Andrew W. Lamb

Human knowledge seems clearly to be situated and conditioned by history and tradition, culture and value, language and meaning, and the contingent faculties of the human body and mind. This fact is often thought to undermine of itself the possibility of the human achievement of rigorous, "scientific" knowledge---the certainty of truth and, in particular, the certainty of objectively relevant truth and of the truth of what counts as a universal essence. Such is the thinking of many who depart from Edmund Husserl's vision of achieving rigorous science on the basis of his phenomenology. Against this line of thinking, this dissertation seeks to show that situatedness and science are compatible. This compatibility is defended by clarifying how a possibly, if not certainly, situated science can be successfully conducted on the basis of phenomenology---a phenomenology that is faithful in the main to the thought of its founder. ;Chapter one of the dissertation clarifies the nature of science and the problem of situatedness. Chapter two defends the genuine possibility of achieving the act of certainty basic to rigorous science, and it highlights phenomenology's relevance to this achievement. With reference to Martin Heidegger, it also explores the problem that semblances pose for science. Drawing upon the findings thus far achieved, the dissertation then shows the objective relevance of a science based upon phenomenology in chapter three, and it defends the genuine possibility of science's laying hold of truths of universals and universally valid truths in chapter four. The fifth and final chapter proposes a "refiguration" of the inherited, philosophical traditions of modernity and post-modernity in light of the genuine possibility of science in situation

Many philosophers who support a four-dimensionalist metaphysics of things also conceive of experience as a state of a mind having temporal extension or existing as a momentary feature of the dimension of time. This essay shows that such a strict four-dimensionalism — suggested in works by D. M. Armstrong, Mark Heller, and David Lewis — cannot be correct, since it cannot allow for the passing of time that is essential to awareness. The argument demonstrates that the positing of any temporal process at all must compromise the strict four-dimensionalist view of the temporality of experience. This is not to say that the traditional endurantist view is left wholeheartedly endorsed. As I point out, this traditional view makes several questionable claims of its own that must be carefully scrutinized. Still, the criticism of the strict four-dimensionalist ontology indicates a direction to be followed in developing a successful metaphysics of experience.

This essay argues against David Carr’s relativism by clarifying the in principle requirements appropriate to non-relative truths and showing that de facto differences of conceptual frameworks threaten none of them. Non-relative truths are not threatened by history. This defense of non-relative truth belongs to a larger defense of Husserlian “science” that shows how essences, even those “delivered” by history, have a universal “governance” and can be affirmed in nonrelative truths-as such science requires. If history also allows the other qualities of Husserlian science to obtain, then, the essay concludes, such science can exist even as a “situated science.”

: Many philosophers interpret Edmund Husserl as relying upon his phenomenological epoché to escape contextual powers so as to recover a contextually unconditioned "constituting" consciousness. I show, however, that in both Ideas I and Cartesian Meditations Husserl relies upon the epoché for something more modest, though important: studying the immanent "reaches" of experience—experience providing, among other things, intuitive disclosures that ultimately legitimate all "science." For this study, experience is to be taken as it exists, even if contextually conditioned. The epoché thus supports a study of experiential immanence—a study definitive of phenomenology—compatible with contextual conditioning

Drawing upon his almost thirty years of reading and lecturing on phenomenology, Moran provides in this book an introduction to the phenomenological movement—a movement that, as he rightly claims, “in many ways, typifies the course of European philosophy in the twentieth century”. Moran’s book sketches the views of nine philosophers whose works either fall squarely within the parameters of phenomenology or draw a significant inspiration from phenomenology. He begins with an introduction to the thought of Franz Brentano, whose concern for an “exact scientific philosophy, and, specifically, his project for descriptive psychology” provide much intellectual impetus for the founding of phenomenology by Edmund Husserl. Moran then devotes four of the remaining twelve chapters to the views of Husserl, two chapters to those of Martin Heidegger, and one chapter each to the philosophies of Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hannah Arendt, Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Jacques Derrida.