Daniel Dwyer

This book is one in a series of studies by the recently deceased Israeli philosopher Nathan Rotenstreich dedicated to the comparison of the philosophies of Kant and Hegel. Reason and Its Manifestations is an attempt to make the best case possible for Kant’s notion of reason in light of Hegel’s critiques of various Kantian dualisms. Rotenstreich argues that the Kantian dualisms later integrated in Hegel—freedom and nature, theoretical reason and practical reason, will and reason, empirical and intelligible character— are not as discontinuous as one might think. According to Rotenstreich, Kant meant “both to maintain dualities and to mitigate them”. Kant’s insistence on the conceptual dualities in his programmatic first and second Critiques is balanced by Rotenstreich’s examination of the third Critique and Kant’s writings on history, where one finds certain continuities between the very concepts Kant at one point distinguished quite sharply.

Brainard’s systematic introduction to Husserl’s systematic introduction to phenomenology shows the underlying teleological directedness and sense of Husserlian thought as a striving toward absolute rationality. It is a structural analysis of and commentary on Ideas I, the 1913 work that introduces the transcendental aspects of the newly emerging phenomenology, including reduction, the pure ego, the noesis–noema correlation, eidetic intuition, and the static analysis of intentional acts. In a sense, Brainard has written three different books here.

This dissertation discloses and critiques certain neo-Kantian presuppositions about mind and world that are operative in contemporary discussions of epistemology. Such presuppositions inform the way in which many philosophers oppose the conceptual freedom of reason to the passivity of sensibility. Dualistic assumptions about the human mind continue to make the notion of any nonconceptual content in perception seem indefensible. Yet there is indeed a way out of the oscillation between coherentism and foundationalism, an oscillation diagnosed recently in John McDowell's Mind and World. ;I argue in the dissertation that an untenable dualism in neo-Kantian epistemology can and should be overcome by a phenomenological description of the situation of the knowing subject. According to this argument, the knower can appropriate the known to herself in a way that is both rationally free and responsive to passive structures of sense experience. Rational freedom should be understood not as an unbounded conceptual spontaneity that arises ex nihilo but rather as an authentic appropriation of certain unfree conditions of freedom. Among these factors that condition but do not overdetermine perceptual content are passively given synthetic forms and inherited socio-linguistic traditions. An epistemology of authenticity implies the need for the knower's free response to the influences of her past on her present perceptual content. What the knower should take responsibility for in the logical space of reasons, then, is neither herself nor the world but her past dealings with a world that was not then and is not now reducible to such dealings. ;Edmund Husserl's phenomenology of knowledge provides grounds for a balanced view of the situation of rational freedom within nature. The dissertation takes as its starting point his conception of a new and specifically phenomenological critique of reason. By tracing his development of originally Kantian notions of synthesis, reason, and sensibility, I argue that Husserl transforms the modern philosophical tradition from within by reconciling empirical and transcendental approaches to the knowing self. Phenomenological notions of intuitive reason, rational motivation, and the genetic history of the self can be appropriated for the purpose of a contemporary synthesis between empirical psychology and transcendental philosophy

Le réductionnisme scientiste a privé le monde de ce qui avait été un univers enchanté, empli des formes et des esprits qui hantaient le monde médiéval. Merleau-Ponty et Husserl dans son œuvre tardive tentent de réenchanter la nature, mais du point de vue de la perception. Leur insistance sur la structure et la forme perceptuelles est un moyen de protection contre le réductionnisme et donc, en un sens, réenchante le monde qui, pour parler comme Merleau-Ponty, est « con­damné au sens ». Être « con­damné au sens », cela signifie être forcé de reconnaître à nos réalisations rationnelles les plus abouties, à nos actes visant à relier ce qui est séparé à partir d’une relationalité déjà perçue, une dépendance génétique (ou Fundierung ) par rapport à des événements de niveau inférieur, pré-rationnels, dans lesquels le soi est présent de façon latente. Être « con­damné au sens » signifie que les réalisations logiques et rationnelles pleinement articulées doivent, pour être dotées de sens, être ramenées à des structures proto-rationnelles dans le champ de la perception. Que Merleau-Ponty et Husserl révèlent la sphère pré-prédicative comme une sphère de simple signification, ce fait reflète une critique commune de l’empirisme. Le monde partiellement réenchanté est un monde conditionné par des horizons de signification qui sont de réels aspects du monde à décrire. Je fais valoir que la perception optimalement monstrative atteint les choses mêmes dans leur télos monstratif où elles se montrent le mieux. Je conclus avec quelques remarques sur la manière dont cette conception du réenchantement mobilise la philosophie de John McDowell, qui est, malgré lui, un partisan de la structure dans le champ perceptuel

The first half of Barbaras’s book, which is as lucidly analytical as it is ambitiously interpretive, is an uncovering of the unjustified Husserlian transcendental “objectivism,” Sartrean dialectic, and Cartesian dualism that dominate the early period of Merleau-Ponty’s thought. According to Barbaras, the Phenomenology of Perception is overburdened with the critique of the intellectualist and realist framework of nonphenomenological theories of perception. Merleau-Ponty’s development must be understood as transcending the residue of his former intellectualist point of view deriving from a phenomenological theory of consciousness. His achievement in his later work is to have uncovered the “unthought” in Husserl’s phenomenology of perception, which is precisely the articulation of intersubjectivity that transcends the insular, solipsistic body. What Barbaras traces in comprehensive detail is a teleology that is directed toward an ontological turn based on the primacy of the flesh as that which manifests meaning in the world of perceptual and linguistic sense, even though, as he admits, “We do not have any one text that gathers together the final state of his philosophy”. Nonetheless, according to the teleological reading incited by the later working note according to which the results of Phenomenology of Perception need to be brought to ontological explicitation, Barbaras takes as the basis of the critique the idea that the early work is based on the consciousness-object distinction, later to be overcome in the notions of intertwining and chiasm. Merleau-Ponty later overcomes this separation by disclosing that genesis of the ideality of expressible meaning is based in the perceptible domain itself, but that in turn the perceivable is not to be reduced to the expressible. Through the investigation of expression the being of a “wild world” can be located beyond the earlier opposition between fact and essence, an inheritance of Husserl’s thought the overthrow of which signals the turn toward the Being of the world as rooted in the intertwining of the perceived and expressed sense in speech. Visual perception is conceived simultaneously as “silent logos,” speech, and expression, and ontologically speaking, as the world itself. This entails a radical extension of phenomenality to include that which is invisible in speech and sense.

In this article I articulate how phenomenology can and should appropriate the theme of Platonic cognitive erôs. Erôs has two principal meanings: sexual passion and the desire for the whole that characterizes the philosophical life; in its cognitive sense, it implies dissatisfaction with partial truth and aiming at the givenness of the whole. The kind of lived-experience in which the being-true of the world is presented to and affectively allures the knower is a phenomenological analogue to what in Plato is the contemplative communion with the Good. Cognitive desire is always motivated by the consciousness of the lack of knowledge and the recalcitranceon the part of the world to be fully revealed. Husserlian phenomenology confirms the fact that erotic perception is always beckoned by the world and its states of affairs from the outside, as opposed to physiologically reduced Cartesian wonder and internally motivated striving on the part of Kantian reason

There is an interesting sense in which philosophical reflection in the transcendental tradition is thought to be unnatural. Kant claims that metaphysical speculation is as natural as breathing and that transcendental critique is necessary to prevent reason from lapsing into a natural dialectic of dogmatism and skepticism. Husserl argues that the critique of theoretical reason is grounded upon a transcending of the natural attitude in which we are at first unjustifiably and naïvely directed toward objects as separate from consciousness. A perfectly sensible question arises: Why do we need to effect a change in our natural cognitive orientation to both ourselves and the world in order to know each respectively? Why does a sort of dialectical self-deception come so naturally to us, and why is an effort so great as to seem unnatural necessary for philosophical self-knowledge? The aim of this paper is threefold: first, to argue that seemingly compulsory philosophical assumptions are inevitably generated from within reason itself and thus remain resistant to a complete therapy; second, to show how Kant diagnoses reason’s dialectical tendencies as inevitable and ever-recurring without transcendental vigilance; finally, to argue that the early Husserl’s appropriation of a transcendental epistemology is influenced decisively by Kant’s transcendental reflection in order to combat the reigning naturalism of his day. My overall claim is that by thematizing the natural dialectic of reason best articulated in the first Critique, we can disclose the Kantian way in which Husserl conceives of the natural temptation to naturalize consciousness. We first turn, however, to an influential contemporary account of a decidedly non-transcendental philosophy, what has come to be known as “therapeutic Wittgensteinianism.”.

This paper argues that John McDowell’s conceptualism distorts a genuine phenomenological account of perception. Instead of the seemingly forced choice between conceptualism and non-conceptualism as to what accounts for perceptual and discursive meaning, I provide an argument that there is a preconceptual intelligibility already in the perceptual field. With the help of insights from certain nonconceptualists I sketch out an argument that there is a teleological directedness in the way in which latent order and structure can be discriminated at the level of perceptual content. This content can then be brought to discursive, conceptual clarity by understanding in such a way that it is guided by the order already discovered in perception. With the help of Husserlian phenomenology of perception, I argue that the fundamental roots of epistemic normativity lie in the discriminating intelligence or mindedness operative below the level of the explicitly conceptual. By preconceptual is meant the directedness of explication of the structures present in the sensory manifold toward fully explicit conceptual judgments

In the sixth Logical Investigation, Husserl thematizes the surplus (Überschuß) of the perceptual intention whereby the intending goes beyond the partial givenness of a perceptual object to the object as a whole. This surplus is an apperceptive surplus that transcends the purely perceptual substance (Gehalt) or sensed content (empfundene Inhalt) available to a perceiver at any one time. This surplus can be described on the one hand as a synthetic link to future, possible, active experience; to intend an object is to intend it as it would appear if we were to have an exhaustively synthetic explication of it. This perceptual apperceptive surplus is, on the other hand, distinguished from the surplus that categorial form represents over the perceptual sense data. In this paper I show how the apperceptive surplus can also be understood as a synthetic link to past experience that is passively operative in any present perception. The synthetic link to both past and possible experience is a link to non-actual perceptions. Links to non-actual experience are despite their non-actuality nevertheless genuinely intentional in that they enter into the sense of any actively constituted object understood as a unity of sense. Key to this interpretation is an explanation of how Husserl appropriated the key concepts of attention and apperception from psychologists of his day, such as Stumpf and Wundt.

In this article I articulate how phenomenology can and should appropriate the theme of Platonic cognitive erôs. Erôs has two principal meanings: sexual passion and the desire for the whole that characterizes the philosophical life; in its cognitive sense, it implies dissatisfaction with partial truth and aiming at the givenness of the whole. The kind of lived-experience in which the being-true of the world is presented to and affectively allures the knower is a phenomenological analogue to what in Plato is the contemplative communion with the Good. Cognitive desire is always motivated by the consciousness of the lack of knowledge and the recalcitranceon the part of the world to be fully revealed. Husserlian phenomenology confirms the fact that erotic perception is always beckoned by the world and its states of affairs from the outside, as opposed to physiologically reduced Cartesian wonder and internally motivated striving on the part of Kantian reason.