Eduard Marbach

In the context of «reassessing the relationship between explanation and phenomenology», the paper discusses the question in what ways Husserlian phenomenology as a descriptive science of consciousness has an explanatory potential in consciousness studies. It takes a very limited approach to the wide-ranging themes that may come to mind on this topic. At the center is an exploration of consciousness as an explanandum in its own right, building on Husserl's reflective-eidetic analyses of conscious experiences. It will concentrate on explicating acts of intuitive representification ( anschauliche Vergegenwärtigungen) as intentional modifications of perception, making up higher, radical novel levels of intentionality. Acts of remembering, imagining, depicting something, as well as iterations and combinations of such acts, will serve as examples. A formal notation will be used with the intention to make the reflection-based theoretical language of phenomenology more precise and easier to survey.

[opening paragraph]: In recent years, David J. Chalmers has forcefully made a point that I consider to be extremely important for the study of consciousness, also from a Husserlian perspective. The point is that conscious experience is ‘an explanandum in its own right’. In order to make progress in addressing the problem of the explanatory gap between physical processes and conscious experience, new approaches are therefore to be explored. As Chalmers has it, ‘a mere account of the functions stays on one side of the gap, so the materials for the bridge must be found elsewhere’. Now, as I see it, the editors of this Special Issue pursue, precisely, the most promising avenue for adequately studying the problem of consciousness in such an exploratory spirit. For, in their excellent Introduction, they un- equivocally propose to include first-person, subjective experience as an explicit and active component of a science of consciousness, to be elaborated with appropriate methods by a research community. Jonathan Shear already put it very clearly elsewhere: ‘what is needed... is not so much new conceptualizations of science or new objective methodologies for exploring relationships of the phenomena of consciousness to physiology and behaviour... but new systematic methodologies for the exploration of the subjective phenomena of consciousness’. Among such methodologies, the editors now include ‘the most important western school of thinking where experience and consciousness is at the very heart: Phenomenology as inaugurated by Edmund Husserl...’.

There is widespread agreement among philosophers that we refer to, think or talk about non-existent objects in much the same way as we refer to, think or talk about other objects. This paper explores the case of objects of fiction in the perspective of Husserlian philosophical phenomenology. In this perspective, everything objective is dealt with as object of some consciousness and as presenting itself in subjective modes. Within the scope of this paper, the focus of the descriptive analysis will be on showing in some detail how conscious experiences of intentionally referring to something fictive in pre-linguistic intuitive acts of imagining something are to be articulated with regard to the object of consciousness, i.e. noematically, and with regard to the intentional act, i.e. noetically. Special attention will be given to the reflective finding of some consciousness being intentionally implied and thereby modified in the very performance of an intentional act of representifying (vergegenwärtigen) something in fiction and to the question of identity and individuation of objects in fiction. It will be argued that modifications occurring in representificational consciousness, which Husserl called ‘as-if’ or ‘quasi’ modifications, provide the key for understanding the phenomenology of fictional intentionality and reference.

This paper argues that, from the perspective of phenomenological philosophy, the study of intersubjectivity is closely tied to questions of the representational mind. It focuses on developmental studies of children's understanding of the human mind, setting out some of the main findings and theoretical explanations. It then takes up Husserl's idea of looking at persons in the 'personal attitude'. Understanding motivational connections among a person's subjective experiences is an essential feature of this attitude. Proposing a unified theoretical interpretation of children's representational achievements, the paper suggests that understanding motivational connections among one's representations requires an ability for reflection that children apply in progressively more refined ways to themselves and others.

This paper reflects on the relationship between Husserlian phenomenology and scientific psychology. It tries to show how phenomenological results have relevance and validity for present-day cognitive developmental psychology by arguing that consciousness matters in the study of the representational mind. The paper presents some methodological remarks concerning empirical or applied phenomenology; it describes the conception of an exploratory developmental study with 3 to 9-year-old children viewing a complex pictorial display; it then illustrates how a phenomenological interpretation of the data works; in conclusion, it sketches a view of realism about conscious experiences which is taken to be inherent in the phenomenological perspective of understanding the representational mind

The theory of so-called‘mental images’, which is put forward again in contemporary cognitive psychology, is criticized by way of elaborating the distinctly different intentional structures of the mental activities of‘remembering something’and‘representing something pictorially’(by means of a painting, photo, sculpture, etc.) It is suggested that psychology in its concept and theory formation could use profitably phenomenological-descriptive analyses of the different forms of intentionality as exemplified in the paper.

L’article est centré sur la distinction entre une naturalisation de la subjectivité au sens fort et une naturalisation au sens faible . Des réflexions méthodologiques et une analyse concrète de la conscience, inspirée de Husserl, conduisent au rejet de la naturalisation de la subjectivité au sens fort et à un plaidoyer en faveur de sa naturalisation au sens faible. Ces déductions sont fondées sur la distinction, méthodologiquement importante, entre une approche naturaliste et une approche phénoménologique. Le rejet de la naturalisation au sens fort est déterminé par une analyse phénoménologique de l’essentialité du vécu conscient, dont les structures ne sont pas tributaires de la singularité de telle ou telle réalité spatio-temporelle et causale, ce qui est observé sur l’exemple concret d’un souvenir

"Allerdings, das ist eine grosse Frage, der ich zu sehr ausgewichen bin, die Evidenz des Ich als ein Identisches, das also doch nicht in dem Bündel bestehen kann." (Husserl, 1907) Bekanntlich verwirft Husserl in den Logischen Untersuchungen die Auffassung, "dass die Beziehung auf das Ich etwas zum we sentlichen Bestande des intentionalen Erlebnisses selbst Gehöriges sei'',! und bildet um 1907, nach Einführung der phänomenolo gischen Reduktion, "die Beziehung auf das Ich zu unterlassen, oder von ihr zu abstrahieren" geradezu die Bedingung, ein "reines Phänomen im Sinne der Phänomenologie" 2 zu gewinnen. Und bekanntlich heisst es demgegenüber in den Ideen von 1913: "Unter den allgemeinen Wesenseigentümlichkeiten des tran szendental gereinigten Erlebnisgebietes gebührt eigentlich die erste Stelle der Beziehung auf das,reine' Ich",3 und revidiert Husserl in der zweiten Auflage der Logischen Untersuchungen von 4 1913 seine Stellungnahme zur Frage des reinen Ich. Weniger bekannt ist bisher, wie Husserl auf seinem Denkweg von der einen zur anderen Stellungnahme zum Problem des Ich gekommen ist. Was bewegte ihn, das "Ich" in die phänomeno logische Problematik einzubeziehen? Zu vermuten war, dem Wandel in der Stellung zum Problem des Ich liege ein Wandel im Verständnis der Phänomenologie selbst zugrunde. Welche Phänomene motivierten, auf dem phänomenologischen Boden selbst, die Einbeziehung des Ich? Vor allem dieser Frage gehen wir, unter Berücksichtigung des Nachlassmaterials des Husserl Archivs (Leuven), in unserer Studie nach.

The paper assumes that the very source for an appropriate concept formation and categorization of the phenomena of consciousness is provided by pre-reflectively living through one’s own experiences (of perceiving, remembering, imagining, picturing, judging, etc.) and reflecting upon them. It tries to argue that without reflective auto-phenomenological theorizing about such phenomena, there is no prospect for a scientific study of consciousness doing fully justice to the phenomena themselves. To substantiate the point, a detailed reflective and descriptive analysis of re-presentational experiences is presented, an essential property of which is their containing in themselves components that can only be individuated on the basis of reflection by the experiencing subject him- or herself. For heterophenomenology to account for them, autophenomenology is therefore presupposed

[opening paragraph]: In recent years, David J. Chalmers has forcefully made a point that I consider to be extremely important for the study of consciousness, also from a Husserlian perspective. The point is that conscious experience is ‘an explanandum in its own right’ . In order to make progress in addressing the problem of the explanatory gap between physical processes and conscious experience, new approaches are therefore to be explored. As Chalmers has it, ‘a mere account of the functions stays on one side of the gap, so the materials for the bridge must be found elsewhere’ . Now, as I see it, the editors of this Special Issue pursue, precisely, the most promising avenue for adequately studying the problem of consciousness in such an exploratory spirit. For, in their excellent Introduction, they un- equivocally propose to include first-person, subjective experience as an explicit and active component of a science of consciousness, to be elaborated with appropriate methods by a research community. Jonathan Shear already put it very clearly elsewhere: ‘what is needed . . . is not so much new conceptualizations of science or new objective methodologies for exploring relationships of the phenomena of consciousness to physiology and behaviour . . . but new systematic methodologies for the exploration of the subjective phenomena of consciousness’ . Among such methodologies, the editors now include ‘the most important western school of thinking where experience and consciousness is at the very heart: Phenomenology as inaugurated by Edmund Husserl . . .’

The paper presents, first, some general remarks about Husserl’s philosophical Phenomenology in view of relating it to the scientific study of consciousness, and recalls some of the basic methodological tenets of a Husserlian phenomenology of consciousness (I). It then introduces some recent work on so-called “mental imagery” in cognitive psychology and neuroscience (II). Next, a detailed exposition of a reflective analysis of conscious experiences that involve “imagery” or “images” is given (III), arguing thereby that reflective conceptual clarifications of various forms of such experiences could contribute to research into their finer details. In order to show more distinctly that the conscious experiences involved in the contemporary cognitive and neuroscientific imagery research are indeed differently structured, a simple notation for designating the various structural components of the experiences under study will be used. In concluding (IV), some methodological assets concerning the present proposal of integrating the method of Husserlian phenomenology into the present-day, and hopefully even more so into the future study of consciousness are highlighted!