Andrea Staiti

In this paper I criticize Claude Romano’s recent characterization of Husserl’s phenomenology as a form of Cartesianism. Contra Romano, Husserl is not committed to the view that since individual things in the world are dubitable, then the world as a whole is dubitable. On the contrary, for Husserl doubt is a merely transitional phenomenon which can only characterize a temporary span of experience. Similarly, illusion is not a mode of experience in its own right but a retrospective way of characterizing a span of experience. Therefore, Husserl cannot be plausibly characterized as either a disjunctivist or a conjunctivist. The common premise of both theories – namely, that perception and illusion are two classes of conscious acts standing on equal footing – is phenomenologically unsound. I propose to call Husserl’s theory a hermeneutical theory of perception, i.e., one that interprets perception as a temporal and self-correcting process. In the last part of the paper I argue that Husserl’s positive appraisal of Cartesian doubt is only pedagogical in nature. Husserl does not take Cartesian doubt to be practicable, but the attempt to doubt universally has the positive effect of revealing transcendental subjectivity as the subject matter of phenomenology

_ Source: _Volume 46, Issue 2, pp 277 - 295 In this paper I argue that in Husserl’s _Ideas I_ there is a seeming contradiction between the characterization of pure consciousness as the _residue_ of the performance of the phenomenological reduction and the claim that in the natural attitude consciousness is taken to be an entity is the world. This creates a puzzle regarding the positional status of consciousness in the natural attitude. After reviewing some possible options to solve this puzzle in the existing literature, I claim that the positional status of conscious experiences in the natural attitude is best characterized as _unsettled_. The act that _settles_ the positional status of conscious experiences is reflection. In reflection, experiences are posited as beings, either in a psychological or in a phenomenological key. I conclude by arguing that the problem of positing is of paramount importance to understand correctly Husserl’s claim that phenomenology is _voraussetzungslos_.

Frederick Beiser’s book is a valuable contribution to the revival of neo-Kantian studies characterizing the past few years: a trend that is blowing the dust off this important, yet hitherto neglected chapter of the history of philosophy. The quality of Beiser’s writing is excellent throughout, showing mastery of an impressive range of sources and treating with equal competence a variety of topics in epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and philosophy of religion.In part 1, Beiser advances his most original historical claim about neo-Kantianism. He argues that the movement has its origin in what he calls the “lost tradition”, that is, the empirical-psychological approach to Kant’s transcendental philosophy..

In this paper I present Max Frischeisen-Köhler’s philosophy of science, which he developed as a critical response to the Neo-Kantians. Frischeisen-Köhler drew on insights from both his teacher Wilhelm Dilthey and Edmund Husserl. In the first four sections I examine Frischeisen-Köhler’s criticism of Marburg and Southwestern Neo-Kantianism. This criticism revolves around the view that reality factors into cognition as a fully independent element that cognition must acknowledge and can never construct out of its own intrinsic lawfulness. In the fifth section I focus on Frischeisen-Köhler’s “phenomenology”. His main thesis is that reality is experienced as such in action in such a way that our consciousness of reality does not stem from theoretical considerations about the hypothetical causes of our sensations but from our transactions in the world as agents. Science is thus founded on this pre-scientific experience of reality. I conclude with a criticism of Frischeisen-Köhler’s distinction between consciousness in general and individual subjectivity from a phenomenological viewpoint.