EARLY PHENOMENOLOGY
Dermot Moran and Rodney K.B. Parker: Editors’ Introduction: Resurrecting the Phenomenological Movement [OPEN ACCESS]
DOCUMENTS
Edmund Husserl: Ms. Signatur A III 1/9-16 „Exzerpte“ zu Jean Hérings Staatsexamensarbeit (Herausgegeben von Thomas Vongehr)
- Abstract: The following text, which is now published for the first time, comes from Husserl’s manuscript A III 1 and was probably written in 1914. The text belongs to a bundle of pages which Husserl wrote down during the presentation and examination of the “Staatsexamensarbeit” of his student Jean Hering. The work “Die Lehre vom Apriori bei Lotze” was done by Hering in the summer semester 1914 in order to receive a degree that would qualify him as a secondary school teacher (Prüfung der Befähigung zum höheren Lehramt). Although this “Staatsexamensarbeit” was never published, Hering used parts of it for his article which appeared in the Jahrbuch, “Bemerkungen über das Wesen, die Wesenheit und die Idee. Edmund Husserl zum 60. Geburtstag gewidmet” (in: Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung IV, 1921, pp. 495–543). Husserl characterized pages 5 to 8 of the manuscript A III 1 as his “own reflections” (eigene Reflexionen) on Hering’s work. These pages are published as “Text Nr. 5” in Husserliana XLI (pp. 83–89). What follows here are pages 9 to 16 of this manuscript, which Husserl called “free excerpts” (freie Exzerpte).
Jean Héring: Phänomenologie als Grundlage der Metaphysik? / Phenomenology as the Foundation of Metaphysics? (Edited by Sylvain Camilleri. Introduction by Sylvain Camilleri and Arun Iyer. Translated by Arun Iyer)
- Abstract: The document presented below stems from the Jean Hering Nachlass in the Médiathèque protestante of Strasbourg and was originally preserved in the Archive of the Collegium Wilhelmitanum Argentinense (the Protestant Institute) of the same city. It concerns a typescript of 7 folios, which was unknown up until now, dealing with the idealism-realism controversy and presenting original views on the consequences of this controversy regarding the issue of metaphysics.
Hedwig Conrad-Martius: Dankesrede bei der Feier zur Verleihung des großen Verdienstkreuzes der Bundesrepublik Deutschland am 01. März 1958 / Acceptance speech at the ceremony for the award of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, March 1st 1958 (Introduction and translated by Susi Ferrarello)
- Abstract: Hedwig Conrad-Martius was honoured with the Bundesverdienstkreuz, the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, on March 1st, 1958. What follows is her acceptance speech on that occasion. In this speech, Conrad-Martius not only gives an account of her biography as a phenomenologist who studied directly with Husserl, but also demonstrates that Husserl’s work is open to a peculiar form of subjective materialist interpretation that can explain his transcendental turn. The speech is an important document for those who support the possibility of a Husserlian transcendental materialism.
ARTICLES
George Heffernan: The Paradox of Objectless Presentations in Early Phenomenology: A Brief History of the Intentional Object from Bolzano to Husserl With Concise Analyses of the Positions of Brentano, Frege, Twardowski and Meinong
- Abstract: This paper explores the close connection in early phenomenology between the problem of objectless presentations and the concept of intentional objects. It clarifies how this basic concept of Husserl’s early phenomenology emerged within the horizons of Bolzano’s logical objectivism, Brentano’s descriptive psychology, Frege’s mathematical logicism, Twardowski’s psychological representationalism, and Meinong’s object theory. It shows how in collaboration with these thinkers Husserl argued that a theory of intentionality is incomplete without a concept of the intentional object. It provides a brief history of the concept of intentional objects in the philosophical logic of the nineteenth century that demonstrates its relevance to the problem of objectless presentations in the early phenomenology of the twentieth century. It suggests that Husserl accepts Bolzano’s objectivism and Frege’s logicism, rejects Brentano’s conception of immanent objects and Twardowski’s notion of representational pictures, and ignores Meinong’s theory of objects. Thus the paper employs the formation of Husserl’s concept of the intentional object to enhance the understanding of the historical and philosophical relationships between early phenomenology and contemporaneous philosophical movements.
Marek Pokropski: Leopold Blaustein’s critique of Husserl’s early theory of intentional act, object and content
- Abstract: The aim of this article is to introduce the work of Leopold Blaustein—philosopher and psychologist, who studied under Kazimierz Twardowski in Lvov and under Husserl in Freiburg im Breisgau. In his short academic career Blaustein developed an original philosophy that drew upon both phenomenology and Twardowski’s analytical approach. One of his main publications concerns Husserl’s early theory of intentional act and object, introduced in Logische Untersuchungen. In the first part of the article I briefly present Blaustein’s biography and some general features of his philosophy. The second part provides an overview of Blaustein’s dissertation concerning Husserl’s early phenomenology. In the third and final part I summarize Blaustein’s research, including the critical remarks of Roman Ingarden.
Hynek Janousek: Judgmental Force and Assertion in Brentano and Early Husserl
- Abstract: The goal of the present article is to describe the Brentanian background of several topics concerning judgments and assertions in Husserl’s Logical Investigations. Why did Husserl abandon Brentano’s theory of two judgmental forces? Is the “is true/false” to be understood as an expression of judgmental force or as a logical predication? Is a “common expression” of the objective validity of judgment equivalent with our expression of our belief in that validity? Does the linguistic sign of the logical force manifest this force or not? In order to provide a better understanding of Husserl’s approach, the paper also discusses his earlier views on these issues in recently published manuscripts from the early 1890s and in his Logic Lectures from the year 1896.
Christian Y. Dupont: Jean Héring and the Introduction of Husserl’s Phenomenology to France
- Abstract: The contributions of Alsatian philosopher and theologian Jean Hering (1890–1966) to the early reception of Husserl’s phenomenology in France have been recognized by Speigelberg, Monseu, and others. This essay probes and elucidates certain historical details to a greater degree than previous studies and also calls attention to the philosophical influences that Hering transmitted to his contemporaries, focusing in particular on his encounters with Emmanuel Levinas and Lev Shestov. It argues that while Hering’s role in facilitating the introduction of Levinas and others to Husserl was important, his more significant contributions consisted in analysing and correcting Levinas’s and Shestov’s appraisals of Husserl’s teachings.
Daniele De Santis: Wesen, Eidos, Idea. Remarks on the “Platonism” of Jean Héring and Roman Ingarden
- Abstract: In this paper we will be discussing the “Platonism” of two former Göttingen students of Husserl, notably Jean Héring and Roman Ingarden. By “Platonism” we mean not simply an account of the difference between individuals and Forms. We mean a peculiar insight into what Ingarden explicitly designates as “the content of Ideas”. Our primary concern is to emphasize a major shift in Plato’s treatment of Forms: we will see Plato switching the focus of his investigation from the difference between the visible world of bodies and the invisible realm of Forms to the internal structure of the Forms themselves. We will then discuss Héring’s Bemerkungen über das Wesen, die Wesenheit und die Idee and Ingarden’s Essentiale Fragen in order to explain the difference between the notions of individual essence, morphe, essentiality (or eidos) and Idea.
Simon Calenge: Hans Lipps critique de l’idéalisme de Husserl
- Abstract: Hans Lipps’s originality lies in a tension between his hermeneutical and existential philosophy on the one hand, and his analysis of themes belonging to classical logic, on the other. To understand this tension, it must be examined at its point of origin – when Lipps discusses Husserl’s philosophy. The purpose of this text is to explain the opposition between Lipps and his first Master. Lipps’s critique of Husserl concerns transcendental idealism, the transcendental reduction, and the concept of intentionality, which appear to Lipps as an escape from the realm of facticity. Husserlian idealism is then similar to Kant’s critical philosophy. Pursuing his inquiry from the perspective of facticity, Lipps refutes Kant’s and Husserl’s transcendentalism and their focus on the realm of representation. He tries nevertheless to analyse the classic problems of phenomenology and Kantian logic from the point of view of facticity.
Faustino Fabbianelli: Bezeichnung und Kennzeichnung: Theodor Conrads Bedeutungslehre in Auseinandersetzung mit Husserl
- Abstract: This paper aims to show how Theodor Conrad’s theory of meaning goes beyond that of Husserl. By drawing on an unedited typescript dating from the 1950s in which the Munich phenomenologist outlines the controversy between Husserl and the so-called Munich-Göttingen group, I interpret the Bezeichnung-Kennzeichung opposition that Conrad introduces in an article from 1910 as a realist position opposing Husserl’s act-phenomenological concept of meaning. This position stands in contrast not only to the phansisch or phänologisch theory of meaning in the Logical Investigations, but also to the new definition of meaning as phänomenologische Bedeutung that Husserl proposes in his 1908 lectures. Conrad advocates a Gegenstandsphänomenologie, for which the main point of a phenomenological theory of meaning is not, like for Husserl, the intentional acts of the subject but rather the qualities of the object to which the meaning refers.
Michele Averchi: The Disinterested Spectator. Geiger’s and Husserl’s Place in the Debate on the Splitting of the Ego
- Abstract: Moritz Geiger developed an original phenomenological account of the splitting of the Ego (Ichspaltung) in two papers, written in 1911 and 1913. Husserl read the 1911 paper as he was working on preliminary manuscripts to Ideas I. The first part of Husserl’s comments focused precisely on the splitting of the Ego. In this paper I will answer three questions: (1.) What is the historical-philosophical context of Geiger’s and Husserl’s discussion on the splitting of the ego? (2.) What are the phenomenological features of the splitting of the ego? (3.) What is the relevance of Geiger’s account of the splitting of the ego, for the further development of Husserl’s phenomenology? Reading Geiger was, indeed, the first occasion in which Husserl started to develop his own phenomenological account of the splitting of the ego. This will prove itself to be crucial for his mature analyses on the phenomenological reduction, as Husserl will distinguish more clearly between reflection and splitting of the ego.
Dalius Jonkus: Phenomenological Approaches to Self-Consciousness and the Unconscious (Moritz Geiger and Vasily Sesemann)
- Abstract: This paper deals with the approach to self-consciousness and the unconscious found in the work of Moritz Geiger and the little known philosopher Vasily Sesemann. The aim of this presentation is to provide an account of Sesemann’s disagreement with Geiger regarding the concept of unconsciousness as well as to introduce his phenomenological explanation of the non-objectifying self-consciousness. The first part of this paper explores Geiger’s concept of unconsciousness. The second part is concerned with Sesemann’s conception of the non-objectifying self-consciousness and its relation to the unconscious. The last part of this paper argues that Sesemann’s concept of self-awareness is similar to the concept of self-consciousness developed by Husserl in his phenomenology.
Alessandro Salice: Actions, Values, and States of Affairs in Hildebrand and Reinach
- Abstract: The present article discusses Dietrich von Hildebrand’s theory of action as presented in his Die Idee der sittlichen Handlung (1916), and focuses on the moral relevance Hildebrand assigns to different kinds of motivations. The act of will which leads to a moral action, Hildebrand claims, can be “founded” or “motivated” in different ways and, in particular, it can be motivated by an act of cognizing (Erkennen) or by an act of value-taking (Wertnehmen). The act of cognizing grasps the state of affairs that the action strives to bring about as a deontic state of affairs, i.e., as a state of affairs that ought to be. By contrast, the act of value-taking is primarily directed towards the values inhering in this state of affairs. Although both kinds of motivations are morally sound, Hildebrand argues that the latter is preferable due to its vicinity to values and to its immediacy in the way in which it grasps values. In what follows, Hildebrand’s view is reconstructed, assessed and evaluated against the background of Adolf Reinach’s theory of intentionality. More specifically, two elements of Reinach’s thought are highlighted as being central for Hildebrand’s understanding of the notion of an action. First, it is argued that Hildebrand’s idea of the act of willing as a stance (Stellungnahme) that can be founded either by an act of cognizing or by an act of presentation is developed in strict symmetry with Reinach’s view that conviction is a stance that can be founded by means of an identical mechanism. Secondly, it will be shown that Hildebrand adopts the notion of a state of affairs (Sachverhalt) from Reinach.
Arkadiusz Chrudzimski: Reinach’s Theory of Social Acts
- Abstract: Some forty years before J.L. Austin, Adolf Reinach developed a highly articulated theory of speech acts. In this paper I present Reinach’s theory, and show some similarities and differences between his approach and the nowadays standard approaches, derived from Austin and Searle. Reinach’s work contains in fact all the cornerstones of the speech act theory. Still when comparing his theory with these contemporary approaches we can find at least two important differences. The first difference concerns what Reinach called the “primitive legal powers,” and what he construed as a part of the metaphysical essence of a person. The second one is that in Reinach’s theory we find a clear distinction between conventional normativity, originating from our performative intentionality, and genuine moral normativity, based on the intrinsic values of certain states of affairs.
Francesca De Vecchi: Edith Stein’s Social Ontology of the State, the Law and Social Acts. An eidetic approach
- Abstract: In her Investigation Concerning the State (1925), Edith Stein takes up some of the main ideas of the social ontology presented by Adolf Reinach (1913), and develops a social ontology of the state, of the law and of social acts. I argue that Stein’s social ontology is an eidetics of the state, the law and social acts. Stein identifies the essential relations that constitute the state, the law and social acts, i.e. pinpoints the parts upon which the state, the law and social acts existentially depend as wholes. In doing so, Stein applies Husserl’s account of wholes and parts to the social domain. I also suggest that Stein outlines a regional ontology of sociality that embodies Husserl’s idea of regional ontology. I focus on the intertwining of the wholes-parts relations, which characterize Stein’s regional ontology of sociality, and argue that there are not only necessary but also possible parts within the wholes. This makes Stein’s regional ontology of the sociality a dynamic ontology.
Joona Taipale: The Anachronous Other: Empathy and Transference in Early Phenomenology and Psychoanalysis
- Abstract: This article discusses our experience of other people from both phenomenological and psychoanalytic perspectives. Drawing on Husserl and Freud, I will distinguish between different temporal modes of the other: while Husserl carefully examines the ways in which others are constituted as synchronous (present) or as asynchronous (past), Freud underlines that others may also appear in a temporally displaced, anachronous manner, whereby one’s experience of some past other dominates in the experience of the present other. Freud discusses this third kind of relationship to the other under the rubric “transference”. The main objective of this article is to argue that the Freudian concept of transference is a structural element in our experience of others, and that, in this respect, the psychoanalytic concept of transference should be seen as complementing the phenomenological account of empathy and interpersonal understanding.
Íngrid Vendrell Ferran: The Emotions in Early Phenomenology
- Abstract: This paper offers an overview of certain key features of the accounts of emotion defended by the early phenomenologists. After briefly presenting the movement of early phenomenology and describing its historical context, I shall elaborate the main claims about the emotions defended by this group, articulating them through the following five topics: 1) the stratification of emotional life; 2) the qualitative aspect of emotional experience; 3) the foundation of the emotions in cognitive acts; 4) the intentionality of feeling and the emotions; and 5) their moral dimension. The paper finishes with some concluding remarks about the significance of the early phenomenological discussion of the emotions for the debate on this topic in contemporary analytical philosophy.
Mariano Crespo: Moritz Geiger on the Consciousness of Feelings
- Abstract: Moritz Geiger was one of the most significant members of the early phase of the phenomenology movement. His work on the consciousness of feelings constitutes an example of careful phenomenological analysis. The central question Geiger raised is this: how are feelings given to consciousness when they are “fully lived” (vollerlebt)? As I seek to prove, the principal result of his analysis is to point out a way of being oriented towards feelings without objectifying them. Geiger’s analysis of the consciousness of feelings is a masterpiece of phenomenological precision. It is reasonable to think that it influenced the way Husserl conceived of something so decisive as emotive intentionality.
Kristjan Laasik: Wilhelm Schapp on Seeing Distant Things
- Abstract: In 1909, Wilhelm Schapp, a student of Edmund Husserl’s at Göttingen, defended his doctoral thesis, Beiträge zur Phänomenologie der Wahrnehmung. In this text, Schapp argues that color presents things to the sense of sight by contributing a certain order, or form, that manifests itself in the orderly, predictable variation of perspectives, in the course of experience. He also argues that we do not visually perceive certain distant things, like a house far down in the valley, due to a lack of such color order. While accepting, with qualifications, Schapp’s claim concerning the need for a color order, I will argue that we can visually perceive distant things. I will also argue that Schapp’s discussion of distant things is, nevertheless, of current interest, viz., by comparison of his views with Alva Noë’s recent arguments to the effect that we do not visually perceive distant objects.
Timothy Martell: Cassirer and Husserl on the Phenomenology of Perception
- Abstract: This paper creates a dialogue between Ernst Cassirer, one of the last prominent representatives of Neo-Kantian thought, and Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology. In Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Cassirer criticizes Husserl’s distinction between hylē and morphē. His criticism is based in part on the work of several figures belonging to the early phase of the phenomenological movement, including Wilhelm Schapp. By developing Cassirer’s criticism and considering the responses that Husserl could have offered, the dialogue helps to clarify the complex relationship between Cassirer’s philosophy and Husserl’s phenomenology. It also reveals some of the ways in which early phenomenology influenced other philosophical movements. But dialogue between Cassirer and Husserl is of more than historical interest. I argue that Husserl would not have had an adequate response to Cassirer’s objections. Cassirer’s criticism of Husserl thus remains relevant for present day research in phenomenology.
Bernardo Ainbinder: From Neo-Kantianism to Phenomenology. Emil Lask’s Revision of Transcendental Philosophy: Objectivism, Reduction, Motivation
- Abstract: Recently, Emil Lask’s work has been the object of renewed interest. As it has been noted, Lask’s work is much closer to phenomenology than that of his fellow Neo-Kantians. Many recent contributions to current discussions on this topic have compared his account of logic to Husserl’s. Less attention has been paid to Lask’s original metaphilosophical insights. In this paper, I explore Lask’s conception of transcendental philosophy to show how it led him to a phenomenological conversion. Lask found in Husserl’s Logical Investigations the possibility of grounding transcendental philosophy in purely objective terms, thus avoiding any risk of psychologism. But he also concluded that the tools found in Logical Investigations needed to be complemented by a method which would inquire back from the constituted to the constituting (anticipating Husserlian reduction) and a way of grounding such a methodological move in experience itself (anticipating Husserlian motivation). Lask then provided a model for reduction and motivation without bringing a transcendental ego into the picture.
VARIA
Philippe Merlier: Interpellation et chiasme
- Abstract: This article examines the points of similarity and the differences between the Patočkian concept of interpellation (oslovéni, questioning) and Merleau-Ponty’s concept of chiasmus. These two modes of relating-to-being through language and body, perception and space share the same character of reversibility and openness to the other. However, the “co-respondance” between the subject and the world is not approached by the two phenomenological philosophers from the same perspective. Being-questioned is the inter-psychical event specific to one’s experience of others and of the world; the chiasmatic structure is the bedrock of the ontological relationship and the intercorporeity of beings. Close, but distinct one from the other, interpellation and chiasm(us) partially reveal the common preoccupations of two philosophers whose dialogue History never allowed to occur.
Matthew Schunke: Revealing Givenness: The Problem of Non-Intuited Phenomena in Jean-Luc Marion’s Phenomenology
- Abstract: This article questions Jean-Luc Marion’s move away from intuition and shows how it risks the promise of his account of religion by returning to metaphysics and speculation. My aim is not to ask whether Marion’s phenomenology can adequately account for religious phenomena but to ask whether Marion’s account of revelation meets his own phenomenological principle—that one must rely on the phenomenon to establish the limits of phenomenology—which he establishes to guard against metaphysics and speculation. To this end, I demonstrate how Marion drifts from his phenomenological principle when he claims that revelation is a phenomenon given without intuition. This drift leads to criticisms that he is leading phenomenology toward speculative philosophy and sneaking revelation in through the back door. I then show the detrimental consequences for both his phenomenological and theological projects and how he could better achieve the goals of both projects by maintaining the role of intuition.
BOOK REVIEWS
- Christian Ferencz-Flatz: Edmund Husserl, Grenzprobleme der Phänomenologie. Analysen des Unbewusstseins und der Instinkte. Metaphysik. Späte Ethik. Texte aus dem Nachlass (1908–1937), Hrsg. von Rochus Sowa und Thomas Vongehr (Dordrecht: Springer, 2014).
- Garrett Zantow Bredeson: Sebastian Luft (ed.), The Neo-Kantian Reader (London: Routledge, 2015).
- Mădălina Diaconu: Peter Fischer, Phänomenologische Soziologie (Bielefeld: transcript, 2012).
- Mădălina Diaconu: Richard Shusterman, Körper-Bewusstsein. Für eine Philosophie der Somästhetik (Hamburg: Meiner, 2012).
- Mădălina Diaconu: Tonino Griffero, Atmospheres: Aesthetics of Emotional Spaces, translation by Sarah de Sanctis (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010).
- Tibor Földes: Alessandro Salice (ed.), Intentionality: Historical and Systematic Perspectives (München: Philosophia Verlag, 2012).
- Philipp Berghofer: Elijah Chudnoff, Intuition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
ISSN: 1582-5647 (print) / 2069-0061 (online)
ISBN: 978-606-697-020-4 (paperback) /9 78-606-697-021-1 (eBook)
