Sebastian Luft

In this essay, I will attempt a systematic reconstruction of the general shape of Husserl's late philosophy, insofar as it centers on the concept of personhood. The systematic concatenation of this and other themes in Husserl's late work - the method of epoché and reduction, ethics, personhood, and teleology - has only recently begun to be explored in Husserl scholarship, and this article is a modest contribution to the further e1ucidation of their mutual relationship. One of the most striking results of this reconstructive analysis is Husserl's final concept of "person", which goes beyond the traditional distinctions, such as "heart" and "mind" or "reason" and "emotion". For Husserl to conceive of the subject as moral person implies, then, the demand to not only conduct oneself morally, but also to have an ethical view of the world as a world that bears meaning and harbors values despite its apparent absurdities

This paper draws out the "speculative" consequences of Husserl's late philosophy which centers around the two major forms of life, the prephilosophical and philosophical attitude. Husserl also calls the philosophical sphere that of the "absolute," since every other form of life is relative upon it. The way to attain this state is, as I try to show, carried out in a certain "dialectical" fashion which attempts to synthesize both at first seemingly contradictory attitudes. In conclusion, I am drawing out a critique of this idea

In this paper I compare and contrast Natorp’s and Husserl’s philosophies as to their programmatic and systematic profiles. I will begin by giving an assessment of their relationship and mutual influence, something that many scholars believe had been done exhaustively in Kern’s initial study of 1964 on the relation between Husserl and Kant and the neo-Kantians. Indeed, this topic – in general, the relation between phenomenology and „critical“ philosophy – deserves a new look now that more material has appeared in the Husserliana, forcefully demonstrating the „transcendental Husserl“ and the Kantian influence on his phenomenology, and given the overall growing interest in neo-Kantianism. I will show that, despite fundamental differences in their philosophical outlooks, Natorp and Husserl share the same principal premise as to the relation between life, science and philosophy, and thus the role of philosophy itself in the midst of „culture“ and „lifeworld“ respectively. Hence, the similarities between Natorp’s Marburg School neo-Kantianism and Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology outweigh the differences, opening up new avenues to pursue transcendental philosophy.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Ernst Cassirer: The Last Philosopher of CultureSebastian LuftEdward Skidelsky. Ernst Cassirer: The Last Philosopher of Culture. Princeton-Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2008. Pp. ix + 288. Cloth $34.00.This is a curious book, because the soul of its author is torn.On the one hand, the book is a monograph on the philosopher-intellectual Ernst Cassirer. It is scholarly, noticeably well-written (not surprisingly, as the author also writes articles for British and American newspapers), philosophical to the extent that it does not distort its subject matter too much, and a splendid piece of intellectual history, which places its subject, Cassirer, in a rich cultural, historical, and intellectual context. In terms of presenting the gist of Cassirer’s thought in relatively few pages, the author does everything right, disregarding minor quibbles. So far, so good.But already reading the introduction, the author makes a confession that bathes the entire book in a different light. Here we learn that the precursor of the present tome was a “straight-faced” account of the philosopher of culture, Cassirer. But over the course of writing it, Skidelsky admits, doubts crept in. Little by little, he came to see Cassirer as a dinosaur of a past age, his philosophy as a “rearguard action on behalf of a vanishing civilization” (3), which died on the battlefields of the Second World War. The “Olympian” Cassirer had an “enchanting vision” and dreamt a “happy dream” of human culture, all of which went down the drain with the advent of Nazism and has now, in our own age of postmodernism, been completely washed away.Instead, the real hero of the book is Heidegger. It was Heidegger, the existentialist, who rebelled against Western metaphysics, who won the day against Cassirer in the 1929 Davos encounter, and it is to him that we, today, owe our sensibilities. The liberalism of Cassirer—a unified vision, not just some narrowly political manifesto—“lost out to the Existenzphilosophie of Heidegger,” he writes, and, “Such unity of vision [as in Cassirer] is impossible for us. Our political principles find no support in our cultural tastes, religious beliefs, or metaphysical insights. We pay tribute to Cassirer, but Heidegger remains the secret master of our thought” (219). [End Page 116]Hence, the book is written, or rather re-written after the author’s conversion, in an ironic, sometimes melancholy style, looking back at Cassirer as a relic of a different era, his thought being “a stranger to our age” (7). Why read and study him at all then? The argument—the only argument—is weak: “he was the twentieth century’s most accomplished defender of the Humboldtian ideal” (6). Is this all? Yes, and this is how Cassirer is presented: with some sympathy, but at bottom as a creature from a different age that one observes like an exotic animal. Once more, why is this so? Skidelsky explains: “We have inherited Cassirer’s liberal political attitudes, but not the cultural sensibility that underlay them. With our skepticism toward progress, our distaste for ‘bourgeois’ formalities, our fascination with charisma, and our endless talk of commitment, authenticity, and roots, we remain, consciously or not, Heidegger’s children” (8), leaving “us” “with a dilemma” between both sentiments (ibid.).But who is this “we”? This reviewer’s suspicion is that it is first and foremost the author himself. Not denying that this dilemma might ring true to many contemporaries, it seems that the one who is troubled by it is primarily the author, who would like the world to be according to Cassirer, but who has become disenchanted with the latter’s synthetic vision due to the fragmented world around him. He would like to bring himself to believe, but cannot. But why is this? Because he has tacitly bought into the idea of all us being “Heidegger’s children.” There can be no doubt—we simply have to accept this fate.But it is this self-assurance that irks this reviewer about the author’s sentiment. Who is this “we” that he invokes? What right does he have to lump “us” together in this category of Heideggerians and to speak about “us” ex cathedra? That one...

Nesta contribuição, a filosofia da cultura de Cassirer é apresentada como uma aplicação especial da filosofia transcendental kantiana, então comparada a outra tradição aqui, a Escola de Pittsburgh, especialmente McDowell. O resultado é o conceito de Sellars de “espaço de razões”, que é então expandido por McDowell com seu conceito de “segunda natureza”. Uma interpretação interessante de um dos primeiros intérpretes de Cassirer – Howe – torna possível trazer “Marburgo” e “Pittsburgo” para a conversa. O resultado dessa comparação será uma posição que transmite ambas as tradições e que Howe poderia descrever como “idealismo naturalista”. No final, tenta-se demonstrar a superioridade da posição de Cassirer, o que não significa uma refutação da de McDowell, mas sim um encaixe de sua posição na de Cassirer.

Der vorliegende Band bietet eine repräsentative Auswahl der wichtigsten Forschungsmanuskripte zur Methode der transzendental-phänomenologischen Reduktion aus Husserls Spätwerk. Werkgeschichtlich orientiert sich diese Edition an den Arbeitsphasen ab 1926, in denen Husserl wiederholt ein `System der Phänomenologie' bzw. ein phänomenologisches Grundwerk zu verfassen beabsichtigte. In den chronologisch angeordneten Texten, die Husserl im Rahmen seiner Manuskriptordnung vom Frühjahr 1935 einer eigenen Sektion (der `B-Gruppe' mit dem Titel 'Die Reduktion') zuwies, führt er aus Vorlesungen und Forschungsmanuskripten der zwanziger Jahre bekannte Themen fort. Neben der Erörterung verschiedener Wege zur phänomenologischen Reduktion und Strategien der Einleitung in die transzendentale Phänomenologie behandelt Husserl das Problem der Phänomenologie als einer eigenständigen, zur intentionalen Psychologie parallelen, transzendentalen Bewußtseinswissenschaft. Hierzu gehören systematisch die Probleme der Unterscheidung von natürlichem und transzendentalem Ich, des Übergangs von natürlicher zu phänomenologischer Einstellung, des Status des unbeteiligten Zuschauers sowie das Problem der `Verweltlichung' des Transzendentalen und dessen `Einströmen' in die vorphilosophische Lebenswelt. In diesen hauptsächlich der Methodik gewidmeten Forschungsmanuskripten wird das Ganze einer phänomenologischen `Systematik' im Umriß erkennbar.

The present volume is the final tome in the six-volume translation of the main writings of Wilhelm Dilthey, offering a selection of what the series editors, Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi, deemed the most important writings of the philosopher-historian. By comparison, Dilthey's Collected Works in the German spans twenty-six volumes and is now complemented by a four-volume edition of his correspondence. Thus, the texts gathered in this set of translations are but the tip of the iceberg of Dilthey's writings.The sixth volume fills...

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...