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100This is the lightly revised text of my commentary/response to David Carr’s keynote address, “Phenomenology of Crisis,” at the 2024 meeting of the Husserl Circle.
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280The Space of Motivations, Experience, and the Categorial GivenIn Daniele De Santis & Danilo Manca (eds.), Wilfrid Sellars and Phenomenology: Intersections, Encounters, Oppositions, Ohio University Press. 2023.This paper outlines an Husserlian, phenomenological account of the first stages of the acquisition of empirical knowledge in light of some aspects of Wilfrid Sellars’ critique of the myth of the given. The account offered accords with Sellars’ in the view that epistemic status is attributed to empirical episodes holistically and within a broader normative context, but disagrees that such holism and normativity are accomplished only within the linguistic and conceptual confines of the space of re…Read more
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27Theodor Elsenhans. Phenomenology, Psychology, EpistemologyIn Evan Clarke & Andrea Staiti (eds.), The Sources of Husserl’s 'Ideas I', De Gruyter. pp. 339-382. 2018.
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284Review of Beata Stawarska, Saussure’s Linguistics, Structuralism, and Phenomenology (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), Phenomenological Reviews. (review)Phenomenological Reviews. 2020.
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244Not How the World is, but That It Exists: Wittgenstein on the Mystical and the MeaningfulIn A. Kohav (ed.), Mysticism and Meaning: Multidisciplinary Perspectives. pp. 177-198. 2019.This essay deals with the relationship between the mystical and meaning in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s early philosophical work, especially the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. The interpretation offered here is intended not primarily for professional scholars of Wittgenstein or historians of the early 20th century philosophy, but for those broadly interested in connections between mysticism and meaning and in what contributions Wittgenstein’s early work might make to the subject. My goal is to explain…Read more
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534Husserl on Significance at the Core of MeaningHusserl Studies 38 (3): 227-250. 2022.I reconstruct the notion of significance [_Sinnhaftigkeit_] in the later Husserl, with attention to his conceptions of judgment and transcendental logic. My analysis is motivated by the idea that an account of significance can help to connect analytic, Anglo-American conceptions of meaning as a precise, law-governed phenomenon investigated via linguistic analysis and Continental European conceptions of meaning in a broader “existential” sense. I argue that Husserl’s later work points to a transc…Read more
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314The Fate of the Act of Synthesis: Kant, Frege, and Husserl on the Role of Subjectivity in Presentation and JudgmentJournal for the History of Analytical Philosophy 9 (11). 2021.I investigate the role of the subject in judgment in Kant, Frege, and Husserl, situating it in the broader and less-often-considered context of their accounts of presentation as well as judgment. Contemporary philosophical usage of “representation” tends to elide the question of what Kant called the constitution of content, because of a reluctance, traced to Frege’s anti-psychologism, to attend to subjectivity. But for Kant and Husserl, anti-psychologism allows for synthesis as the subjective ac…Read more
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471From Word to Flesh: Embodied Racism and the New PoliticsJournal of Religion and Society 126-45. 2021.This article stems from my presentation at the 2020 Symposium of the Kripke Center for the Study of Religion and Society, whose theme was "Religion and the New Politics." The article is written for an interdisciplinary audience. Drawing on resources from the philosophical tradition of phenomenology and putting them into dialogue with an important theme in Christian theology, I argue that there is a distinctly non-discursive, embodied form of racism that should be recognized and addressed by the …Read more
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546Husserlian Phenomenology, Rule-following, and Primitive NormativityIn Chad Engelland (ed.), Language and Phenomenology, Routledge. pp. 74-91. 2020.The paper presents a phenomenological approach to recent debates in the philosophy of language about rule-following and the normativity of meaning, a debate that can be traced to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations but that was given new life with Saul Kripke’s Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language. Taking a cue from Hannah Ginsborg’s recent work on “primitive normativity,” I use some of Husserl’s own comments about meaning and the status of rules to sketch a solution to Krip…Read more
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401Reduction and Reflection after the Analytic-Continental DivideIn Hanne Jacobs (ed.), The Husserlian Mind, Routledge. pp. 117-28. 2021.In this chapter, I discuss some lesser-known aspects of Husserl’s concept of the phenomenological reduction in relation to his use of the notion of reflection, and indicate how these topics connect to concerns in contemporary philosophy after the analytic-continental divide. Empathy, collective intentionality, non-representationalism, non-cognitivism, and the focus on the lived body as a source of sense-making and knowing-how are all domains in which Husserl’s conception of the reduction antici…Read more
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9Phenomenological Habitus and Social Creativity (article translation from French) (review)Phenomenology and Mind 6. 2014.Article by Valerie Kokoszka, translated from French by Jacob Rump. How is social creativity linked to habitual dispositions? This paper critiques Bourdieu’s answer to this question, which is related to his theory of habitus, against the background of its phenomenological evidences. his concept of habitual dispositions seems to be linked both to an internalisation of the performativity of habits as a form of Kantian schematism (in Husserlian terms: ‘noetization’), and to a static concept of the s…Read more
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299This is my full original translation of Elsenhans' “Phaenomenologie, Psychologie, Erkenntnistheorie,” an early long review article on Husserl's Ideen I, published in German in Kant Studien XX (1915). A revised version of this translation (with Andrea Staiti and Evan Clarke) appears in The Sources of Husserl’s Ideas I, ed. Staiti and Clarke, De Gruyter (2018), 339-82. Please cite only from the published version of the translation.
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608SynthesisIn Daniele De Santis, Burt C. Hopkins & Claudio Majolino (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy, Routledge. 2020.Handbook entry on "Synthesis," surveying the roles played by synthesis in Husserl, important precursors in the history of philosophy, and the legacy of the term in Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty.
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42The Phenomenological Dimension of the Theory of Meaning: A Critical Inquiry through Husserl and WittgensteinDissertation, Emory University. 2013.Given the undeniable influence of the linguistic turn, it is common to characterize epistemology in the twentieth century as centrally concerned with meaning. But many of the early twentieth-century figures who helped to inspire that turn did not characterize meaning exclusively in terms of language. In response to contemporary accounts that tend to limit the scope of meaning to the semantic, pragmatic or conceptual, I use the work of Husserl and Wittgenstein to argue for the importance of non-l…Read more
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423Kant, Husserl, and the Case for Non-conceptual ContentIn Faustino Fabbiancelli & Sebastian Luft (eds.), Husserl and Classical German Philosophy, Springer. 2014.In recent debates about the nature of non-conceptual content, the Kantian account of intuition in the first Critique has been seen as a sort of founding doctrine for both conceptualist and non-conceptualist positions. In this paper, I begin by examining recent representative versions of the Kantian conceptualist (John McDowell) and Kantian non-conceptualist (Robert Hanna) positions, and suggest that the way the debate is commonly construed by those on both sides misses a much broader and more im…Read more
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977Meaning, Experience, and the Modern Self: The Phenomenology of Spontaneous Sense in Woolf’s Mrs. DallowayMetodo 6 (1): 317-355. 2018.By portraying meaning as a phenomenon that eludes complete expression and arises spontaneously in our everyday embodied interactions with others and objects in the world, as well as in our own unconscious registering of those interactions, Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway is uniquely insightful concerning both the presence of meaning in modern life and the modern conception of the self--phenomena marked by a certain ineradicable tension between that which is constituted by us and that which is given from o…Read more
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75Lévi-Strauss, Barthes, and the "Structuralist Activity" of Sartre's Dialectical ReasonSartre Studies International 17 (2): 1-15. 2011.The paper examines Lévi-Strauss' criticisms of Sartre's conception of dialectical reason and history as presented in the last chapter of La Pensée Sauvage , suggesting that these criticisms are misplaced. Sartre's notion of reason and history in the Critique is much closer to structuralist accounts than Lévi-Strauss seems to recognize, but it differs in placing a strong emphasis on activity and praxis in place of the latter's passive conception of reason. The active role of the inquirer in struc…Read more
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457Both Millikan’s brand of naturalistic analytic philosophy and Husserlian phenomenology have held on to teleological notions, despite their being out of favor in mainstream Western philosophy for most of the twentieth century. Both traditions have recognized the need for teleology in order to adequately account for intentionality, the need to adequately account for intentionality in order to adequately account for meaning, and the need for an adequate theory of meaning in order to precisely and c…Read more
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592History as Soil and Sediment: Geological Tropes of Historicity in Heidegger, Husserl, and Merleau-PontyDanish Yearbook of Philosophy 48 139-152. 2013.Many twentieth-century accounts of history have used geological tropes to describe the phenomenon of historical knowledge, and such terms have been of particular importance in the phenomenological tradition. In Heidegger's references in Being and Time to the "soil of history," Husserl's account in his later work of "sedimentation" in the lifeworld, and the reformulation of this notion in the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, geological tropes are used to illustrate important insights into the rela…Read more
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572The Epistemic Import of Affectivity: A Husserlian AccountMidwest Studies in Philosophy 41 (1): 82-104. 2017.I argue that, on Husserl's account, affectivity, along with the closely related phenomenon of association, follows a form of sui generis lawfulness belonging to the domain of what Husserl calls motivation, which must be distinguished both (1) from the causal structures through which we understand the body third-personally, as a material thing; and also (2) from the rational or inferential structures at the level of deliberative judgment traditionally understood to be the domain of epistemic impo…Read more
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655Making sense of the lived body and the lived world: meaning and presence in Husserl, Derrida and NoëContinental Philosophy Review 51 (2): 141-167. 2017.I argue that Husserl’s transcendental account of the role of the lived body in sense-making is a precursor to Alva Noë’s recent work on the enactive, embodied mind, specifically his notion of “sensorimotor knowledge” as a form of embodied sense-making that avoids representationalism and intellectualism. Derrida’s deconstructive account of meaning—developed largely through a critique of Husserl—relies on the claim that meaning is structured through the complication of the “interiority” of conscio…Read more
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49Meaning, Truth, and Reference in Historical Representation by Frank Ankersmit (review)Journal of the History of Philosophy 51 (4): 685-686. 2013.
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576Phenomenology, Historical Significance, and the Limits of RepresentationGraduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 37 (2): 401-426. 2016.This paper is an essay-length review article on David Carr's book Experience and History (Oxford University Press, 2014).
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234Knowledge, Temporality, and the Movement of HistoryResearch in Phenomenology 44 (3): 441-452. 2014.The paper is an essay-length review article on Søren Gosvig Olesen's Transcendental History (Palgrave MacMillan, 2013).
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55Steven Crowell: Normativity and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger: Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2013. (review)Continental Philosophy Review 47 (3): 479-485. 2014.Steven Crowell’s book is a welcome addition to the literature in phenomenology as well as a demonstration of the importance of phenomenology for those working in other areas of contemporary philosophy, especially those areas of Anglo-American philosophy concerned with normativity, meaning and the philosophy of action. Through a series of thirteen independent but thematically linked essays, he offers a novel account of the importance of normativity to phenomenology, a carefully argued re-thinking…Read more
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Epistemology |
Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence |
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