Edmund Husserl, <Emphasis Type="Italic">Logical Investigations. Volume I. Prolegomena to Pure Logic</Emphasis>

This is a translation from Russian to English of Nikolai Onufriyevich Lossky’s review of the first Russian translation of volume one of Husserl’s Logische Untersuchungen (the “Prolegomena to Pure Logic”), which was translated by E. A. Berstein and published in 1909 by a Petersburgian editor. The review appeared in the Muscovite philosophical journal Pyccкaя мыcль (Russian Thought) in 1909. In this short text, Lossky expresses his agreement with Husserl’s early anti-psychologism in logic. He also manifests his stance against logical and axiological relativism and naturalism. As an ontological realist, Lossky thought he had found in the author of the Logische Untersuchungen an ally against the subjectivistic trends then still prevalent in Germany. The review is significant in intellectual history for its vanguard role in the Rezeptionsgeschichte of Husserl’s thought in Russia. (Frédéric Tremblay)     

Nikolai Lossky’s Reception and Criticism of Husserl

Nikolai Lossky is key to the history of the Husserl-Rezeption in Russia. He was the first to publish a review of the Russian translation of Husserl’s first volume of the Logische Untersuchungen that appeared in 1909. He also published a presentation and criticism of Husserl’s transcendental idealism in 1939. An English translation of both of Lossky’s publications is offered in this volume for the first time. The present paper, which is intended as an introduction to these documents, situates Lossky within the Rezeptionsgeschichte of Husserl in Russia and explains why he is central to it. It also explains what Lossky principally found in Husserl: he saw in the latter’s critique of psychologism support for his own ontology, epistemology, and axiology. Lossky characterizes his ontology as an ideal-realism. According to ideal-realism, both the realm of ideal beings (in Plato’s sense) and the realm of real beings (i.e., the world of becoming) are mind-independent. Per his epistemology, which he calls “intuitivism,” real beings are intuited by sensual intuition and ideal beings by intellectual intuition. The realm of ideal beings includes the subrealm of values, which is intuited by axiological intuition. This thoroughly realist conception contrasted sharply with the subjectivist tendencies of the time. So, when Lossky took cognizance of Husserl’s critique of psychologism, he thereupon found an ally in his battle against the various subjectivisms. But, when Husserl took the transcendental idealist turn, Lossky was at the forefront of the backlash against the new direction Husserl wanted to give to phenomenology.     

The Concept of <Emphasis Type="Italic">Krisis</Emphasis> in Husserl’s <Emphasis Type="Italic">The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology</Emphasis>

In The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, Husserl argues that the only way to respond to the scientific Krisis of which he speaks is with phenomenological reflections on the history, method, and task of philosophy. On the assumption that an accurate diagnosis of a malady is a necessary condition for an effective remedy, this paper aims to formulate a precise concept of the Krisis of the European sciences with which Husserl operates in this work. Thus it seeks an answer to the question: What exactly, according to Husserl, is “the ‘crisis’ [Krisis] of the European sciences”? There are two different tendencies in the literature on this question. According to the traditional interpretation, the Krisis of the European sciences lies not in the inadequacy of their scientificity but in the loss of their meaningfulness for life. According to an innovative suggestion, the Krisis lies not in the loss of their meaningfulness for life but in the inadequacy of their scientificity. These readings are mutually exclusive because each claims that the other misidentifies the Krisis as something that it is not. The argument of this paper, however, is that, given the many different senses of Krisis in The Crisis, an adequate understanding of the Krisis that Husserl identifies requires not a disjunctive but an inclusive approach. Therefore the paper proposes that Husserl’s Krisis of the European sciences is both a crisis of their scientificity and a crisis of their meaningfulness for life. The relevance of this result to Husserl’s philosophical and historical sense-investigations in The Crisis—as well as to the present critical situation of philosophy—is self-evident.     

Der Begriff der „Bekundung“ bei Husserl und Heidegger

The article intends to explore the extension of several Husserlian concepts and issues in Heidegger’s first lectures of the 1920s. To this extent it focuses especially on the concept of Bekundung (intimation), exposed by Husserl in the second book of his Ideas, and also discussed by Heidegger in his Freiburg lecture Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie (WS 1919/20). By following this concept both in Husserl’s theory of the constitution of materiality and causal reality, as well as in his discussion of the personal self, and by pointing out the tensions between the two perspectives, we will try to show that Heidegger’s use of the term can in several aspects be seen as an attempt to solve certain difficulties of the Husserlian perspective. Thus, we wish to sketch out a part of that complex network of continuities and differences that constitute the “common ground” of the two thinkers in the early 1920s.     

Spirituality and Intersubjective Consensus: A Response to Ciocan and Ferencz-Flatz

In The Human Place in the Cosmos Max Scheler argues the question of philosophical anthropology must address three problems: (i) the difference between man and animal; (ii) the Cartesian problem of the mind and body; and (iii) the essence of spirit. In a recent issue of Human Studies, two articles by Cristian Ciocan and Christian Ferencz-Flatz addressed the first of these problems through investigations of Husserl’s Nachlass. In this paper, I respond primarily to Ciocan by drawing on Scheler’s phenomenology and the implications this has for understanding Husserl’s phenomenology. By looking at Husserl’s published comments, we can see how the attempt to differentiate between man and animal is bound up with his understanding of spirituality. This allows an alternative way of understanding normality and abnormality which shifts emphasises away from how far we can empathise with the Other (be they man or animal) to emphasise what it means to be normal or abnormal. This will allow us to address an ambiguity of Husserl identified by Ferencz-Flatz.     

Husserl’s Transcendental-Phenomenological Idealism

This is a translation from Russian to English of Nikolai Onufriyevich Lossky’s “Tpaнcцeндeнтaльнo-фeнoмeнoлoгичecкiй идeaлизмъ Гyccepля” (Husserl’s Transcendental-Phenomenological Idealism), published in the émigré journal Пyть (The Way) in 1939. In this article, Lossky presents and criticizes Husserl’s transcendental idealism. Like many successors of Husserl’s “Göttingen School,” Lossky interprets Husserl’s transcendental idealism as a Neo-Kantian idealism and he criticizes it on the ground that it leads to a form of solipsism. In light of his own epistemology (intuitivism) and his metaphysical system (ideal-realism), he also claims that, although Husserl is more radical than Descartes in his methodological doubt, he is not radical enough, because his abstention from existential judgment with regard to the external world is itself an existential judgment. In this regard, Lossky affirms that his own critically-informed defense of naive realism is in fact more radical than Husserl’s transcendental idealism. (Frédéric Tremblay)     

Husserl’s Conception of Experiential Justification: What It Is and Why It Matters

The aim of this paper is twofold. The first is an interpretative one as I wish to provide a detailed account of Husserl’s conception of experiential justification. Here Ideas I and Introduction to Logic and Theory of Knowledge: Lectures 1906/07 will be my main resources. My second aim is to demonstrate the currency and relevance of Husserl’s conception. This means two things: Firstly, I will show that in current debates in analytic epistemology there is a movement sharing with Husserl the basic idea that certain experiences gain their justificatory force simply from their distinctive phenomenal character. Secondly, I shall reveal the benefits of Husserl’s specific version of this view. Thus, one of my aims is to show that debates in current analytic epistemology could profit from adopting certain Husserlian elements. More precisely, I will defend Husserl’s claim that perceptual experiences are justifiers due to their self-giving phenomenal character as opposed to the currently popular view that it is the phenomenology of pushiness that makes them justifiers. To put it differently, what matters is what is originally given within experience and not how you feel about what is given.     

Why Husserl’s Universal Empiricism is a Moderate Rationalism

Husserl claims that his phenomenological–epistemological system amounts to a “universal” form of empiricism. The present paper shows that this universal moment of Husserl’s empiricism is why his empiricism qualifies as a rationalism. What is empiricist about Husserl’s phenomenological–epistemological system is that he takes experiences to be an autonomous source of immediate justification. On top of that, Husserl takes experiences to be the ultimate source of justification. For Husserl, every justified belief ultimately depends epistemically on the subject’s experiences. These are paradigms of empiricist claims and thus Husserl seems to subscribe to empiricism. However, what is universal about Husserl’s “empiricism” is that he does not limit the concept of (justification-conferring) experiences to sensory experiences or sensory experiences plus introspective intuitions but broadens the concept of experience such that also a priori intuitions are included. Husserl insists that logical, mathematical, and phenomenological intuitions such as?~?(p ∧ ?~?p), 2?+?2?=?4, and “Experiences necessarily bear the mark of intentionality” provide non-inferential justification analogous to how sensory experiences can non-inferentially justify beliefs such as “There is a table in front of me.” Importantly, Husserl makes clear that such a priori intuitions are not about our concepts but about reality. This is why Husserl’s universal empiricism is a rationalism. Husserl differs from traditional rationalism as he allows that a priori intuitions can be fallible and empirically underminable. This distinguishes Husserl’s rationalism from Descartes’ and makes him a proponent of moderate rationalism as currently championed by Laurence BonJour.     

Making sense of the lived body <Emphasis Type="Italic">and</Emphasis> the lived world: meaning and presence in Husserl,Derrida and Noë

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 consciousness by an “outside,” and thus might be thought to lend itself to theories of mind such as Noë’s that emphasize the ways in which sense-making occurs outside the head. But while Derrida’s notion of “contamination” rightly points to an indeterminateness of meaning in an outside, extended, concrete lived world, he ultimately reduces meaning to a structure of signification. This casts indeterminateness in terms of absence, ignoring the presence of non-linguistic phenomena of embodied sense-making central to both the contemporary enactivist program and to the later Husserl, who is able to account for the indeterminateness of meaning in lived experience through his distinction between sense (Sinn) and more exact linguistic meaning (Bedeutung). Husserl’s transcendental theory of meaning also allows for a substantive contribution to sense-making from the side of the perceived object—an aspect missing from Noë’s account. Thus, in contrast to Derrida and to Noë, Husserl accounts for sense-making in terms of both the lived body and the lived world.     

Algebraic Models of Mental Number Axes: Part II

The paper presents a formal model of the system of number representations as a multiplicity of mental number axes with a hierarchical structure. The hierarchy is determined by the mind as it acquires successive types of mental number axes generated by virtue of some algebraic mechanisms. Three types of algebraic structures, responsible for functioning these mechanisms, are distinguished: BASAN-structures, CASAN-structures and CAPPAN-structures. A foundational order holds between these structures. CAPPAN-structures are derivative from CASAN-structures which are extensions of BASAN-structures. The constructed formal model unifies two competitive conceptions of cognitive arithmetic: namely, the conception of the mental number line and the conception of parallel individuation. The paper is the continuation of a paper entitled Representational structures of arithmetical thinking, in which rich empirical evidence supporting the model is presented. The main result achieved in the present paper may be philosophically interpreted as an attempt to formalize the Kantian conception of the pure idea of time, understood as the a priori form of human arithmetical thinking. In this way, our theory may be comprehended as a result of applying the hard method of logical reconstruction of fundamental epistemological categories.     

No I,No Problems: The Quintessence of Buddhist Psychology of Awakening

If psychology is viewed as the science of human mind, the Buddha could unarguably be termed as the finest depth psychologist humanity has seen. Not only did he penetrate deep into the hidden recesses of human mind and uncovered the machinations of the latent tendencies, he also found the way out of their stranglehold on mankind. As a compassionate teacher, he focused his entire teaching primarily on the later practical aspect. He often mentioned that he taught only two things: there is unhappiness (dukkha) and there is a way out of this unhappiness. The root cause of this unhappiness, he identified as the primeval ignorance avijja, which creates the notion of ‘I’ as an individual entity, the doer, the feeler and the thinker. This in turn gives rise to the concepts of ‘I and mine’, ‘thee and thine’ from which originate craving (raga) and aversion (dosa). The Buddha’s penetrative insight into the nature of human reality revealed that what we call ‘I’ or a ‘being’ is only a concatenation of the five impermanent aggregates, viz. the body, consciousness, intellect, feelings and volitional mental formations, which work interdependently, changing from moment to moment in accordance with the law of cause and effect. By a systematic cultivation of the mindfulness of these aggregates anyone can progressively uproot the ego and purify the mind by extinguishing this fire of defilements continuously burning within it. As the mind gets progressively purified, it awakens from the illusion of ‘personality’ and naturally abides in loving kindness (maîtri), compassion (karuna), altruistic joy (mudita) and equanimity (upekkha) to increasing degree. ‘No I, No problems’, as one contemporary Master puts it.     

Expansion of Parents’ Undetermined Experience in Socioeducational Programs: Extending the Dialogical Self Theory

The Dialogic Self Theory (DST—Hermans et al. Integrative Psychology and Behavioral Sciences, 51(4), 1-31, 2017) is extended here in its dynamic aspects through focusing on the notions of indeterminacy, emptiness and movement. Linking with Husserl, I propose moving the dialogical self (DS) from a clear position in the “repertory of the Self” to an undetermined horizon. This makes it possible to introduce “holes” (emptiness) into the schematic representation of the “repertory of the Self”. Yet Husserl’s concept of horizon seems to focus too much on making the indeterminable determinate. To overcome this limit, I incorporate Bergson’s concept of empty form into the DST. This enables conceptualising the extension and emergence of horizon. Extending Bergson’s concept of organisation, it is possible to see how the expansion of the horizon in a movement of globalisation does not necessarily entail the disorganisation of the DS but rather to its further organisation. Extending the system of DS by Hermans et al. Integrative Psychology and Behavioral Sciences, 51(4), 1-31, (2017), I open by suggesting that movements are both horizontal (between people) and vertical (between the person, the institutions and the norms) connectors. My conceptual propositions are illustrated by parents’ and educators’ discourses in two Canadian socio-educational programs.     

The Dynamic Association of Being and Non-Being: Heidegger’s Thoughts on Plato’s <Emphasis Type="Italic">Sophist</Emphasis> Beyond Platonism

This article examines Heidegger’s interpretation of Plato’s Sophist, focusing on his attempts to grasp Plato’s original thinking of being and non-being. Some contemporary thinkers and commentators argue that Heidegger’s view of Plato is simply based on his criticism against the traditional metaphysics of Platonism and its language. But a close reading of his lecture on the Sophist reveals that his view of Plato is grounded in Plato’s questioning struggle with the ambiguous nature of human speech or language (logos). For Heidegger, Plato’s way of philosophizing is deeper than the metaphysical understanding of Platonism which sees only fixed ideas of being. In the Sophist, dialectical thinking of Plato constantly confronts the questionable force of the logos which betrays the natural possibility of non-being based on the tension between movement and rest. Thus, from Plato’s original insight Heidegger uncovers the dynamic association (koinōnia) of being and non-being as a natural ground of everyday living with others. However, although Heidegger’s understanding of the Sophist powerfully demonstrates the lively possibility (dunamis) of being beyond the customary perspective of Platonic metaphysics, his interpretation fails to further disclose Plato’s political question of being emerging in the Sophist, which seeks the true associative ground of human beings.     

Phenomenology as Critique: Teleological–Historical Reflection and Husserl’s Transcendental Eidetics

Many have deemed ineluctable the tension between Husserl’s transcendental eidetics and his Crisis method of historical reflection. In this paper, I argue that this tension is an apparent one. I contend that dissolving this tension and showing not only the possibility, but also the necessity of the successful collaboration between these two apparently irreconcilable methods guarantees the very freedom of inquiry Husserl so emphatically stressed. To make this case, I draw from Husserl’s synthetic analyses of type and concept constitution as well as his later work on sedimentation and streaming-in and develop a richer modal taxonomy than the one Husserl proposed. I employ this taxonomy in an examination of the structures and conditions for the possibility of transcendental eidetic variation in order to show this method’s reliance on historically sedimented epistemic and normative resources. This reliance brings to light the necessity for a methodological critique, which is precisely what I take to be the work of teleological–historical reflection as Husserl comes to conceive it in the Crisis.     

Scientific Realism Within Perspectivism and Perspectivism Within Scientific Realism

Perspectivism is often understood as a conception according to which subjective conditions inevitably affect our knowledge and, therefore, we are never confronted with reality and facts but only with interpretations. Hence, subjectivism and anti-realism are usually associated with perspectivism. The thesis of this paper is that, especially in the case of the sciences, perspectivism can be better understood as an appreciation of the cognitive attitude that consists in considering reality only from a certain ‘point of view’, in a way that can avoid subjectivism. Whereas the way of conceiving a notion is strictly subjective, the way of using it is open to intersubjective agreement, based on the practice of operations whose nature is neither mental nor linguistic. Therefore, intersubjectivity (that is a ‘weak’ sense of objectivity) is possible within perspectivism. Perspectivism can also help understand the notion of ‘scientific objects’ in a referential sense: they are those ‘things’ that become ‘objects’ of a certain science by being investigated from the ‘point of view’ of that science. They are ‘clipped out’ of things (and constitute the ‘domain of objects’ or the ‘regional ontology’ of that particular science) by means of standardized operations which turn out to be the same as those granting intersubjectivity. Therefore this ‘strong’ sense of objectivity, which is clearly realist, coincides with the ‘weak’ one. The notion of truth appears fully legitimate in the case of the sciences, being clearly defined for the regional ontology of each one of them and, since this truth can be extended in an analogical sense to the theories elaborated in each science, it follows that are real also the unobservable entities postulated by those theories.     

Depicting and seeing-in. The <Emphasis Type="Italic">‘Sujet’</Emphasis> in Husserl’s phenomenology of images

In this paper I investigate an underappreciated element of Husserl’s phenomenology of images: the consciousness of the depicted subject (Sujet or Bildsujet), which Husserl calls the Sujetintention, e.g. the awareness of the sitter of a portrait. Husserl claims that when a consciousness regards a figurative image, it is absorbed in the awareness of the depicted subject and yet this subject some how withholds its presence in the midst of its appearance in the image-object (Bildobjekt). Image-consciousness is an intuitive (anschaulich) consciousness that intends a being that is both ‘in’ and ‘beyond’ the image: the depicted subject haunts the image. Borrowing Richard Wollheim’s language, the aim of this study is to determine what it means for a consciousness to see a depicted-subject in an image-depiction, which happens on the basis of seeing an image-object in a material image-thing, like paint, canvas, ink, paper etc. Restricting myself to figurative images, I will argue against the view that the relation to the depicted subject is symbolic or signitive. I argue that the consciousness of the Sujet is quasi-perceptual, which allows for a better account of the depicted subject’s sense of absence. I develop this view on the basis of Husserl’s claims that the depicted subject is the bearer of norms inherent to intuitive appearances, which concern how the profiles and movements of an object ought to unfold, though they fail to do so for image-consciousness. This failure is not a mere privation for the image as a perceptual appearance but is inherent to its status as a mediated and artificial presence.