as mind-dependence forms of idealism prior to Descartes. Contemporary philosophers have become sophisticated about various forms of realism, anti-realism and irrealism. Such discussions, among others, will benefit significantly by accepting this volume’s invitation to become more sophisticated about idealism as well. This very welcome contribution to the literature should find a broad readership." —_Kenneth R. Westphal, University of East Anglia_ "If it is true—as Hegel and his followers have claimed—that being and truth are indissociable from history, then philosophy cannot be successful if it limits itself exclusively to investigations of individual thinkers and periods. What is at stake, ultimately, is the development of Western thought as a whole. In this volume, a fine international group of scholars investigate the meaning of idealism across the ages. Without sacrificing nuance, their contributions show that a core of shared assumptions characterizes idealist philosophies. The historical dialogue which this volume advances emphasizes the relevance of ancient and medieval thinkers for the current debate, but it also challenges us to place modern representatives of idealism—such as Berkeley, Kant, and Hegel—in historical perspective." —_Philipp W. Rosemann, University of Dallas_

In this article I wish to re-examine the vexed issue of the possibility of idealism in ancient and medieval philosophy with particular reference to the case of Johannes Scottus Eriugena (c. 800–c. 877), the Irish Neoplatonic Christian philosopher. Both Bernard Williams and Myles Burnyeat have argued that idealism never emerged (and for Burnyeat, could not have emerged) as a genuine philosophical position in antiquity, a claim that has had wide currency in recent years, and now constitutes something of an orthodoxy.1. Myles Burnyeat, “Idealism and Greek Philosophy: What Descartes Saw and Berkeley Missed,” Philosophical Review 91 (1982): 3–40, repr. in Godfrey Vesey, ed., Idealism—Past and Present (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1982), pp. 19–50. Hereafter this essay will be cited in the version printed in Vesey, ed. Richard Sorabji (instancing Gregory of Nyssa) and Werner Beierwaltes (citing Proclus and Eriugena), and Eyjólfur Kjalar Emilsson (discussing Plotinus), on the other hand, have all argued that idealism is to be found in the Neoplatonic tradition, a tradition neglected by Burnyeat.Richard Sorabji, “Gregory of Nyssa: The Origins of Idealism,” in Time, Creation and Continuum. Theories in Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (London: Duckworth, 1983), pp. 287–96; Werner Beierwaltes, Denken des Einen. Studien zur neuplatonischen Philosophie and ihrer Wirkungsgeschichte (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1985). See also Beierwaltes, “Die Wiederentdeckung des Eriugena im Deutschen Idealismus,” in Platonismus und Idealismus (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1972), pp. 188–201, and his “Zur Wirkungsgeschichte Eriugenas im Deutschen Idealismus und danach. Eine kurze, unsystematische Nachlese,” in Eriugena. Grundzüge seines Denkens (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1994), pp. 313–330. Eyjólfur Kjalar Emilsson, “Cognition and its Object,” in Lloyd P. Gerson, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Plotinus (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1996), pp. 217–49, esp. pp. 245–49. But see, Lloyd P. Gerson, Plotinus (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 227, n.3, who maintains that Plotinus is not an idealist. Similarly, in a 1989 study, I argued not only that idealism was a genuine possibility in late classical and in medieval philosophy, but that that the ninth-century Carolingian philosopher Johannes Eriugena presents a striking example of an extremely radical, almost fantastical, idealism.Dermot Moran, The Philosophy of John Scottus Eriugena. A Study of Idealism in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1989). Of course, the whole discussion depends entirely on what is meant by ‘idealism’. Burnyeat uses Berkeley’s immaterialism as his standard for idealism, and it is this decision, coupled with his failure to acknowledge the legacy of German idealism, which prevents him from seeing the classical and medieval roots of idealism more broadly understood.

Inspired by Aristotle, Franz Brentano revived the concept of intentionality to characterize the domain of mental phenomena studied by descriptive psychology. Edmund Husserl, while discarding much of Brentano?s conceptual framework and presuppositions, located intentionality at the core of his science of pure consciousness (phenomenology). Martin Heidegger, Husserl?s assistant from 1919 to 1923, dropped all reference to intentionality and consciousness in Being and Time (1927), and so appeared to break sharply with his avowed mentors, Brentano and Husserl. Some recent commentators have sided with Heidegger and have endorsed his critique of Husserl and Brentano as still caught up in epistemological, representationalist approaches to intentionality. I argue that Heidegger is developing Husserl, focusing in particular on the ontological dimension of intentionality, not reversing or abandoning his account. Heidegger?s criticisms of representationalism merely repeat Husserl?s. Furthermore, I argue that Husserl?s account of cognitive intentionality, which recognizes the importance of the disinterested theoretical attitude for scientific knowledge, has been underestimated and misunderstood by Heidegger, who treats scientific cognition as a deficient form of practice. In short, Heidegger is more dependent on Husserl than he ever publicly acknowledged.

Duns Scotus, Metaphysician. William A. Frank and Allan B. Wolter. Purdue University Press 1995, pp. 224 £27.50 Hb. ISBN 1–55753–071–8 £13.19 Pb. ISBN 1–55753–072–6 Plato in Renaissance England. Sears Jayne. Dordrecht, Boston & London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1995, pp. 197 Dfl. 190.00, $122.00, £80.00 hb. ISBN 0–7923–3060–9 Mechanismus und Subjektivität in der Philosophie von Thomas Hobbes. Michael Esfeld. Frommann‐Holzboog, Stuttgart‐Bad Cannstatt 1995, pp. 434. ISBN 3–7728–1699–1 Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz: The Concept of Substance in Seventeenth‐Century Metaphysics. R. S. Woolhouse. London: Routledge, 1993. £11.99. ISBN 0–415–09021–0, ISBN 0–415–09022–9 pb. Descartes et Regius. Autour de l'Explication de l'Esprit Humain. Edited by Theo Verbeek. Studies of the History of Ideas in the Low Countries. Rodopi, Amsterdam‐Atlanta, 1993, pp. 114 $23.50 pb. ISBN 90–5183–375‐X The God of Spinoza. A Philosophical Study. Richard Mason. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp. xiv + 272. £35.00. ISBN 0–521–58162–1 Robert Boyle and the Limits of Reason. Jan Wojcik. Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp. 243. £40.00. ISBN 0521–56029–2 An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. John Locke. Edited and abridged by Kenneth P. Winkler. Hackett Publishing Company, Indianapolis, 1996, pp. 416. £27.95 hb; £6.95 pb. ISBN 0–87220–217–8 hb. 0–87220–216‐X pb. John Locke and the Eighteenth Century Divines. Alan Sell. Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 1997, pp. 444. £40.00 hb. ISBN 0–7083–1409–0 The Margins of Orthodoxy. Heterodox Writing and Cultural Response, 1660–1750. Edited by Roger D. Lund. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp. xiv + 298. £35.00. ISBN 0–521–47117‐X The Enigmatic Parting Shot: What was Hume's ‘Compleat Answer to Dr. Reid and to That Bigotted Silly Fellow, Beattie'? James Somerville. Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 1995. pp. 424. £47.50. ISBN 1–85972–083–8 Discursus Praeliminaris de Philosophia in Genere. Christian Wolff. Ed. and trans. into German by Günther Gawlick and Lothar Kreimendahl. Forschungen und Materialien zur deutschen Aufklärung, Abt. I, Bd. 1. Stuttgart: Frommann‐hotzboog, 1996, pp. lxviii + 299. ISBN 3–7728–1523–5 Practical Philosophy. Immanuel Kant. Translated and edited by Mary J. Gregor, with a General Introduction by Allen Wood. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. xxxiii + 668. £50.00. ISBN 0–521–37103–1 Religion and Rational Theology. Immanuel Kant. Translated and edited by Allen Wood and George Di Giovanni. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, £45.00, pp. xxiv + 518. ISBN 0–521–25416–1 Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics. Immanuel Kant. Translated by Paul Carus, with a collection of essays edited by Beryl Logan. London, Routledge, 1996. £45.00, hb. ISBN 0–415–11575–2 £14.99 pb. pp. 264. ISBN 0–415–11576–0 Kant: Philosophic de l'Histoire. Edited by Norbert Waszek. Revue Germanique Internationale 6/1996. Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, pp. 220. ISBN 2–13–047698–8; ISSN 1253–7837 Johann Georg Hamann's Relational Metacriticism. Gwen Griffith Dickson.. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin, New York, 1995, pp. xix + 534. ISBN 3–11–014437–9 Frege. Anthony Kenny. London, Penguin Books, 1995, pp. xii + 223. £7.99 pb. ISBN 0–14–012550–7 Russell. A. C. Grayling. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1996, pp. ix + 115. £5.99. ISBN 0–19–287683‐X

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