Mohsen Saber

This article critiques Husserl’s idea of grounding through an exploration of his notion of the lifeworld. First, it sketches different senses of the lifeworld in the Crisis and explains in what sense it is taken to be a universal foundation of all sense-formation. Second, it criticizes Husserl’s idea of grounding and shows that it fails because the alleged foundation—namely, the lifeworld as a perceptual world, or rather lifeworldly experience as perception—is inadequately determined. Perception cannot function as a universal foundation because it is always already interpretation. “The groundlessness of sense” means that the process of sense-formation can in no way rest upon an ultimate ground because contingent presuppositions and historical circumstances influence it from the very beginning. The paper concludes by discussing the consequence of this view for the relation between philosophy and sciences.

Although Avicenna does not explicitly develop a ‘theory of intentionality', one can reconstruct his account of intentionality through an analysis of his thoughts on the relation between mind, meaning, and thing. We take up this task in this paper through an analysis of Avicenna's theory of the considerations of quiddity. First, we clarify Avicenna's idea of ‘quiddity', and show how it functions as a core of ‘meaning' which remains identical in its different modes of realization. Second, through an examination of the very notion of ‘consideration' (i‘tibār), we distinguish between two aspects of the mind, i.e. mental act and mental existence. This helps us clarify what Avicenna means by the existence of a quiddity in mind and in what sense, if any, it is essential to intentionality. Third, addressing the problem of the relation between ‘mental existence' and ‘external existence’, we show how the mode of existence of a quiddity, including its concrete existence, is posited in and through intentionality. This implies that both being and quiddity are moments of the intentional object, and thus, intentionality, for Avicenna, is a dyadic relation between the intentional act and the intentional object. We conclude by reconstructing the structure of intentionality in Avicenna.

This article seeks to reconstruct and critically extend Jacques Derrida’s critique of Edmund Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology. Derrida’s critique of Husserl is explored in three main areas: the phenomenology of language, the phenomenology of time, and the phenomenological constitution of ideal objects. In each case, Husserl’s analysis is shown to rest upon a one-sided determination of truth in terms of presence—whether it be the presence of expressive meaning to consciousness, the self-presence of the temporal instant, or the complete presence of an ideal object through intuition. At every juncture, Derrida’s reasoning is deployed in order to demonstrate how presence is irreducibly bound up with absence and otherness and thus how the ideal of a phenomenological self-presence of consciousness is itself an abstraction from the contingency of history and our concrete embeddedness within a particular lifeworld. The article concludes with an appraisal of reason’s limits in a time of technological domination and the threat of global annihilation. Rather than a flight into irrationalism or skepticism, the author advocates a deepening of philosophical responsibility and an ethics of undecidability as essential for meeting the challenges of modernity.