Peter Shum

The domain of phenomenological investigation delineated by the Husserlian term authentic empathy presents us with an immediate tension. On the one hand, authentic empathy is supposed to grant the subject access (in some sense that remains to be fully specified) to the Other’s experience. On the other hand, foundational phenomenological considerations pertaining to the apprehension of a foreign subjectivity determine that it is precisely a disjunction in subjective processes that is constitutive of the Other being other. In my approach to this problem, I seek, within the context of a reading of Edith Stein’s work 'On the Problem of Empathy', to clarify the place of ascription in authentic empathy, and to render more explicit a certain notion of “contiguity” that I take to be informing Stein’s understanding of the co-givenness of the Other’s mental life. I go on to argue that a resolution to the problem of empathy lies in the idea that the respective lived experiences of self and Other are, as a matter of descriptive fact, phenomenally connected by a relation of resemblance, and that, consonantly, the essential structure of authentic empathy is characterised in its mature phases by an homological relation to picture consciousness.

This paper explores Jean Starobinski's often tacit conception of the implied author, with a view to clarifying his intellectual legacy for literary criticism. It argues that it is plausible to trace a certain strand in the intellectual genealogy of Starobinski's literary theory from the descriptive psychology of Wilhelm Dilthey to twentieth-century psychoanalysis and phenomenology. Accordingly, the question "Who is Jean Starobinski?" is formulated in a sense which seeks to move beyond the bare facticity of biographical detail, a sense that can be expected to differentiate between scholarly and purely journalistic enquiry to ask: who, exactly, is the Jean Starobinski that we encounter in his major works - works like "The Living Eye" and "Transparency and Obstruction"? It is from this vantage point that the discussion proceeds to clarify Starobinski's ambivalent relations to both Rousseau and Freud, and thereby to illuminate some of the tensions and nuances inherent in his notion of the implied author.

The domain of phenomenological investigation delineated by the Husserlian term authentic empathy presents us with an immediate tension. On the one hand, authentic empathy is supposed to grant the subject access (in some sense that remains to be fully specified) to the Other’s experience. On the other hand, foundational phenomenological considerations pertaining to the apprehension of a foreign subjectivity determine that it is precisely a disjunction in subjective processes that is constitutive of the Other being other. In my approach to this problem, I seek, within the context of a reading of Edith Stein’s work On the Problem of Empathy, to clarify the place of ascription in authentic empathy, and to render more explicit a certain notion of “contiguity” that I take to be informing Stein’s understanding of the co-givenness of the Other’s mental life. I go on to argue that a resolution to the problem of empathy lies in the idea that the respective lived experiences of self and Other are, as a matter of descriptive fact, phenomenally connected by a relation of resemblance, and that, consonantly, the essential structure of authentic empathy is characterised in its mature phases by an homological relation to picture consciousness.

This paper begins by affirming the view that if there is a debate to be had over whether literature can convey moral knowledge, then efforts by proponents to substantiate this claim will already be necessarily conditioned by an understanding of what morality consists in, independently of literature. This observation brings to light a certain danger for the debate, namely that if participants fail to explicitly specify the ethical theory that they rely on, then the debate can seem nebulous. This raises a new question: is there an account of morality, independent of literature, which is most conducive to literary moral cognitivism, that is, which optimises literary moral cognitivism's chances of succeeding philosophically? This paper both formulates and investigates this hypothesis with reference to moral pluralism, the view that there is an irreducible plurality of foundational moral principles. It concludes that such an affinity exists, but with an important caveat: the affinity is stronger at the level of moral suggestion than the level of moral justification. This has implications for the strength of the version of literary moral cognitivism that it is ultimately plausible to endorse from a moral pluralist point of view.

Dietrich von Hildebrand seeks to pursue the idea that the discipline of phenomenology can offer a way of surmounting what Kant saw as the intrinsic limitations of human metaphysical enquiry. In this book review of the 2021 edition of Hildebrand’s What is Philosophy?, Hildebrand’s train of thought is reconstructed in some detail, from his opening remarks about knowing in general through to his account of the intuition of essences, the question of objectivity, and the overarching purpose of philosophy. Hildebrand’s argument culminates in the claim that philosophy is not only the fundamental activity of a mind turned toward God, but is properly a preamble to religious faith. The review concludes by raising a number of objections to Hildebrand’s version of phenomenological realism.

The foundational status that Edmund Husserl envisages for phenomenology in relation to the sciences would seem to suggest that the successful unfolding of contemporary debates in the field of social cognition will be conditioned by progress in resolving certain central controversies in the phenomenology of intersubjectivity, notably in long-standing questions pertaining to the priority of subjectivity in relation to intersubjectivity, and the priority of empathy in relation to other forms of intersubjectivity. That such controversies are long-standing is in no small part attributable to the fact that the debate surrounding Husserl’s seminal attempts to elucidate these problems has placed his account, and certainly his published position, under a certain amount of pressure, pressure which stems from the suspicion that intentionality toward others may be more deeply embedded in subjectivity than the Husserl of Cartesian Meditations seems prepared to admit. Is the primordinally reduced solipsistic subject of the Fifth Meditation really capable of discovering intersubjectivity in the way that Husserl describes, or is such putative discovery (indeed, subjective transformation) already conditioned by a more primitive form of intersubjectivity? This paper investigates two ways in which this kind of “circularity” objection might arise. Firstly, it might be argued that Husserl presupposes an external perspective on one’s own body, a perspective which rationally would have to be correlated with an indeterminate foreign subjectivity. Secondly, the view has been advanced (Zahavi in Husserl and transcendental intersubjectivity: a response to the linguistic-pragmatic critique. Ohio University Press, Athens, OH, 2001b) that horizonal perceptual awareness of another spatio-temporal entity turns out to be essentially intersubjective, on the grounds that awareness of some of an object’s averted aspects commits one to positing the possibility in principle of those averted aspects being available to an indeterminate foreign subjectivity. Objections such as these seem to place the phenomenological enquiry into the encounter with another person at something of a crossroads. On the one hand, they have led some to argue that basic empathy, as Husserl conceives it, must indeed be conditioned by the anonymous constituting influence of a more primitive form of intersubjectivity. On the other hand, the option remains open to seek to defend Husserl’s published position against the charges of circularity. This paper pursues the latter alternative, and argues that, with appropriate clarification, the objections from circularity can be convincingly answered. It will be argued that the key to understanding why the standard Husserlian position can be sustained lies in recognising the centrality of the activity of the imagination as a condition for the possibility of intersubjectivity

This paper examines the phenomenological considerations which govern an important transition in the thought of Edmund Husserl, namely his gradual disenchantment with the view that acts of the imagination are given to consciousness in the manner of a semblance, and his decision to replace it with the view that they should more accurately be understood to be reproductions of non-posited perceptions. The central conclusion of this paper will be that the logic of Husserl’s own analysis points to a further phenomenological discovery that Husserl himself does not fully articulate, but which helps to explain his initial attraction toward an imagistic account of imagining. This is the finding that a structure homologous to picture-consciousness is liable to arise in the context of nested reproductions, and in particular that acts of remembering imagining bear the act-character of pictoriality.

If the possible ends of art criticism are taken to include not only the provision of a detailed evaluation of the artwork, but, cognately, an elaboration upon how one has been, or believes oneself to have been, changed by a particular artistic encounter, then the very praxis of art criticism stands to benefit from a theoretical elucidation of the possible nature of the subjective transformations that may flow from the critical appreciation of art. We are entitled to enquire, in particular, into the conditions under which, and indeed the extent to which, such putative change at the personal level can be explicated in moral epistemological terms. It is pertinent in this context also to investigate the phenomenal character of the experiences that have been operative and their essential structures; to enquire, in short, into the phenomenology of the transformative artistic encounter. In this thesis, the bearing, in particular, of intersubjectivity upon the content and modalities of disclosure in a literary context will be investigated. It will be shown how an understanding of the relevance of intersubjectivity to the phenomenology of literary experience can inform an assessment of the claims of literary aesthetic moral cognitivism. Yet the intention to clarify the connection between literary experience and intersubjectivity also requires reflection upon what it is in the first place to encounter someone else, and to apperceive a foreign subjectivity and its motivations. For this reason, the contributions of Edmund Husserl and Edith Stein to the investigation of the phenomenology of empathy will be discussed and evaluated. This discussion will in turn be shown to be of assistance in clarifying the role of the imagination in the apperception and comprehension of another person’s mental life. The thought of Jean Starobinski will prove to elucidate the question of why the insights of the phenomenological tradition are highly pertinent to the investigation of literary experience, and to the development, in particular, of a conception of an imagined ‘Other’ who is (in a sense that will be clarified) embedded within the literary text, a person, that is, to whom one might coherently refer as the “implied author”. For reasons which will emerge in the course of this study, it will be argued that authentic empathy, in its fulfilling explication (in the Steinian sense), is given to the empathising consciousness in the manner of a semblance, and, consonantly, that the phenomenological structure of authentic empathy is characterised in its mature phases by an homological relation to pictureconsciousness. The epistemological significance of literature’s capacities for moral suggestion will be explicated principally in terms of the unfolding of values within the human personality, and in terms of the disclosure of the phenomenal character and structures of virtuous experience. It will be explained why the structure of empathy has implications for the aesthetic value of literature. The question of the relation between aesthetic and ethical value will be clarified. In this context, it will be argued on phenomenological grounds that the appresentation of moral virtue in an implied author could contribute to the aesthetic value of a literary work, although it will also be shown that implied authorial moral virtue could conflict irremediably with other qualities like moral doubt and uncertainty, which may themselves be important sources of aesthetic value. For this reason, the thesis will conclude by challenging the ethicist view that an aesthetically relevant ethical flaw in a literary work must count as an aesthetic flaw