John J. Drummond

Cet article maintient que l’intérêt de Husserl pour le développement d’une logique pure en tant que théorie de la science limite sa conception de l’ontologie. L’ontologie formelle est, pour Husserl, une théorie formelle des objets de connaissance, dont les catégories fondamentales sont celles de substance, propriété et relation. En outre, les ontologies régionales évoluent au sein des limites catégorielles définies par l’ontologie formelle. Mais une telle ontologie laisse de côté les activités et les processus de tout genre, parmi lesquels le plus important est celui de l’ « avoir à l’esprit ». La phénoménologie transcendantale, en revanche, s’occupe de l’être-conscient-du-monde, un être-conscient qui est cependant inséparable de l’être-dans-le-monde. Cette phénoménologie se situe sur le même terrain ontologique que l’ontologie fondamentale de Heidegger. Mais alors, bien que la notion husserlienne d’ontologie soit limitée par le rôle dominant attribué à la logique en tant que théorie de la science et à la connaissance vraie qui lui est propre, il y a plus d’ontologie chez Husserl que dans son « ontologie »

Husserl’s Ideen II, subtitled “Phenomenological Investigations on Constitution” and one of Husserl’s most comprehensive works, encompasses wide-ranging analyses of what Husserl calls “material nature,” “animal nahlre,” and “the spiritual world.” In this paper, I shall reflect briefly on his understanding of the interplay among the notions of person, society, and community Both personal and professional factors contribute to this reflection. Each of us belongs to several different, but interrelated and overlapping, communities. family, circle of friends, departmental colleagues, faculty, college or university community, professional society, and political communities of various levels. The functionings and malfunctionings of some of these communities are themselves sufficient to motivate a reflection on the nature of a well-ordered community. In addition, however, the recent publication of the articles Husserl wrote for the Japanese journal Kaizo on the theme of renewal and his early lectures on ethics and value-theory, along with some of the previously published materials on intersubjectivity —as well as the fine commentaries on Husserl’s ethical writings by writers such as Karl Schuhmann, James Hart, and Philip Buckley —provides new reason to reflect on Husserl’s ethical thought, which is too often dismissed as marginal to his work.

La axiología fenomenológica de Husserl se basa en dos planteamientos de Brentano: (1) que aprehendemos lo que es valioso en actos emotivos (Akte der Gemütsbewegungen), y (2) que estos actos emotivos están fundados en “representaciones” (Vorstellungen). Este artículo primero resume la apropiación husserliana del segundo planteamiento de Brentano, y luego esboza algunos modos en los que los propios análisis de Husserl pueden ser corregidos y extendidos, si es que queremos empezar a explicar la complejidad de las emociones. El artículo concluye con algunas observaciones acerca del significado moral de esta explicación más compleja de las experiencias emocionales.

This paper (1) questions the manner in which James Mensch's Ethics and Selfhood: Alterity and the Phenomenology of Obligation characterizes the alternatives among moral theories provided, for example, by Kant and Aristotle; (2) considers and criticizes the notion of "inherent alterity" that Mensch uses to articulate a middle ground in moral theory; and (3) offers an alternative phenomenology of obligation. The notion of "inherent alterity," standing on apparently opposed Husserlian and Levinasian legs, is, it is charged, ambiguous. I argue that the notion of obligation is properly grounded in nonmanifest goods to be realized in the pursuit of manifest goods.

This chapter addresses the issues that motivate representationalist accounts, and it describes the different versions of representationalism as responses to these issues. It argues that the representationalist views do not adequately respond to the epistemological problems that motivate them and that they engender some ontological problems. The chapter presents an alternative ‘presentationalist’ account that preserves the straightforward sense of the mind's openness to the world. While representationalism and presentationalism agree that the relation between mental events or states is direct but mediated, they radically differ in their views of the nature of the mediation involved in the mind's intentional directedness to the world. This difference and the preferability of the presentationalist account are explored.

Evans challenges a widely held, but far from unanimous, view that Derrida's early studies of Husserl and Saussure are carefully argued, scholarly critiques of those thinkers' positions. Evans is careful to point out that in criticizing Derrida's readings and interpretations he is not importing a standard to which Derrida owes no allegiance. Rather, he is applying Derrida's own standard, namely, that a reading must "recognize and respect" all the "instruments of traditional criticism," including the canons of faithful textual interpretation and logical argumentation, not in order to "protect" a text but to "open" a reading.

Brough's translation of Husserl's writings on time-consciousness found in volume 10 of the critical edition of Husserl's works is a welcome addition to the growing catalogue of translations of Husserl. The texts collected in Husserliana 10 are of central importance to understanding Husserl's phenomenology. They are indispensable first to understanding the "wonder" of time-consciousness, whose analysis is "an ancient burden", and the "most difficult" and "perhaps the most important" problem in phenomenology. But they are also indispensable to understanding the most fundamental structures of all experience and of the ego. The irreducible and unitary form of time grounds the possibility of experiencing the duration, concreteness, and individuality of all objects, whether immanent or transcendent, whether processional or enduring; indeed, even ideal objects are experienced as timeless only against the backdrop of the temporal. The analysis of time-consciousness therefore discloses intentionalities essential to the experience of every possible object.

Cobb-Stevens recognizes that Husserl's phenomenology and the so-called analytic tradition beginning with Frege are fundamentally similar in their rejection of modern philosophy's identification of the content of our experiences with representations in the mind. He also, however, identifies a cardinal difference between analytic and Husserlian philosophies in their characterizations of the relation between perception and predication. He develops this point by showing first that the project of the analytic tradition fails insofar as it cannot establish a sufficiently strong connection between word and world. He argues that Frege sharply distinguished psychological representations from objective senses so as to free semantics from psychology and epistemology. However, classic epistemological and ontological issues about appearances and reality refused to disappear. Frege attempted to confront these problems in his account of the relation between a sense and its truth-conditions and in his characterization of sense as a mode of presentation referring to objects, but his critique of psychologism barred any appeal to our intuitions of objects and their intelligible forms. Truth and falsity, for Frege, had to be properties of propositions considered in themselves apart from our intuitive grasp of worldly states of affairs.

This collection is the third of three planned volumes collecting Husserl's shorter essays, reviews, and lectures. Slightly more than one-third of the volume is devoted to five essays on the theme of renewal. All were written in the years from 1922 to 1924; the first three were published in the Japanese journal Kaizo in 1923 and 1924, but the fourth and fifth were not published. These essays arise out of Husserl's own experience of and reflection upon the First World War. Husserl sees a crisis in which our loss of a proper sense of the human has consequences which are not merely theoretical but, much more broadly, ethical and cultural. His response to this crisis is to call for a philosophical renewal of the sort which can underwrite a cultural renewal.

The present volume is a sequel, apparently unforeseen, to the same author's Vom Gesichtspunkt der Phänomenologie: Husserl-Studien, and it continues and expands the treatment of themes developed in the earlier essays. VGP [I] is centered around the treatment of what is for Boehm Husserl's chief methodological technique, viz., the phenomenological reduction, and of several concepts related to the theory and performance of the reduction. Boehm maintains that the reduction, employed by Husserl in the service of establishing a philosophical theory, reveals in its radical application, e.g., in the Krisis, that all objectivities are relative to a transcendental subjectivity, and constitutional analysis further reveals that some particular interest is an essential part of any experience; hence, according to Boehm, theories as purely objective and transcending all subjective interests are in principle impossible. Instead theories must be understood as objective only in the sense of intersubjective and as conditioned by historical and cultural circumstances, interests, and desires. This critical thesis lays the groundwork for the theses of the second volume.

EDMUND HUSSERL in his early writings on space distinguishes three kinds of problems surrounding the presentation of space: psychological, logical, and metaphysical. By the term "psychology" Husserl means a descriptive and genetic psychology which seeks to characterize the contents and structure of particular experiences and to investigate the genetic relations between different experiences. Included among the genetic questions concerning space is the problem of the origin of the science of space.

A POSTMODERN THINKER might very well be dismayed by the suggestions embedded in my title that the breach between modernism and postmodernism can be overcome and that Husserl is at all relevant to a discussion of postmodernism. Has not, after all, the postmodern critique revealed once and for all the poverty of the modern philosophical tradition with its epistemological and foundationalist concerns? And what better example of a philosopher working in the modern tradition than Husserl, who clearly identifies his own philosophy as a form of "transcendental idealism" and who is clearly committed to the discovery of both an indubitable starting point upon which and a clear methodology by which philosophy can establish itself as a sure science of cognition?

This paper attempts to clarify how one might understand philosophy as necessarily involving both third-person and first-person perspectives. It argues, first, that philosophy must incorporate the first-person perspective in order to provide an adequate account of consciousness and the prereflective awareness of the self and, second, in opposition to Dennett’s hetero-phenomenology that this incorporation is possible only within a transcendental perspective. The paper also attempts to meet the challenge of those who claim that the notion of the self—and along with it, the idea of first-person perspective—is dependent upon a second-person perspecive. It argues that the second-person challenge depends upon a sense of “self ” different from that at stake in the first-person perspective operative in prereflective self-awareness.

This paper explores the emergence of the distinctions between the transcendental and the psychological and, correlatively, between phenomenology and psychology that emerge in The Idea of Phenomenology. It is argued that this first attempt to draw these distinctions reveals that the conception of transcendental phenomenology remains infected by elements of the earlier conception of descriptive psychology and that only later does Husserl move to a more adequate—but perhaps not yet fully purified—conception of the transcendental.