It is indeed a great honour and privilege to respond to Professor Jaakko Hintikka’s challenging a... more It is indeed a great honour and privilege to respond to Professor Jaakko Hintikka’s challenging and provocative paper, ‘Philosophical Research: Problems and Prospects’.1 I have been a long time reader and admirer of Professor Hintikka’s work, especially his writings on Husserl, but beginning many years ago with his groundbreaking work on Descartes’ cogito as performance rather than inference (Hintikka, 2005). I also want to acknowledge publicly the sterling work he performed as Vice-President of the Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie (FISP) in organizing the very successful 21st World Congress of Philosophy held in Boston in August 1998.2 Jaakko Hintikka has worked at the highest level of the profession over many years – he is one of the very few whose work has featured in the Library of Living Philosophers series (Auxier and Hahn, 2006) and he has a six-volume collection of papers published. He has made revolutionary contributions to logic, set theory, semantics,...
In this paper I outline the main features of the phenomenological approach, focusing on the centr... more In this paper I outline the main features of the phenomenological approach, focusing on the central themes of intentionality, embodiment, empathy, intersubjectivity, sociality and the life-world. I argue that phenomenology is primarily a philosophy of intentional explication that identifies the a priori, structural correlations between subjectivity and all forms of constituted objectivities apprehended in their horizonal contexts. Intentional description reveals the structurally necessary, meaning-informing interactions between embodied subjectivity (already caught in the nexus of intersubjectivity) in the context of embeddedness in the temporal, historical, and cultural life-world. I shall defend phenomenology as a holistic approach that rightfully defends the role of subjectivity in the constitution of objectivity and recognizes the inherent limitations of all forms of naturalism, objectivism and scientism.
This paper argues that Charles Taylor’s infl uential accounts of embodied personhood and agency a... more This paper argues that Charles Taylor’s infl uential accounts of embodied personhood and agency are closer to the phenomenological accounts of personhood found in the mature Husserl (especially his Ideas II and in his ethics lectures) than, perhaps, he realises. Taylor acknowledges the infl uence of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Martin Heidegger (through the lens of Hubert Dreyfus) but tends to see Husserl as imprisoned within the Cartesian tradition that begins from the certainty of self-consciousness. I shall develop relevant aspects of embodied, situated subjectivity found in Husserl and shared by Taylor ; and, fi nally, I shall refl ect on the diffi cult problematic of the relation between natural and transcendental approaches to personhood.
In recent years there have been attempts to integrate first-person phenomenology into naturalisti... more In recent years there have been attempts to integrate first-person phenomenology into naturalistic science. Traditionally, however, Husserlian phenomenology has been resolutely anti-naturalist. Husserl identified naturalism as the dominant tendency of twentieth-century science and philosophy and he regarded it as an essentially self-refuting doctrine. Naturalism is a point of view or attitude (a reification of the natural attitude into thenaturalistic attitude) that does not know that it is an attitude. For phenomenology, naturalism is objectivism. But phenomenology maintains that objectivity is constituted through the intentional activity of cooperating subjects. Understanding the role of cooperating subjects in producing the experience of the one, shared, objective world keeps phenomenology committed to a resolutely anti-naturalist (or ‘transcendental’) philosophy.
It is indeed a great honour and privilege to respond to Professor Jaakko Hintikka’s challenging a... more It is indeed a great honour and privilege to respond to Professor Jaakko Hintikka’s challenging and provocative paper, ‘Philosophical Research: Problems and Prospects’.1 I have been a long time reader and admirer of Professor Hintikka’s work, especially his writings on Husserl, but beginning many years ago with his groundbreaking work on Descartes’ cogito as performance rather than inference (Hintikka, 2005). I also want to acknowledge publicly the sterling work he performed as Vice-President of the Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie (FISP) in organizing the very successful 21st World Congress of Philosophy held in Boston in August 1998.2 Jaakko Hintikka has worked at the highest level of the profession over many years – he is one of the very few whose work has featured in the Library of Living Philosophers series (Auxier and Hahn, 2006) and he has a six-volume collection of papers published. He has made revolutionary contributions to logic, set theory, semantics,...
In this paper I outline the main features of the phenomenological approach, focusing on the centr... more In this paper I outline the main features of the phenomenological approach, focusing on the central themes of intentionality, embodiment, empathy, intersubjectivity, sociality and the life-world. I argue that phenomenology is primarily a philosophy of intentional explication that identifies the a priori, structural correlations between subjectivity and all forms of constituted objectivities apprehended in their horizonal contexts. Intentional description reveals the structurally necessary, meaning-informing interactions between embodied subjectivity (already caught in the nexus of intersubjectivity) in the context of embeddedness in the temporal, historical, and cultural life-world. I shall defend phenomenology as a holistic approach that rightfully defends the role of subjectivity in the constitution of objectivity and recognizes the inherent limitations of all forms of naturalism, objectivism and scientism.
This paper argues that Charles Taylor’s infl uential accounts of embodied personhood and agency a... more This paper argues that Charles Taylor’s infl uential accounts of embodied personhood and agency are closer to the phenomenological accounts of personhood found in the mature Husserl (especially his Ideas II and in his ethics lectures) than, perhaps, he realises. Taylor acknowledges the infl uence of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Martin Heidegger (through the lens of Hubert Dreyfus) but tends to see Husserl as imprisoned within the Cartesian tradition that begins from the certainty of self-consciousness. I shall develop relevant aspects of embodied, situated subjectivity found in Husserl and shared by Taylor ; and, fi nally, I shall refl ect on the diffi cult problematic of the relation between natural and transcendental approaches to personhood.
In recent years there have been attempts to integrate first-person phenomenology into naturalisti... more In recent years there have been attempts to integrate first-person phenomenology into naturalistic science. Traditionally, however, Husserlian phenomenology has been resolutely anti-naturalist. Husserl identified naturalism as the dominant tendency of twentieth-century science and philosophy and he regarded it as an essentially self-refuting doctrine. Naturalism is a point of view or attitude (a reification of the natural attitude into thenaturalistic attitude) that does not know that it is an attitude. For phenomenology, naturalism is objectivism. But phenomenology maintains that objectivity is constituted through the intentional activity of cooperating subjects. Understanding the role of cooperating subjects in producing the experience of the one, shared, objective world keeps phenomenology committed to a resolutely anti-naturalist (or ‘transcendental’) philosophy.
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Papers by Dermot Moran