Andrij Wachtel

In this paper, I analyze several recent attempts to marry (cognitive) science and (classical) phenomenology. I argue that some of the most prominent proposals of such marriage are based on a conflation of two fundamentally different claims about experience that require different theoretical commitments. The _weak claim_ is that experience is important for science and cannot be neglected; the _strong claim_ is that experience is foundational for science. In my view, this conflation is mostly based on a misinterpretation of the methods and goals of phenomenological philosophy in its original Husserlian form. I further argue that, if Husserl is right, this conflation may be detrimental to both phenomenology and science as it suppresses the value of the transcendental-phenomenological enterprise and disorients the objective-scientific approach. To set the stage for my argument I examine Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, and Evan Thompson’s 2024 book _The Blind Spot_ reading it back-to-back with Husserl’s _Crisis_.

The paper presents a phenomenological critique of the enactive approach inaugurated by Francisco Varela, Eleanor Rosch, and Evan Thompson in The Embodied Mind (1991/2016). The aim of the paper is twofold. On the one hand, to provide a sharper distinction between the natural and the transcendental viewpoints on consciousness against the backdrop of enactivists’ alleged commitment to the latter. On the other, to show that the lack of a proper distinction between the viewpoints in question leads to self-inconsistency in the enactive approach. I particularly analyze the enactivists’ idea of “fundamental circularity” between subjectivity and objectivity along with the closely related principle of “groundlessness” and attempt to demonstrate that these ultimately result in circular reasoning rather than “virtuous” or “creative” circularity, as enactivists seem to suggest.

In this paper, I analyze Husserl’s concept of definiteness and its most common interpretations, starting with the one provided by Oskar Becker in his habilitation thesis written under Husserl’s supervision. The notion of definiteness characterizes a consistent and complete formal system and has long been a subject of heated debate. Contrary to the widespread reading of the concept of definiteness as a certain standard (either a realistic or an idealistic one) devised for the exact sciences, I propose to view this concept as a descriptive term in the transcendental sense of the word. I argue that such an interpretation is grounded in Husserl’s "principle of all principles" and helps get a much better grasp of his phenomenological approach to mathematics and logic.

The article is a translator’s commentary on the Ukrainian translation of E. Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations. The task of this article is twofold: On the one hand, to reveal the historical context of the writing and publishing of Cartesian Meditations, on the other hand, to outline the strategic and terminological aspects of the Ukrainian translation of this work. The first part of the article is devoted to the history of the creation of the text of Cartesian Meditations. In particular, the author answers the question of why the German text of Cartesian Meditations was not published until 1950, almost twenty years after the French translation of the book was released. The historico-philosophical investigation conducted in the article shows that Husserl considered the publication of Cartesian Meditations as an opportunity to systematically present his phenomenological philosophy and, eventually, recognized the impossibility of embracing the complexity of his doctrine within this work. The difficulty of this systematic presentation led to the enhancement of the role of Husserl’s assistant, Eugen Fink, in the editing of Cartesian Meditations and, ultimately, to the creation of Fink’s Sixth Meditation. The latter, as the author of the article demonstrates, puts previous developments in the phenomenology of static and genetic types into a new theoretical perspective, mainly by introducing the method of constructive phenomenology. In the second part of the article, the author offers one of the possible strategies for translating Husserlian texts that consists in structural simplification and stylistic improvement of the text. This strategy is proposed to be implemented by using simpler grammatical structures, by supplementing the text with translator’s comments, as well as by consistent usage of the Ukrainian phenomenological terminology. During the analysis of the terminological discourse of contemporary Ukrainian phenomenology, the author revises some of the established Ukrainian translations, such as the translation of the phenomenological terms Ausschaltung and Zeitbewusstsein and introduces the translation of new terms, such as Vergemeinschaftung, Person, reell and ideell.

Since the end of the last century, there have been several ambitious attempts to naturalize Husserlian phenomenology by way of mathematization. To justify themselves in view of Husserl’s adamant antinaturalism, many of these attempts appeal to the new physico-mathematical tools that were unknown in Husserl’s time and thus allegedly make his position outdated. This paper critically addresses these mathematization proposals and aims to show that Husserl had, in fact, sufficiently good arguments that make his antinaturalistic position sound even today. The starting point of the discussion presented in this paper is the mathematization project introduced by Jean-Michel Roy, Jean Petitot, Bernard Pachoud, and Francisco Varela in their introduction to the book Naturalizing Phenomenology. This proposal was followed by a number of critiques but also by several alternative naturalization attempts clearly inspired by Roy et al.’s ambitious project. The review of some of Husserl’s important arguments often overlooked or misinterpreted by both the naturalization advocates and their critics leads the author of the paper to the twofold conclusion which, on the one hand, explores the deeper reasons for the impossibility of a physical and mathematical treatment of phenomenology, on the other hand, clarifies the sense in which such treatments are possible, namely by way of restriction of the variety of experiential aspects that undergo naturalization and substitution of the aspects amenable to the direct mathematization for the directly unmathematizable ones. In the fourth section of this paper, the author attempts to demonstrate that, contrary to widespread belief, Husserl’s arguments are not obsolete by the standards of the contemporary physico-mathematical approaches employed in the mathematization of phenomenology and indeed stand the test of time.