Pirui Zheng

This paper critically examines the claim that Edmund Husserl is an anti-volitionist, as argued by Andrea Staiti and Nicola Spano, who suggest that Husserl rejects volitionism and instead characterizes volition as an extensional property of action. While acknowledging the textual evidence supporting this view, the paper presents a close reading of Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins and related manuscripts to demonstrate that Husserl’s text also supports a volitionist conception of action. The paper argues that Husserl’s volitionalist approach synthesizes elements of identity theory, externalism, and internalism, illustrating that Husserl’s account of action integrates both the initiating and sustaining dimensions of volition within a dynamic, stratified structure of complete action. Drawing on Husserl’s nuanced distinctions between decision-will and fiat-will, as well as his analysis of primary and secondary actions, the paper proposes a “dual-will volitionism” as a more coherent interpretive framework.

Whether Husserl is a conceptualist has been heatedly debated among contemporary Husserl scholars. The present article intends to join the debate by asking the question of how, in the Husserlian context, intuitive acts fulfill signitive ones. On the one hand, those who take Husserl to be a conceptualist hold the content-identity theory, arguing that intuitive act and signitive act have the same content, so that the former can fulfill the latter. On the other hand, the non-conceptualists defend the object-identity theory and claim that it is the identity of object of intuitive and signitive act that makes fulfillment possible. On the basis of a careful reading of the sixth investigation of Husserl’s Logical Investigations, the article proposes a dynamic content-identity theory, in which the identity of content does not mean that intuitive act and signitive act have the identical content accidentally, but rather, in the dynamic fulfillment process, the intuitive act obtains the content that overflows into it from the signitive act, so that the two acts have the identical content. And this article shows how the dynamic content-identity theory places Husserl in the conceptualist camp while avoiding certain difficulties of either plain content-identity theory or object-identity theory.

ABSTRACTHusserl's phenomenology of intersubjectivity is often thought to fall into solipsism and thus be a failed project. One of the typical symptoms is the so-called “paradox of incorporation”. The key to avoiding the paradox lies in finding the motives that lead to alien experiences. An important effort in this direction is to extend the so-called phenomenon of “double sensation” limited to the tactile realm to all perceptual realms. However, the legitimacy of the extension is based on the recognition of a pre-subjective, anonymous, and impersonal dimension, which exorcizes, but not answer the question. This article attempts to make a new interpretation of Husserl's fifth Cartesian Meditation. It focuses on the concept of “replacing” and argues that the motivational basis of alien experience is the desire for total naturalization.