Dermot Moran

Intentionality (‘directedness’, ‘aboutness’) is both a central topic in contemporary philosophy of mind, phenomenology and the cognitive sciences, and one of the themes with which both analytic and Continental philosophers have separately engaged starting from Brentano and Edmund Husserl’s ground-breaking Logical Investigations (1901) through Roderick M. Chisholm, Daniel C. Dennett’s The Intentional Stance, John Searle’s Intentionality, to the recent work of Tim Crane, Robert Brandom, Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi, among many others. In this paper, I shall review recent discussions of intentionality, including some recent explorations of the history of the concept (paying particular attention to Anselm), and suggest some ways the phenomenological approach of Husserl and Heidegger can still offer insights for contemporary philosophy of mind and consciousness.

The twentieth century was one of the most significant and exciting periods ever witnessed in philosophy, characterized by intellectual change and development on a massive scale. _The Routledge Companion to Twentieth Century Philosophy_ is an outstanding authoritative survey and assessment of the century as a whole. Featuring twenty-two chapters written by leading international scholars, this collection is divided into five clear parts and presents a comprehensive picture of the period for the first time: major themes and movements logic, language, knowledge and metaphysics philosophy of mind, psychology and science phenomenology, hermeneutics, existentialism, and critical theory politics, ethics, aesthetics. Featuring annotated further reading and a comprehensive glossary, _The Routledge Companion to Twentieth Century Philosophy_ is indispensable for anyone interested in philosophy over the last one hundred years, suitable for both expert and novice alike.

The chapter titled “The Body” in Being and Nothingness offers a groundbreaking, if somewhat neglected, philosophical analysis of embodiment. As part of his “es- say on phenomenological ontology,” he is proposing a new multi-dimensional ontological approach to the body. Sartre’s chapter offers a radical approach to the body and to the ‘flesh’. However, it has not been fully appreciated. Sartre offers three ontological dimensions to embodiment. The first “ontological dimension” addresses the way, as Sartre puts it, “I exist my body.” The second dimension is the manner in which my body is experienced and utilized by the other. This includes my ready-to-hand equipmental engagement with the world and my body as the “tool of tools.” The third dimension is the manner in which “I exist for myself as a body known by the other.” In this paper, I explore Sartre’s original analysis and suggest comparisons with Merleau-Ponty’s account of embodiment. I shall suggest that Sartre offers more discussion on intercorporeality than Merleau-Ponty.

Throughout his career, Husserl identifies naturalism as the greatest threat to both the sciences and philosophy. In this paper, I explicate Husserl’s overall diagnosis and critique of naturalism and then examine the specific transcendental aspect of his critique. Husserl agreed with the Neo-Kantians in rejecting naturalism. He has three major critiques of naturalism: First, it (like psychologism and for the same reasons) is ‘countersensical’ in that it denies the very ideal laws that it needs for its own justification. Second, naturalism essentially misconstrues consciousness by treating it as a part of the world. Third, naturalism is the inevitable consequence of a certain rigidification of the ‘natural attitude’ into what Husserl calls the ‘naturalistic attitude’. This naturalistic attitude ‘reifies’ and it ‘absolutizes’ the world such that it is treated as taken-for-granted and ‘obvious’. Husserl’s transcendental phenomenological analysis, however, discloses that the natural attitude is, despite its omnipresence in everyday life, not primary, but in fact is relative to the ‘absolute’ transcendental attitude. The mature Husserl’s critique of naturalism is therefore based on his acceptance of the absolute priority of the transcendental attitude . The paradox remains that we must start from and, in a sense, return to the natural attitude, while, at the same time, restricting this attitude through the on-going transcendental vigilance of the universal epoché.

In the last decade of his life (from 1928 to 1938), Husserl sought to develop a new understanding of his transcendental phenomenology (in publications such as Cartesian Meditations, Formal and Transcendental Logic, and the Crisis) in order to combat misconceptions of phenomenology then current (chief among which was Heidegger’s hermeneutic phenomenology as articulated in Being and Time). During this period, Husserl had an assistant and collaborator, Eugen Fink, who sought not only to be midwife to the birth of Husserl’s own ideas but who also wanted to mediate between Husserl and Heidegger. As a result of the Fink- Husserl collaboration there appeared a rich flow of works that testify to the depth with which transcendental phenomenology had been rethought. Bruzina is the chief scholar of this material. This paper attempts both to disentangle the relationships between the phenomenologies of Husserrl, Heidegger, and Fink and to assess critically the value of Bruzina’s contribution.

In this paper, I shall examine the evolution of Heidegger’s concept of ‘transcendence’ as it appears in Being and Time (1927), ‘On the Essence of Ground’ (1928) and related texts from the late 1920s in relation to his rethinking of subjectivity and intentionality. Heidegger defines Being as ‘transcendence’ in Being and Time and reinterprets intentionality in terms of the transcendence of Dasein. In the critical epistemological tradition of philosophy stemming from Kant, as in Husserl, transcendence and immanence are key notions (see Husserl, The Idea of Phenomenology, 1907, and Ideas I, 1913). Indeed, ‘transcendence in immanence’ is a leitmotif of Husserl’s phenomenology. Husserl discusses transcendence in some detail in Cartesian Meditations §11 in a manner that is not dissimilar to Heidegger. Heidegger is critical of Husserl’s understanding of consciousness and intentionality and Heidegger deliberately chooses to discuss transcendence as an exceptional domain for the discussion of beings in his ‘On the Essence of Ground’, his submission to Husserl’s seventieth-birthday Festschrift. Despite his championing of a new concept of transcendence in the late 1920s, Heidegger effectively abandons the term during the early 1930s. In this paper, I shall explore Heidegger’s articulation of his new ontological conception of finite transcendence and compare it with Husserl’s conception of the transcendence of the ego in order to get clearer what is at stake in Heidegger’s conceptions of subjectivity, Dasein and transcendence.

Introduction to Medieval Logic, 2nd edn By Alexander Broadie, The Clarendon Press, 1993. Pp. 232. ISBN 0–19–8240260–0. £27.50 hbk. Metaphysics and Culture By Louis Dupre, The Aquinas Lecture 1994 Marquette University Press, 1994. 65pp. ISBN 0–87462–161–5. The Immaterial Self: A Defence of the Cartesian Dualist Conception of the Mind By John Foster, Routledge, 1991. Pp. 272. ISBN 0–415–02989–9. £37.50. Donald Davidson and the Mirror of Meaning: Holism, Truth and Interpretation By J.E. Malpas, Cambridge University Press, 1992. Pp. xviii + 301. ISBN 0–521–41721‐X. £37.50. Knowledge and Evidence By Paul K. Moser, Cambridge University Press, 1991. Pp. 285. ISBN 0–521–42363–5. £13.95 pbk. Essays on Wittgenstein By Peter Philipp and Richard Raatszch, The Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Bergen, 1993. Pp. 178. ISBN 82–91071–05–5. 150 NOK. Wittgenstein and Contemporary Theories of Language Edited by Paul Henry and Arild Utaker, The Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Bergen, 1993. Pp. 251. ISBN 82–91071–04–7. 200 NOK. Metaphysics of Consciousness By William Seager, Routledge, 1991 Pp. 256. ISBN 0–415–06357–4. £37.50 Gadamer and Hermeneutics (Continental Philosophy IV) Edited by Hugh J. Silverman, Routledge, 1991. Pp. 332. ISBN 0–415–90373–4. £35.00 Hbk.

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.