Daniel Neumann

The term “cognitive phenomenology” may be understood as referring to the idea that there is something it is like to entertain thoughts. One of the main problems in the debates on cognitive phenomenology is the question of how it should be construed, for instance in terms of being in a particular phenomenal state. In order to give a concise idea of what cognitive phenomenology is, I elicit the help of the philosophical doctrine of phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, whose approach allows us to clearly distinguish between the act of thinking and what is thereby thought. With this distinction in hand, I discuss the following three problems: What is the individuative phenomenology of thought? Is there a cognitive horizon in which thoughts stand to one another in virtue of their phenomenology? What is the relation between sensory and cognitive phenomenology? In particular, I consider how a suitably modified interpretation of Husserl’s noetic-noematic distinction helps to elucidate the cognitive phenomenology of acts of thinking.

On Max Scheler’s account, the purpose of the phenomenological reduction of an experience is to reveal the a priori or essential contents that are constitutive for that experience. By contrast to Husserl, Scheler does not hold that the reduction reveals the immanent contents of consciousness, but objective and mind-independent sense-structures. In this paper, I aim to give a systematic account of these claims by interpreting the phenomenological reduction as demonstrating the objectivity of knowledge. To do so, I discuss what the objective contents of an experience are, how Scheler proposes to get them into view and what he takes the relation of mind and world to consist in. In doing so, I draw in particular on some of his posthumously published and little discussed ideas on the reduction. While Scheler complemented his method with a metaphysical interpretation, in concluding my discussion, I suggest a more naturalistic way in which to understand the results of the reduction.

„Wir wissen gar nicht, was ein Körper kann.“ Es ist ein Verdienst von Gilles Deleuze, diesen Satz als eine Kernfrage Spinozas gesetzt zu haben. Wir wissen nicht, zu welchen passiven und schließlich aktiven Affekten, zu welcher Eigenaktivität der Körper fähig ist und wie er über sich hinauswächst, d.h., sich mit anderen Körpern verbindet. Aus diesem Grund ist nach der deleuzianischen Interpretation die „Ethik“ auch eine Biologie und Ethologie der verschiedenen Körper, deren konstante Interaktion zu verschiedenen Lebenswelten führen. Ich möchte die Frage nach dem Vermögen auf das Denken beziehen und mit Deleuze fragen: Wissen wir denn, was ein Geist kann?

In the phenomenological tradition, a state of affairs is described as the objectual correlate of an act of judgement. This understanding of states of affairs is ambivalent in regards to its logical and ontological implications. I explore this ambivalence in terms of the following dialectic: states of affairs are what make our judgements true. But they do so because we can form true judgments that posit them. According to the approach of Alexander Pfänder, the logical properties of judgements determine the form of states of affairs (logical view). By contrast, in the approach of Adolf Reinach, the ontological properties of states of affairs determine the form of judgements (ontological view). The paper's conclusion is that neither of the two views can be fully endorsed on its own because neither is sufficient to account for all aspects of states of affairs that are relevant to a phenomenological approach.

This contribution will explore a realist theme shared by the phenomenologists Edith Stein and Max Scheler concerning the experience of essences. I will argue that in both authors one finds an account of the experience of essences as a determining factor of the intentional objects experienced. That is, Stein and Scheler phenomenologically show how the experience of reality is dependent on—in some sense—observable, mind-independent features. I understand this to be one possible basis for a consistent program for phenomenological realism. The text will proceed in three steps. First, I will consider Scheler’s “phenomenological experience” as being one of the essential features of experience. Second, I will explore Stein’s notion of “objective sense” that is embedded in perception. Third, I will discuss why this is to be understood as a common concern.

The two early phenomenologists Max Scheler and Conrad-Martius hold the view that an originary experience of reality cannot be described in terms of intentionality, i.e., as the experience of intentional objects. Instead, a more primitive experience of reality is that of resistance or pressure. I discuss this phenomenological suggestion in problematizing how both authors have understood resistance to most fundamentally mark our non-conscious experience of reality, and its relationship to consciousness. A decisive difference between the two accounts is identified as the role that phenomenality plays in conceiving of the experience of reality. While Scheler views resistance as preceding the sensual encounter with the world, for Conrad-Martius, the phenomenon of reality is primarily constituted as the direct contact with a sensible object. One thus finds a non-intentional phenomenological approach to the experience of reality in early phenomenology that has, as of yet, not been discussed as a common concern.

In the work of Roman Ingarden, ideas are supra-personal items of knowledge, the content of which maps, in a specific way, the ontological structure of ideal and real objects falling under them. This paper develops a systematic account of Ingarden’s theory of ideas. The account specifies, firstly, the structure of the content of ideas, and accordingly the different kinds of ideas corresponding to different kinds of objects. Secondly, the account discusses how we come to grasp ideas of objects in the first place, and how we recognize an object to fall under a certain idea. Ideas in the pertinent sense are those that map the nature or essence of things. The aim of the paper, then, is to discuss how Ingarden establishes the possibility of knowledge of essences and their intuition via ideas. A particular concern is addressing the sense in which ideas constitute mind-independent claims about essences.

There are still many anthropomorphizing misunderstandings about what it means for a machine to be intelligent. In searching for common ground between human and artificial thinking processes, I suggest reconsidering how human intelligence can be conceived in mechanistic terms. To do this, I take a closer look at the notion of the spiritual automaton of the 17th century philosopher Baruch de Spinoza. In his writings, a mechanical theory of the mind can be found, before the comparison between minds and machines even arises. In a second step I sketch some ways in which current methods in AI studies could be seen to reflect aspects of the Spinozistic model of the mind.

Gerda Walther’s approach to sociality is unique in that it does not start with an act of apperceptionApperception, with some intellectualIntellectual form of recognition of the other, but with a very immediate feeling which even precedes thinking and reflection. The key concept here is unification, an emotional connection we involuntarily establish with others. My main goal is to elucidate this concept and its various modifications presented by Walther to account for different forms of communities. In the first part of the paper, I present important ideas of three of Walther’s phenomenologicalPhenomenological interlocutors, namely Edmund HusserlHusserl, Alexander PfänderPfänder and Edith SteinStein. In the second part, I show how Walther combines and modifies these ideas in her theory of the ontology of socialSocial communities. Finally, I discuss how the concept of unification is still relevant today in the context of “we-experiences” of social ontology. By contrast to some contemporary approaches, one can understand collective social phenomena with Walther as the plural within the self, instead of a pluralization of self-awarenessSelf-awareness.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:On Inception by Martin HeideggerDaniel NeumannHEIDEGGER, Martin. On Inception. Translated by Peter Hanley. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2023. xi + 171 pp. Cloth, $40.00This translation [End Page 548] of Heidegger's On Inception (written in 1941 and published in German in 2005 as Über den Anfang) is an important addition to the translated corpus of texts on the themes of Ereignis (event) and the history of beyng (Seynsgeschichte) that occupied Heidegger's thinking from the mid-1930s to the mid-1940s, and that resulted in a series of writings that remained unpublished during his lifetime. Similar to those other volumes, On Inception does not follow a linear train of thought but offers short and often fragmentary notes and musings that, nonetheless, build on one another. There is a considerable thematic overlap with the other writings on the event. Many of the themes found here, such as the role of technology in exposing contemporary understanding of being, Hölderlin as the poet of the saying of beyng, or the notion of another beginning of the unconcealment of beyng, can be found in Contributions to Philosophy, Mindfulness, and The Event as well.What sets On Inception apart from these other volumes is the focus on the inceptual aspect of the thinking of beyng. In this regard, the first and longest of the six sections comprising the book (entitled "The Incipience of Inception") offers the most extended original contribution Heidegger makes here. It concerns the question of how one can think from out of the unconcealment of beyng. Exploring this topic throws more light on many of the questions that the reading of the other volumes raises, such as whether the event should be thought of as a one-time historical occurrence; how one can think from out of the event, that is, how it constitutes the possibility of thinking it; and the relationship between beings, being (referring to the truth of the presence of beings), and beyng (referring to the truth of the presencing of being). All of these issues concern the inceptual character of the event, whose understanding affords a better sense of paradigmatic change in thinking and dwelling associated with it. To understand the inceptual character of the event gives the reader a clue as to where to begin thinking (about) it. This does not remove the considerable and intentional obscurity surrounding these ideas, but it shows Heidegger as constantly altering and refining how to think of the history of the concealment and unconcealment of beyng. One of the biggest disagreements among interpreters has been whether to read this in transcendental or realist terms, that is, whether we should take the unconcealment of beyng as the proffering of a real, mind-independent totality or as a cipher for our transcendental ability to understand and make sense of the appearance of being. In this regard, the question of incipience goes toward elucidating who or what is thought to begin this unconcealment.What, then, does an inceptive thinking of beyng amount to? Put negatively, it can concern neither beyng as some sort of cause of beings, nor beings themselves as what appear as a consequence of beyng's unconcealment: "[I]nception is not the inception of something other than what it itself is; equally, inception is not the inception of itself, as if what were being thought of were a producing and causing." To think beyng as inception puts emphasis on the emergent nature of the opening of the clearing in which beings can come to presence for someone. That is, the [End Page 549] word "inception" names the very opening up of the possibility to consider the truth of beyng, that is, to think the event. What is at stake is therefore the incipient nature of inception—the fact that grasping what the term means cannot be based on any one incipient thing, but on incipience (Anfängnis). There is a processual (or, to use Daniela Vallega-Neu's more Heideggerian term, poietic) aspect to the way Heidegger thinks the event, and incipience in many ways expresses this poietic nature because it both suggests that there is something that begins and unfolds, but also conceals what...

Descartes gilt als einer der einflussreichsten Vertreter der metaphysischen Scheidung des Menschen in Körper und Seele. Entgegen dieser Annahme entdeckt Daniel Neumann in Descartes' Frühwerk einen »denkenden Körper“, in welchem die Mechanik des Körpers und die Denkprozesse des Verstandes unzertrennlich sind. Dieser Befund bildet die Grundlage für eine Neubetrachtung der Rezeptionsgeschichte der cartesianischen Philosophie von ca. 1650 bis 1750 in den Niederlanden und Frankreich. Durch die Frage, inwiefern Körper und Geist untrennbar sind, erscheint die Aufnahme der Ideen Descartes' an den Universitäten in Utrecht und Leiden in neuem Licht, ebenso wie Spinozas Parallelismus von Denken und Ausdehnung und La Mettries homme machine. Damit stellt der »denkende Körper« ein unterschwelliges Interpretationsmotiv dar, das den philosophischen Dualismus von Körper und Geist als in sich brüchig erweist.

This article reconsiders a critique of Jean-Luc Nancy’s and Giorgio Agamben’s political philosophies as passive and unpractical. The article argues that in both cases, the political philosophy is motivated by the concept of “withdrawal of law,” as outlined in the texts Abandoned Being and Homo Sacer, respectively. This withdrawal is shown to situate the political philosophies within a broader “phenomenological receptivity,” whose indebtedness to Heidegger’s philosophy of the event is elucidated. As a consequence, the term receptivity turns out to possibly be the better candidate for describing both philosophers’ political outlook, as opposed to passivity. Thus, instead of reproaching Nancy’s and Agamben’s theories for not providing the means for practical political interventions, the implicit phenomenological perspective they offer is restituted.

In current debates on Descartes’ metaphysics of the mind, the question tends to be whether his position is that of a libertarian or of a compatibilist concerning the freedom of the will. I intervene in this discussion by focusing on the experience of choosing freely. To do this I take a closer look at the 'feeling of not being determined by external forces', an up to now too little discussed passage of the 'Fourth Meditation'. In successively considering God, an evil genius and the faculty of understanding as external forces acting on the will, I show how Descartes’ discussion of freedom of choice implicates both his ethical and epistemological ambitions in a way that could benefit the libertarian-compatibilist debate. To determine the nature of the freedom of will in Descartes, one may not only discuss the causality of the operations of the will, but also the perception of this causality by the mind, in other words, the experience of freedom.

Based on a creative use of the phenomenological method, we argue that a close examination of the temporality of objects reveals the future as genuinely open. Without aiming to decide the matter of phenomenological realism, we suggest that this method can be used to investigate the mode of being of objects in their own temporality. By bracketing the anticipatory structure of experience, one can get a sense of objects’ temporality as independent of consciousness. This contributes to the current Realism versus Idealism debates, but it does so without taking sides. The starting point is neither an analysis of pure consciousness, nor attempts to describe objects in-themselves, but the idea that things can be phenomenologically grasped through the difference between their temporality and our own. By being methodically “open to the future,” one can become aware of the sui generis temporality of objects as different from the temporality shaped by our anticipation.

There are several problems in conceiving of value experience in early phenomenology. What exactly does the experience of a value consist in? How are we to determine the morality of an action that is based on a value which is, as a reality in and of itself, imposed on us from without? How is the experience of values related to the person and in what way can an intuitive value response be reconciled with the application of acquired, personal value stances? In a joint reading of the early works of Max Scheler and Dietrich von Hildebrand, I propose a systematic solution to these various problems which revolve around the non-reflective self-awareness that a value experience entails: we cannot experience the real, material value quality without changing as persons. Rather than reflecting on an object, we experience the value as ourselves, dynamically reacting to it in the context of a given situation.

This article considers a largely overlooked phenomenological account of nonconceptual experience that turns on experience having a sense that is unique to intuition, and which can be invoked to explain how we come to view what we experience in objective terms without referring to ready‐made concepts. The two early phenomenologists Edith Stein and Gertrud Kuznitzky are discussed as having elaborated two distinct, yet related, versions of this intuitive sense. My discussion identifies two common assumptions of both philosophers: firstly, the idea that the objective character of intuition hinges on the structure of apprehension, which is found by investigating the regularities of the appearance of objects; secondly, the objective character of intuition presupposes a metaphysical notion of things having a sense in themselves. Importantly, both philosophers do not take this “sense in itself” to be a direct part of the contents of experience, showing objectivity to arise out of intuition instead.

This article aims to sketch a phenomenological approach to Heidegger’s concept of Ereignis. In understanding Ereignis as the presencing of being, the fun­damental question is whether and how this presence of being, i.e., presence as such, can be experienced. While this experience is incompatible with a transcendental ap­proach, the suggestion here is that Ereignis can be experienced not as my own, but as an anonymous presence. To flesh out this suggestion, a close reading of Heidegger’s critique of subjectivity in the Contributions will elaborate on why presence can belong neither to humanity nor to being. In a second step, a motif in Heidegger’s reception of Schelling is discussed which clarifies that the experience of Ereignis involves a necessity that goes beyond subjectivity. In a third step, the idea of “letting-presence” shows how the coming into being of experience has to remain anonymous in order to be the experience of Ereignis.

In later Edith Stein and Hedwig Conrad-Martius, finite existence appears to be necessarily intertwined with infinite being. In response to this observation, this paper puts particular focus on the experience of finite being in order to address the specifically phenomenological (i.e., experiential) aspects of Stein’s and Conrad-Martius’ metaphysics. As a consequence, instead of pointing to eternal or infinite being, finite experience is understood to – less specifically – transcend itself. Using the notion of actus essendi (priority of existence over essence), I identify two ideas as specifically characterizing this transcendence: non-ownership of time (in Conrad-Martius), by which is questioned the coherence of inner time consciousness, as well as non-ownership of sense (in Stein), stipulating that the sense one intuitively and intellectively experiences in reference to objects is discovered, rather than made. Subsequently, the paper discusses how Stein’s and Conrad-Martius’ metaphysics of finite existence is reflected in their critical assessments of Heidegger’s existential finitude.

A phenomenological approach to the ontology of the will could be rendered along three positions: Firstly, the willing I is completely immanent in its experience, such that one can only will, and know that one wills, by reflecting on the actual experience of willing. Secondly, one could hold that the will, while being analyzable as a conscious phenomenon, is itself a real psychic force driving one’s motivations and actions without one necessarily being aware of it. The third position would argue that the reality of the will is not exhausted by the way it is experienced, but that its real causes are not necessarily part of a complete phenomenological investigation. I discuss the phenomenology of the will of Alexander Pfänder, Moritz Geiger and Edmund Husserl along this realist-transcendentalist spectrum. My basic concern here is a critical examination of the phenomenological approach to an entity beyond experience which is responsible for the experienced volitions. I will proceed in three steps, based on the distinction of volitions into three parts. Firstly, I ask what antecedes a volition in order to determine its phenomenal and ontological causes. Secondly, the analysis of the apperception of willing clarifies in what sense an “I” is experienced as the real or phenomenal cause of its volition. Thirdly, the discussion of the realization of the volition will address the role that this “I” subsequently plays in the process of fulfilling its intent. The paper develops the ways in which the ontology of the “willing I” limits and shapes the conception of the intentional relation between willing and desiring consciousness and its contents.

This article takes a phenomenological approach to thinking about ways in which the future comes to pass without being derived from the present, i.e. without being based on our current and past objective engagements. In the first part, I look at Husserl’s idea of “protention” in order to discuss how phenomenology has conceptualized the indeterminacy of the present moment. In the second part, the Heideggerian notion of “projection” is discussed as a modification of protention. In the third part, I argue for an empty teleology of time in which our temporal engagement in the world is distinguished from our existential concern with temporal things. The basic idea of the paper is that for the future to arrive “as future” (instead of as another present), it has to happen in spite of the present, i.e. in spite of the interested stance that defines our present engagement in the world.

This paper investigates Hedwig Conrad-Martius’ theory of representation, which is unique in that it introduces a method of ideation that is completely different from the one of transcendental phenomenology. Instead of separating the essence from the individual real entity through reduction, Conrad-Martius’ method of representation elucidates what constitutes the reality of the actual individual. In a representation, we can explore and play with our receptivity to the self-emergence of reality by observing the different ways in which our representations themselves appear as real. I will discuss this access to reality as a realistic phenomenological method not just in terms of lived experience, but also as eidetic reduction. My thesis is that Conrad-Martius’ theory of representation allows for conceiving how essences, as the immutable features of reality beyond surface perception, can be addressed by intuition, viz. representation. In a second step, a shift in Conrad-Martius’ thinking towards the constitution of reality in itself is discussed based on her second major work, Realontologie. Thirdly, Conrad-Martius’ theory of representation is roughly contrasted with Husserl’s to further elucidate what constitutes the “really real” in her phenomenology beyond the simple alternative between idealism and realism.

In this text, Heidegger's notion of the event is understood as a rupture on an ontological level. From this follows the aporia of whether the event concerns the coming about of being itself, or of beings. To address the ontological as well as the ontic aspect of the event, the article suggests to understand the event in a subjective framework, in line with transcendental conditions of experience, specifically as a "receptivity" to the event. The main part of the article considers existing phenomenological approaches to the event and the possibility or impossibility of a receptivity to the event expressed therein. In conclusion, the article suggests that the subjective event can be conceived as a rupture within subjective experience, as being tied to the necessary coming about of experience.