David Smith

In everyday _perception_, we experience a direct acquaintance with things in our surroundings, say, as I see this tennis ball before me. In everyday _action_, we also experience a direct acquaintance with things, as I grasp and pick up and hit this ball. Moreover, perception and action form a unified _phenomenal intentional experience_, as I consciously see-and-grasp-and-hit this particular ball. An _experience_ of seeing-and-acting with regard to a particular object is a form of direct acquaintance, a paradigm of what Husserl called ‘intuition’. The phenomenology of perception-cum-action leads into the ontology of direct acquaintance. The structure of this form of embodied intentional experience cuts between internalist and externalist models of perception (and volition in action), clarifies embodiment and activity, and obviates disjunctivist models of perception, while avoiding reducing consciousness in acquaintance to a physical transmission of physical information, say, between my brain, my body, and this ball.

A mental act is conscious if it includes a certain self-consciousness, where the subject is aware of its transpiring. What is the form of that inner awareness? Many philosophers have proposed that consciousness involves some form of higher-order monitoring of the mental act. This chapter considers a different model. Inner awareness of a conscious mental state consists in a modal character of the experience, part of the way one is conscious of this or that object. On the present model, this modal character involves a certain form of reflexive content (‘in this very experience I see such-and-such’). The way this reflexive content works is explored, considering how consciousness can include an awareness of itself without a higher-order activity that rides along with the basic act of consciousness. The result is an analysis of the phenomenological structure of this reflexive inner awareness, guided by considerations of the logic of indexical expressions.

The essays in this volume explore the full range of Husserl's work and reveal just how systematic his philosophy is. There are treatments of his most important contributions to phenomenology, intentionality and the philosophy of mind, epistemology, the philosophy of language, ontology, and mathematics. An underlying theme of the volume is a resistance to the idea, current in much intellectual history, of a radical break between 'modern' and 'postmodern' philosophy, with Husserl as the last of the great Cartesians. Husserl is seen in this volume as a philosopher constantly revising his system in order to be able to integrate philosophy with ideas emanating from science and culture. The so-called rift between analytic and 'continental' philosophy emerges as an artificial construct.

Husserl’s philosophy, by the usual account, evolved through three stages: 1. development of an anti-psychologistic, objective foundation of logic and mathematics, rooted in Brentanian descriptive psychology; 2. development of a new discipline of "phenomenology" founded on a metaphysical position dubbed "transcendental idealism"; transformation of phenomenology from a form of methodological solipsism into a phenomenology of intersubjectivity and ultimately (in his Crisis of 1936) into an ontology of the life-world, embracing the social worlds of culture and history. We show that this story of three revolutions can provide at best a preliminary orientation, and that Husserl was constantly expanding and revising his philosophical system, integrating views in phenomenology, ontology, epistemology and logic with views on the nature and tasks of philosophy and science as well as on the nature of culture and the world in ways that reveal more common elements than violent shifts of direction. We argue further that Husserl is a seminal figure in the evolution from traditional philosophy to the characteristic philosophical concerns of the late twentieth century: concerns with representation and intentionality and with problems at the borderlines of the philosophy of mind, ontology, and cognitive science.

In this stimulating introduction, David Woodruff Smith introduces the whole of Husserl’s thought, demonstrating his influence on philosophy of mind and language, on ontology and epistemology, and on philosophy of logic, mathematics and science. Starting with an overview of his life and works, and his place in twentieth-century philosophy, and in western philosophy as a whole, David Woodruff Smith introduces Husserl’s concept of phenomenology, explaining his influential theories of intentionality, objectivity and subjectivity. In subsequent chapters he covers Husserl’s logic, metaphysics, realism and transcendental idealism, and epistemology. Finally, he assesses the significance and implications of Husserl’s work for contemporary philosophy of mind and cognitive science. Including a timeline, glossary and extensive suggestions for further reading, Husserl is essential reading for anyone interested in this eminent philosopher, phenomenology or twentieth-century philosophy

For Brentano, an act of consciousness features a presentation of an object joined with an inner presentation – an ‘inner consciousness’ or inner awareness – of that object-presentation. On Mark Textor’s articulation of Brentano’s model, the act has the structure of a single experience directed upon a plurality, viz.: the object and the experience itself. I consider an alternative development of this Brentanian model. Drawing on Husserl’s part-whole ontology, I submit, the act itself has the structure of a whole formed from two co-dependent parts, viz., the object-presentation and inner awareness of that presentation. Looking to Husserl’s analysis of inner time-consciousness, Textor proposes an enhancement of Brentano’s model of inner consciousness. On Textor’s model, inner awareness is such that one may be aware of one’s experience, in the stream of one’s consciousness, ‘without grasping any adumbrations [of the experience], but temporal ones’. I dig into Husserl’s doctrine of ‘abumbration’ (as where a tree is given visually with adumbrations of its shape on the back side, of its color in gradations, etc.). On my reconstruction, inner awareness of an experience presents the experience within a manifold of ‘adumbrated’ temporal retentions and protentions that place the experience in its stream of consciousness.

Husserlian phenomenology develops around Husserl’s theory of the complex structure of intentionality, featuring key notions of noesis, noema, horizon, and the constitution of objects of consciousness. By virtue of the structures of noema and horizon found in our experience, things in the world around us are said to be “constituted” in consciousness (along with self and other). The present essay explores intentionality and constitution as modeled in lines of interpretation that extend classical Husserlian phenomenology. The resulting “semantic” approach to intentionality draws on the ontology of consciousness, meaning, and horizon, unfolding a “constitutive” realism whereby our consciousness takes its place in the world beyond our consciousness, yet we experience things in the world around us by virtue of noema and horizon. The “logical” and the “transcendental” aspects of phenomenal intentionality appear in due course, within a formal model of intentionality, a model taking shape within a meta-phenomenological and meta-metaphysical framework.

"This is a sea urchin", I declare while strolling the beach with a friend. What do I refer to by uttering the demonstrative pronoun "this"? The object immediately before me, of course. As it happens on this occasion, the object in the sand at my feet. I may point at it to aid my hearer - or I may not. BUt now , if the meaning of the term is distinguished from the referent, what is the meaning of this, or of my utterance of this? I think we can distinguish the meaning of this, or of its utterance, from its referent. And if we attend carefully to what meanings should be, we can see just what ,after all, is the meaning of this.

: In prior essays I have sketched a “modal model” of consciousness. That model “factors” out several distinct forms of awareness in the phenomenological structure of a typical act of consciousness. Here we consider implications of the model à propos of contemporary theories of consciousness. In particular, we distinguish phenomenality from other features of awareness in a conscious experience: “what it is like” to have an experience involves several different factors. Further, we should see these factors as typical of consciousness, rather than essential features, allowing that some elements of awareness may be absent while others are present in certain less typical cases. Keywords : consciousness; Higher-order Theories of Consciousness; Self-representational Theories of Consciousness; Phenomenality; Phenomenological Theories of Consciousness I diversi elementi della coscienza Riassunto : In lavori precedenti ho cercato di proporre un “modello modale” della coscienza. Questo modello “considera” forme differenti e distinte di consapevolezza che sono presenti nella struttura fenomenologica di un atto tipico di coscienza. Qui intendo considerare alcune implicazioni di questo modello in relazione ad alcune teorie contemporanee della coscienza. In particolare, distingueremo la fenomenicità da altre proprietà della consapevolezza all’interno di un’esperienza cosciente: il “che cosa si prova” a essere titolari un’esperienza implica elementi differenti e distinti. Inoltre, dovremo considerare questi elementi come caratteri tipici della coscienza e non come proprietà essenziali, riconoscendo che alcuni elementi della consapevolezza possono essere assenti, mentre altri sono presenti in alcuni casi meno frequenti. Parole chiave : coscienza; Teorie della coscienza di alto livello; Teorie auto-rappresentazionali della coscienza; Fenomenicità; Teorie fenomenologiche della coscienza.

Initially, Realism is related to perception and its intentionality, And perception is analyzed as a form of acquaintance, Or intuition, A direct cognitive relation to its object. Then several commitments to realism are detailed in the phenomenological content of everyday perception. At issue is internal, As opposed to external, Realism, In a sense defined. The demonstrative content of perception (i see "this object (visually before me)") contains a commitment to a causal relation between the perceptual experience and the object perceived, Hence a commitment to the object's independence from the experience, Hence realism. The content of a perception typically includes as well other implicit commitments to other "conditions of the possibility" of perceptual experience

Over the past century phenomenology has ably analyzed the basic structuresof consciousness as we experience it. Yet recent philosophy of mind, lookingto brain activity and computational function, has found it difficult to makeroom for the structures of subjectivity and intentionality that phenomenologyhas appraised. In order to understand consciousness as something that is bothsubjective and grounded in neural activity, we need to delve into phenomenologyand ontology. I draw a fundamental distinction in ontology among the form,appearance, and substrate of any entity. Applying this three-facet ontology toconsciousness, we distinguish: the intentionality of consciousness ,the way we experience consciousness ,and the physical, biological, and cultural basis of consciousness .We can thus show how these very different aspects of consciousness fit togetherin a fundamental ontology. And we can thereby define the proper domains ofphenomenology and other disciplinesthat contribute to our understanding of consciousness

What are we to make of the cogito (cogito ergo sum) today, as the walls of Cartesian philosophy crumble around us? The enduring foundation of the cogito is consciousness. It is in virtue of a particular phenomenological structure that an experience is conscious rather than unconscious. Drawing on an analysis of that structure, the cogito is given a new explication that synthesizes phenomenological, epistemological, logical, and ontological elements. What, then, is the structure of conscious thinking on which the cogito draws? What kind of certainty does the experience of thinking give one about one's thinking and about one's existence? What form of inference is the cogito, and what is the source of its validity and soundness? Does the cogito itself lead to an ontology of mind and body like Descartes's dualism? The discussion begins with Descartes's own careful formulations of some of these issues. Then the cogito is parsed into several different principles, the phenomenological principle emerging as basic. In due course the analysis sifts through Husserl's epistemology, Hintikka's logic (or pragmatics) of the cogito, and Kaplan's logic of demonstratives, as these bear specifically on the cogito