Sebastian Luft

Diese Aufsatzsammlung ist der erste ausführliche Versuch, eine Verbindung zwischen dem Denken der klassischen deutschen Philosophie und Husserls Phänomenologie herzustellen. Vorliegender Band versammelt eine Reihe neuer kritischer Artikel sowohl von etablierten Forschern wie jüngeren Philosophen aus beiden Traditionen, um diese Forschungslücke, als welche sie von beiderlei Forschungsrichtungen anerkannt ist, zu schließen. Dieser Band wirft neues Licht auf beide Traditionen und hebt ihre Bedeutung für die Philosophie der Gegenwart hervor, sowohl in historischer wie systematischer Hinsicht. Die in diesem Band behandelten Hauptthemen sind Erkenntnistheorie, Moralphilosophie und die Geschichte der Philosophie, wobei diese Themen auf der Basis von mehreren Subthemen (Objekt, Idealismus/Realismus, Subjektivität/Intersubjektivität, Ethik, Geschichte, Kultur) diskutiert werden. Hierdurch wird das grundsätzliche Koordinatensystem für einen spekulativen Vergleich zwischen Husserl und der klassischen deutschen Philosophie präsentiert, indem die wichtigsten Deutungslinien verfolgt werden, um sowohl die Kontinuität wie auch die Diskontinuität beider Traditionen wertschätzen zu können. Eine Sektion des Bandes ist insbesondere der Rezeption der Husserl’schen Phänomenologie und der klassischen deutschen Philosophie gewidmet. Die Aufsätze dieses Bandes sind für eine generelle philosophische Leserschaft intendiert mit besonderer Berücksichtigung von Forschern in den Gebieten der klassischen deutschen Philosophie (Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel), des Neukantianismus und der phänomenologischen Tradition (insbesondere Husserl, aber ebenso andere wichtige Vertreter derselben).​

In this article, I argue that Husserl received important cues from Natorp and his project of a transcendental psychology. I also trace the entire relationship both thinkers had over the course of their lifetime and show how there were important cross-fertilizations on both sides. In particular, Natorp’s project of a reconstructive psychology proved crucial, I argue, for Husserl’s development of genetic phenomenology. Allowing for a reconstruction of subjective-intentional processes makes Husserl see the possibility of breaking with the paradigm of direct intuition as the sole method of phenomenology. However, Natorp’s psychology was also seriously flawed, to Husserl. While exploiting the fruitful elements of Natorp’s reconstructive psychology, Husserl maintained that they could only come to actual fruition in a transcendental phenomenology.

: Mind as Spirit in the World of Culture. Philosophy of Culture, “Naturalistic” Transcendental Philosophy and the Question of the Space of Culture. In this essay I present Cassirer’s philosophy of culture as a special application of Kant’s transcendental philosophy. I then compare and contrast it to another tradition, namely the Pittsburgh School, especially McDowell. The starting point here is the Sellarsian concept of the ‚Space of reasons‘, which McDowell expands through his Aristotelian-inspired concept of ‚Second nature‘. By way of a rather peculiar interpretation of an early interpreter of Cassirer - Howe - I will attempt to bring ‚Marburg‘ and ‚Pittsburgh‘ into a conversation. The result will be a position mediating both traditions and which one could call, following Howe, a ‚Naturalistic idealism‘. In the end I will attempt to demonstrate the superiority of Cassirer’s position, which, however, does not necessitate a rejection or even refutation of McDowell’s.

Dieses Handbuch gibt einen umfassenden Überblick über das Gesamtwerk Husserls und seinen Einfluss auf die nachfolgende Philosophie und andere Wissenschaften. Es ist gleichzeitig das erste Referenzwerk, was nicht nur Husserls veröffentlichte Schriften, sondern auch die Themen des zur Husserls Lebzeiten unveröffentlichten Nachlasses berücksichtigt.​Edmund Husserl gilt als der Begründer der Phänomenologie und als einer der wichtigsten Philosophen des 20. Jahrhunderts. Er stand jedoch lange im Schatten seiner Nachfolger wie etwa Martin Heidegger oder Jean-Paul Sartre. Etwa ab den 1990er Jahren setzte eine Wendung ein, da nun Husserls unveröffentlichter Nachlass zunehmend rezipiert wird. Dabei wird deutlich, dass Husserl mit seiner Phänomenologie für die Philosophie wichtiges Neuland erschlossen sowie zu vielen traditionellen Themen der Philosophie wichtige Beiträge geleistet hat. Seine feingliedrigen Beschreibungen und Strukturbestimmungen der Erfahrung und des Bewusstseins hatten darüber hinaus bedeutende Einflüsse auf Disziplinen, wie etwa Psychologie, Anthropologie oder Soziologie.

Phenomenology was one of the twentieth century’s major philosophical movements and continues to be a vibrant and widely studied subject today. _The Routledge Companion to Phenomenology_ is an outstanding guide and reference source to the key philosophers, topics and themes in this exciting subject, and essential reading for any student or scholar of phenomenology. Comprising over fifty chapters by a team of international contributors, the _Companion_ is divided into five clear parts: main figures in the phenomenological movement, from Brentano to Derrida main topics in phenomenology phenomenological contributions to philosophy phenomenological intersections historical postscript. Close attention is paid to the core topics in phenomenology such as intentionality, perception, subjectivity, the self, the body, being and phenomenological method. An important feature of the _Companion_ is its examination of how phenomenology has contributed to central disciplines in philosophy such as metaphysics, philosophy of mind, moral philosophy, aesthetics and philosophy of religion as well as disciplines beyond philosophy such as race, cognitive science, psychiatry, literary criticism and psychoanalysis.

The latter half of the nineteenth and the early part of the twentieth century witnessed a remarkable resurgence of interest in Kant’s philosophy in Continental Europe, the effects of which are still being felt today. _The Neo-Kantian Reader_ is the first anthology to collect the most important primary sources in Neo-Kantian philosophy, with many being published here in English for the first time. It includes extracts on a rich and diverse number of subjects, including logic, epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of science, and transcendental idealism. Sebastian Luft, together with other scholars, provides clear introductions to each of the following sections (to the authors as well as to each text), placing them in historical and philosophical context: the beginnings of Neo-Kantianism: including the work of Hermann von Helmholtz, Otto Liebman, Friedrich Lange, and Hermann Lotze the Marburg School: including Hermann Cohen, Paul Natorp, and Ernst Cassirer the Southwest School: including Wilhelm Windelband, Heinrich Rickert, Emil Lask, and Hans Vaihinger responses and critiques: including Moritz Schlick, Edmund Husserl; Rudolf Carnap, and the 'Davos dispute' between Martin Heidegger and Ernst Cassirer. The Neo-Kantian Reader is essential reading for all students of Kant, nineteenth and twentieth century philosophy, history and philosophy of science, and phenomenology, as well as to those studying important philosophical movements such as logical positivism and analytic philosophy and its history.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Forms of Knowledge and Sensibility: Ernst Cassirer and the Human Sciences and: Dilthey und Cassirer: Die Deutung der Neuzeit als Muster von Geistesund KulturgeschichteSebastian LuftGunnar Foss and Eivind Kasa, editors. Forms of Knowledge and Sensibility: Ernst Cassirer and the Human Sciences. Kristiansand: HøyskoleForlaget, 2002. Pp. 223. Paper, $25.00.Thomas Leinkauf, editor. Dilthey und Cassirer: Die Deutung der Neuzeit als Muster von Geistesund Kulturgeschichte. Hamburg: Meiner, 2003. Pp. 170. Paper, € 34,80.These two new anthologies on Cassirer attest to the new attention that is being paid to what has often been referred to as "the last neo-Kantian." While interest in Cassirer's oeuvre as a whole, specifically his draft of a philosophy of symbolic forms as a philosophy of culture, has awoken again in the last decade on the European continent—mainly in Germany, but also in France and Italy—it is a pleasant surprise to see him also being well received in the Nordic European countries, as the volume edited by Foss and Kasa demonstrates. Both volumes—successfully, it should be noted—make the case that Cassirer can and in fact ought to play an important role for what goes on in contemporary philosophy and its projects, be they historical, hermeneutical, sociological, linguistic or other. These two books do a good job of demonstrating that Cassirer was unrightfully forgotten and deserves to be reconsidered, especially now that his complete works have and continue to become accessible in critical edition. This novel scholarship is not only about a reassessment of Cassirer's original achievements, as attempted in Foss/Kasa, but also about placing him in the context of twentieth-century philosophy. Leinkauf's volume, in particular, attempts to take stock of the history of philosophy and its meaning for us today—projects that were of paramount interest to Cassirer. It is only logical, hence, to compare his method to Dilthey's, whose manner of doing historiography is framed as a critique of historical reason.Leinkauf's anthology appears in the already well-established Cassirer-Forschungen with Meiner Publishers; as is known, Meiner also edits the critical Cassirer edition and the Collected [End Page 504] Works. Foss's and Kasa's volume, however, is an entirely novel venture into a philosopher who has been only little acknowledged in the Scandinavian countries—perhaps with the exception of Sweden to which the Cassirers emigrated and (after a brief stay in England) became naturalized after the Nazis' seizure of power. This seeming unfamiliarity with Cassirer also explains why the articles in the Norwegian volume are more general and intended to orient Cassirer in the intellectual landscape of these Northern countries that have traditionally been more inclined towards Anglo-American and Eastern-European philosophy. This, however, by no means diminishes the importance of this volume. Indeed, in terms of systematic philosophical approaches presented here, the essays in this volume are, with few exceptions, somewhat more lively and fresher than some of the rather staid historical studies of the German anthology. To be fair, the Leinkauf volume has a decidedly more specific agenda, namely, to locate Cassirer's attempts to interpret modernity, especially his studies of the Renaissance period, in a larger project of a historiography of modernity as a whole; a project that has been so much at the forefront in many philosophical endeavors in the late-twentieth and beginning twenty-first century. Cassirer is contrasted, as the title indicates, with another influential attempt at the same task, namely by Wilhelm Dilthey. This is especially interesting since Dilthey, being a generation older, took no notice of Cassirer's work, and Cassirer, in turn, gave only little attention to Dilthey's work, since his writings on the subject were published later. Thus, the anthology closes a gap both in Cassirer and Dilthey scholarship.What both books have outwardly in common, however, is the fact that they both are collections of papers given at conferences, in Potsdam and Trondheim, respectively. The contributors of the German volume are St. Otto, R. A. Makkreel, M. Mulsow, G. Cacciatore, E. Rudolph, H. Holzhey, U. Renz, G. Scholtz, and G. Hartung. It is no surprise to find some of these well-established authors in...

This paper takes a renewed look at Husserl's method of the phenomenological reduction. It interprets "the reduction" as shorthand for the meaning of Husserl's entire phenomenology in its mature stage. In the same way, the method of reduction might have different manners of execution but they are nevertheless guided by a common intent. The text takes its starting point by considering the different metaphors Husserl uses - the "flatland creatures" and the reduction as akin to a religious conversion - and spells out their implications, which lead me to consider their metaphilosophical significance. In this way, this article attempts a metaphilosophical reading of the meaning of the reduction in Husserl, which is equal to considering the meaning philosophy has for Husserl in the most general terms. In this way, some unorthodox reflections are carried out that shed new light on central phenomenological concepts, such as evidence and eidetic variation, phenomenology as a form of transcendental idealism, and the notorious problem of the lifeworld. In this way, Husserl's phenomenology is interpreted as a peculiar representative of Enlightenment philosophy that restitutes a special notion of responsibility

This essay makes two claims. The first, exegetical, point shows that there are Husserlian elements in Gadamer’s hermeneutics that are usually overlooked. The second, systematic, claim takes issue with the fact that Gadamer saw himself in alliance with the project of the later Heidegger. It would have been more fruitful had Gadamer aligned himself with Husserl and the enlightenment tradition. following Heidegger in his concept of “effective history,” Gadamer risks betraying the main tenets of the enlightenment by shifting the weight from subjectivity to effective history as the “agent” in history. This is not a wholesale dismissal of Gadamer’s project, however. The problem in Gadamer’s effective history can be remedied by insisting, with Husserl, on the subjective character of effective history. Gadamer was right to criticize Husserl’s idea of a transcendental genesis, but went too far in giving up the idea of human subjectivity as the agent in history.

In this chapter, I present some systematic thoughts on a phenomenology of attention. There are two angles from which I will approach this topic. For one, the phenomenon in question is quite important for Husserl, but his thoughts on the topic have not been known to the public until recently through a new volume of the Husserliana (Hua XXXVIII) that presents the only analyses in Husserl’s entire oeuvre dealing with this phenomenon. As it turns out, attention, as located between passive perception and active, synthetic consciousness, plays a key role in genetic phenomenology and its attempt to work out the levels of consciousness from passivity to activity. Hence, one part of this paper has the intention of presenting some of Husserl’s thoughts on attention and the systematic role it plays in his phenomenology of constituting consciousness. Secondly, in order to further the systematic point of the phenomenon, I turn to Goethe’s reflections on the primal phenomenon (Urphänomen) that can, I believe, be brought to bear on attention. Indeed, the primal phenomenon as a phenomenon that immediately and forcefully seizes our attention Goethe once compares to “the most beautiful pearls” in a chain of related phenomena. Among the phenomena appearing to us, some “simply” have a special quality in that they beckon us to investigate them, very much in the way in which Husserl describes the manner in which some phenomena lure us to focus our attention on them. Finally, if it is the world which “chooses,” as it were, certain phenomena for us to be drawn into their meaningful contexts, this observation has serious consequences for phenomenology as transcendental idealism. I want to put it as a question: What does it mean for a theory of world-constitution through consciousness that the world is “designed” such that certain phenomena are privileged from within the world to leap out at us, enticing us to explore it? Does attention bring us before the limits of phenomenology as transcendental idealism?

In this article, we present two accounts of intersubjectivity in Jaspers and Husserl, respectively. We argue that both can be brought together for a more satisfying account of empathy and communication in the context of psychiatric praxis. But while we restrict ourselves for the most part to this praxis, we also indicate the larger agenda that drives Jaspers and Husserl, despite all disagreement. Here we spell out, in particular, how a phenomenologically inspired account of empathy and intersubjectivity can have larger ramifications for a theory of social life and interaction. Finally, we argue for a ‘relaxed' view concerning the relation between pure and applied phenomenology, such that both can mutually benefit from one another.