John J. Drummond

Volume 1 of this work, subtitled Creative Experience and the Critique of Reason and reviewed in these pages by Dallas Laskey, is a study of human creative processes, for it is, Tymieniecka argues, the creative imagination and the will which are the wellspring of all human life. These creative processes, which are to be understood as "man's self-interpretation-in-existence," reach their natural or worldly pinnacle in historical, cultural communities with their poetic, moral, and intelligible productions. Such communities, however, emerging and decaying in turn, cannot confer an ultimate significance on human life. Hence, the present volume turns its attention to the elucidation of the "transnatural destiny" of the human being, of the ways in which human creativity orients us toward the divine. This elucidation of the experience of the divine will complete the account of human creativity because we shall discover that the divine reveals itself to us in human inwardness, in the human formulation of the sacred message: "the ciphering of the sacred message advances through man's self-ciphering-in-the-sacred."

A fruitful way to approach The Idea of Phenomenology is through Husserl’s claim that consciousness is not a bag, box, or any other kind of container. The bag conception, which dominated much of modern philosophy, is rooted in the idea that philosophy is restricted to investigating only what is really immanent to consciousness, such as acts and sensory contents. On this view, what Husserl called “the riddle of transcendence” can never be solved. The phenomenological reduction, as Husserl develops it in The Idea of Phenomenology, opened up a new and broader sense of immanence that embraces the transcendent, making it possible both to solve the riddle and to escape the bag conception once and for all. The essay will discuss ways in which this new conception of immanence is tied to the key Husserlian themes of appearance, phenomenon, essence, seeing or intuiting, and constitution.

Can we have objective knowledge of the world? Can we understand what is morally right or wrong? Yes, to some extent. This is the answer given by Adam Smith and Edmund Husserl. Both rejected David Hume’s skeptical account of what we can hope to understand. But they held his empirical method in high regard, inquiring into the way we perceive and emotionally experience the world, into the nature and function of human empathy and sympathy and the role of the imagination in processes of intersubjective understanding. The challenge is to overcome the natural constraints of perceptual and emotional experience and reach an agreement that is informed by the facts in the world and the nature of morality. This collection of philosophical essays addresses an audience of Smith- and Husserl scholars as well as everybody interested in theories of objective knowledge and proper morality which are informed by the way we perceive and think and communicate.

Tragesser intends to show that Husserl in his phenomenological investigation of the foundations of logic and mathematics undercuts the basis on which the problem of realism and antirealism in epistemology and the philosophy of logic is traditionally conceived. Husserl does this, Tragesser contends, by attempting "to purge logical thinking of [the] assumption [of the law of the excluded middle] while at the same time avoiding the pitfalls of psychologism". Central to this investigation is Husserl's disclosure of the noema, the intentional correlate of an act of consciousness, as the thought-component of acts of thinking. Thus, phenomenology, on Tragesser's account, is the descriptive theory of "the domain of all possible thoughts and thus also all possible entities which can be thought".

This very ambitious and remarkably detailed book examines some of the most fundamental themes in Husserl's philosophy. As is evident from the title, the book has two parts, the first of which (pp. 1-101) discusses Husserl's methodology, esp. the phenomenological reduction, and the second of which (pp. 103-347) investigates the themes of space, time, and other. These themes are selected because they are central to our mundane and embodied experience of an objective, physical and animate world

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 <I>Ethics and Selfhood: Alterity and the Phenomenology of Obligation<D> 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.

Rapaport, a professor of literature, differs from many literary critics interested in the thought of Jacques Derrida insofar as he seeks to locate Derrida within the philosophical tradition and problematic out of which Derrida's ideas, so significant for critical theory, emerge. While Rapaport considers Derrida in relation to thinkers as diverse as Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud, Husserl, Blanchot, Joyce, and Celan, he focuses his attention on Heidegger, and Derrida's reflections on Heidegger, for there the relation between time and language central to Derrida's deconstructionism is most fruitfully to be examined.

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.