Dermot Moran

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.

This thesis is a study of the philosophical system of a little-studied, but important medieval thinker, John Scottus Eriugena , concentrating on his Periphyseon . ;I argue that Eriugena's system of nature must be approached through an investigation of his epistemology and general philosophy of mind. Instead of beginning with his fourfold classification of Nature, as most commentators have done, I begin with Eriugena's concept of the mind and its dialectical operations , and continue with an examination of his anthropology , and his concept of self-knowledge , before turning to his relativist ontology of being and non-being . Chapter Seven examines Eriugena's fourfold division of Nature in the light of the earlier chapters. ;Against some recent commentators, I argue that Eriugena should not be interpreted solely from within the framework of the Latin-Augustinian metaphysical tradition of the early Middle Ages, that it was his sympathy for Greek Christian Neoplatonism which led him to develop an idealist philosophical outlook . Eriugena synthesises the Greek Eastern and the Latin Western traditions into a profound and original philosophical system. ;I show further that Eriugena "deconstructs" Latin metaphysical realism in favour of his own "me-ontology" or "meta-ontology," inspired by the Greeks. He produces the most detailed account of non-being between Plato's Parmenides and the phenomenologies of nothingness of Heidegger and Sartre. ;The summit of Eriugena's system is infinite Non-being, or infinite self-identical subjectivity. This philosophy bears strong similarities to post-Kantian critical philosophy, especially the Idealism of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. My interpretation thus agrees with the nineteenth-century Idealist reading of Eriugena. At the same time, it suggests the implications of Eriugena's idealism for the interpretation of certain modern philosophies

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.

Résumé Dans cet article, j’explore l’idéalisme d’Érigène selon ses propres termes et conditions, en tentant de saisir la nature spécifique de son application théologique, métaphysique et épistémologique de la relation entre être et non-être. Je suggère que les idéalistes allemands ont raison de considérer Érigène comme l’un des leurs pour sa reconnaissance de l’univers comme un processus d’articulation de soi et de compréhension de soi de l’esprit divin. L’explication d’Érigène de la nature de toutes les existences comme essentiellement immatérielles, son classement ontologique du monde apparemment physique, matériel et sensible sous le niveau de l’esprit et dans un sens spécifique, dépendant de l’esprit, et sa compréhension de toutes choses comme contenues dans l’esprit divin (et par extension dans l’esprit humain comme imago dei ) doivent être considérés non seulement comme constituant un système philosophique original à part entière, mais aussi comme un idéalisme dynamique et intellectualiste. La nature infinie d’Érigène implique l’interaction dialectique du caché et de la manifestation, du néant et de l’être, de l’esprit inconnu de lui-même qui en vient à la connaissance de soi dans un savoir et un non-savoir infinis.

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

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 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.