My Research Interests include Transcendental Philosophy (broadly construed), Neokantianism and Phenomenology. I am especially interested in the way in which a renewed reading of 19th and 20th century philosophy can contribute to contemporary philosophical problems, in particular to (1) the problem of the status of the concepts that govern our experience of the world, in particular within the debate in metaontology; (2) reason-governed behavior and the possibility of accounting for the way in which reasons govern action without appealing to a reflective model of the mind. Hence, my research addresses both issues in Metaphilosophy and in Philosophy of Mind and Philosophy of action. Address: School of Humanities and Social Inquiry | Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts | Building 19, Room 1024 University of Wollongong NSW 2522 Australia
Pasqualin, Ch. & Sforza, A. (eds), Das Vorprädikative. Perspektiven im Ausgang von Heidegger, Alber-Reihe Philosophie,, 2020
In the §73 of his 1929-30 lecture on The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, Heidegger gives voi... more In the §73 of his 1929-30 lecture on The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, Heidegger gives voice to an auto-criticism which at first might appear as surprising. He contends not only that the entire tradition has granted an illegitimate privilege to the affirmative and true judgments, assuming that it can deduce from this kind of judgments all the other types (namely the affirmative false, negative true and negative false judgments), but he also affirms that the way he himself unfolded the question of logos in Being and Time testifies for the enduring presence of this prejudgment. In our contribution, we will attempt to lay out the implications of this claim and to show how this auto-criticism leads Heidegger to provide a new account of the relation between the pre-predicative and the predicative. His project of producing a new view of the "whole of the logos-structure and inquiring back into the ground of its possibility" (GA 29-30, 485) will result in a radicalization of the idea of the pre-predicative in the direction of facticity that is not entirely captured in the "space of meaning" but which nevertheless grounds such "space of meaning" and can still be analyzed, as the former, in normative terms.
Many philosophers identify normativity as the distinctive mark of intentionality. Among them, Joh... more Many philosophers identify normativity as the distinctive mark of intentionality. Among them, John McDowell has underscored the need to overcome any form of dualism between reason and nature in order to properly account for the way in which such norms can be about the world around us, dubbing this project a “rehabilitation of empiricism”. Steven Crowell argues that McDowell’s notion of experience falls short in accounting for the way in which we can experience the world as normative and is hence insufficient for rehabilitating empiricism in McDowell’s sense. In this paper, we will contend that Crowell’s attempt to provide a phenomenological account of intentionality goes quite far in the right direction but is nevertheless incomplete. If in fact Crowell succeeds in placing norms in nature through his phenomenological account of perceptual experience, he still shares with McDowell the idea that intentionality proper is to be identified with full-fledged normative contentful capacities. We argue that this commitment leads him to reject the possibility of accounting for the way in which intentional agents are themselves placed in nature. We will claim that placing intentional agents in nature is not only possible, but also necessary for bringing Crowell’s and McDowell’s respective projects of rehabilitating empiricism to completion. Finally, we sketch a strategy for successfully conducting this task.
It is a well-acknowledged fact that Husserl’s phenomenology can be adequately characterized as tr... more It is a well-acknowledged fact that Husserl’s phenomenology can be adequately characterized as transcendental philosophy. Nevertheless, whether Husserl’s phenomenology and notion of the transcendental can be conceived as continuous with Kant’s critical philosophy and own transcendental program is a far more complicated issue. Since Iso Kern’s monumental work (Kern 1964), many have attempted to explain to what extent Husserl follows Kant and where exactly he has found the limits of critical philosophy In order to cut through some of the brambles in this monumental discussion, one might adopt a more modest and focused strategy by attempting to show that we cannot prima facie exclude the possibility of understanding the phenomenological use of ‘transcendental’ in its legitimate Kantian sense. To compare their uses of this term would require examining the various places where Husserl’s and Kant’s paths seem to diverge. In this paper, I will look at one such divergence, namely, Husserl’s later insistence (proper to his genetic phenomenological writings from at least 1917 onwards) on including in the field of phenomenological inquiry allegedly causal, pre-personal, cognitive mechanisms: e.g. instincts, drives, stimuli (Reize), passive associations, and the like. The inquiry into such themes seems to indicate a decided abandonment of Kantian transcendentalism and an endorsement of some hybrid form of a priori analysis and naturalistic inquiry. This evaluation of Husserl’s genetic phenomenology seems prima facie valid. However, my main contention in this paper will be that Husserl’s genetic analysis—at least in part—can be understood as a way of defending a transcendental perspective in the strong sense and overcoming some of the flaws Husserl found in Kant’s critical philosophy. I will claim that Husserl’s appeal to mechanisms is transcendentally motivated: if transcendental philosophy is the inquiry into the conditions of possibility of cognition in terms of the justification of the validity of our claims to knowledge, analyzing the mechanisms involved and their transcendental role contributes to understanding what rational grounding is and how rational norms can inform our cognitive processes. This is a question that troubled Husserl ever since the Prolegomena to Pure Logic and that led him to contend one of Kant’s central methodological distinctions, the one between questions of genesis and questions of validity.
This paper tackles a problem that is central to a phenomenological idea of transcendentality, nam... more This paper tackles a problem that is central to a phenomenological idea of transcendentality, namely, the problem about whether transcendental statements can be grounded in experience. According to phenomenology we should only accept philosophical descriptions that can be traced back to experience as their legitimazing source. As a consequence, in order for transcendental descriptions to find justification, we must at least be able to point to an experience whose content we know when we know the description in question is justified. So for a transcendental statement such as “Time is the form of intuition,” we would need to be able to specify what we know as its content, i.e. what would be the case if it were true. It is worth noting that the discussion is usually laid out in terms of what that knowledge justifies (that is, it is not about our mental facts but about the epistemic justificatory potential of what we know). So, for instance, a Humean would say that all we know is that we have experienced things as being in time until now or some empirical truth like that. But this would not ground our usual cognitive practice of assessing our experience, including our future experience, in light of what such statements describe. In a nutshell, if something does not adjust to time, it will not count as a legitimate object of experience. So what we know is not just how things stand but rather how things ought to be. But how can we justify statements about this ought? What makes me acknowledge, in the above example, time as a condition to which any object must adjust to even count as an object at all? The kind of experience we are searching for in order to justify transcendental statements is then an experience of an ought. But is there such an experience? Drawing on some Husserlian and Heideggerian ideas, I will claim that in order to find such an experience we need to shift our attention to the realm of practical philosophy. It is precisely through the peculiar way in which we grasp the reasons that govern our agency as rational beings whereby we can find a model for the right kind of transcendental experience. This will have some interesting consequences for the methodological import of what is sometimes taken to be a minor contribution of phenomenology, namely, its conception of agency.
In this paper, I will tackle a question that has been absent in the literature, namely, what is H... more In this paper, I will tackle a question that has been absent in the literature, namely, what is Heidegger’s conception of color-perception. Heidegger himself, who discusses at length other kinds of experiences, is silent about the topic. But why does Heidegger pay so little attention to colors, which are, for Husserl, for instance, a prime case for phenomenological analysis? A simple answer would be that colors, as such, become phenomenologically relevant only within an ontology of atomistic property-bearing entities (or as Heidegger calls it, of Vorhandenheit), an ontology such as Husserl’s, which is one of the favorite targets of Heidegger’s criticisms. Nevertheless, I think this approach to the problem is wrongheaded for two reasons: First, even if we start from the phenomenological fact that we cannot experience colors as separated and independent from colored objects and that we cannot experience objects outside a holistic temporally extended net of other objects, that does not allow us to eo ipso put aside questions regarding how we are to think about colors. Adams (2016, p. xviii) distinguishes between first-order and second-order claims about colors. While the former are claims about objects and colors as properties (e.g. ‘This brick is orange’), the latter are “claims about the nature of color properties themselves” (Ibid). Though it seems we are able to produce first-order claims without acknowledging second-order ones, it is far from obvious that the questions arising from the latter are philosophically unproblematic. Thus, adequately examining Heidegger’s take on colors requires that we consider whether Heidegger might be said to engage with these second-order color questions. I aim to show that Heidegger manages to shed light on the debate concerning second-order questions even though he does not explicitly address such problems. Second, if what I just said opens a path to inquire into Heidegger’s contribution to the debate about colors, I also argue that this inquiry into Heidegger’s take on colors may prove fruitful for understanding his approach to experience, in general, and perception, in particular. In order to do so we need to challenge the assumption made by Dreyfus, Wrathall, and others that I will call the either-theory-or-praxis assumption. According to it, there are (at least) two heterogeneous ways of experiencing something: we can experience it as a tool, a piece of equipment, a meaningful part of our practical coping or we can experience it as an isolated, atomic, independent item from a theoretical perspective. There are many textual grounds to challenge such conclusion. I will not engage with the question of how to read Heidegger on these matters, but rather assume that once we abandon the either-theory-or-praxis assumption we can gain a new insight on the problem of color. The idea is this: Heidegger’s description of experience does not privilege some phenomena (say, tools or meanings) vis-à-vis others (things, colors and the like), but rather a way of understanding experience in general (as organized in terms of a whole of meaningful relations where each single thing is defined by its normative import for the whole, i.e. a relational view) vis-à-vis a way of understanding it in terms of atomic items and stratified properties. I will call this conception of experience a normative-conceptual one (Golob, 2014). But since the world is obviously populated by colors, numbers and atoms, just as much as it is by tools, pieces of art and people, in order to be successful such a conception must be able to accommodate things such as colors, in particular, and perceptual experiences, in general. Now the question is what is to be said about colors from a normative-conceptual approach to experience such as Heidegger’s. Are colors a counterexample to Heidegger’s normative-conceptualism or, to the contrary, can colors be accounted for in normative-conceptualist terms? This is the question I would like to tackle in this paper. My strategy will be to engage with the supposed challenges that color perception poses to conceptualism in general. So-called arguments from the fine-grainedness of perception (Speaks, 2005) find in colors a prime example of non-conceptual content. In particular, I would like to analyze some examples presented by Sean Kelly designed to show that color perception is a very good candidate for denying conceptualism, i.e the thesis that contents of experience involve a form of articulation that is at least similar to the one expressed in judgment. I will claim, on the contrary, following a Heideggerian strategy, that color perception is an excellent candidate for showing in what sense conceptualism is true, precisely by analyzing Kelly’s examples of color sorting.
Recently, Emil Lask’s work has been the object of renewed interest.
As it has been noted, Lask’s ... more 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 fr om 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.
El presente artículo se propone analizar una serie de llamativas coincidencias entre el pensamien... more El presente artículo se propone analizar una serie de llamativas coincidencias entre el pensamiento tardío de Husserl y el pensamiento temprano de Heidegger – en particular en torno a tópicos como la muerte, la finitud, la negatividad y la posibilidad – a partir de la puesta en primer plano de ujn problema metodológico crucial para la fenomenología: el de la legitimación de las propias descripciones del ámbito de la subjetividad originaria. Ello conduce a Husserl, pretendo mostrar, al abandono de una noción estrecha de donación y legitimación asociada a la intuitividad y al desarrollo de una fenomenología constructiva centrada la pregunta por lo inconstituible y por el modo en que la esfera propiamente constituyente puede darse, si bien siempre indirectamente, en la experiencia, en el sentido de lo que Montavont ha llamado un “trascendental a posteriori”. Es allí donde las coincidencias con Heidegger saldrán a la luz.
Pasqualin, Ch. & Sforza, A. (eds), Das Vorprädikative. Perspektiven im Ausgang von Heidegger, Alber-Reihe Philosophie,, 2020
In the §73 of his 1929-30 lecture on The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, Heidegger gives voi... more In the §73 of his 1929-30 lecture on The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, Heidegger gives voice to an auto-criticism which at first might appear as surprising. He contends not only that the entire tradition has granted an illegitimate privilege to the affirmative and true judgments, assuming that it can deduce from this kind of judgments all the other types (namely the affirmative false, negative true and negative false judgments), but he also affirms that the way he himself unfolded the question of logos in Being and Time testifies for the enduring presence of this prejudgment. In our contribution, we will attempt to lay out the implications of this claim and to show how this auto-criticism leads Heidegger to provide a new account of the relation between the pre-predicative and the predicative. His project of producing a new view of the "whole of the logos-structure and inquiring back into the ground of its possibility" (GA 29-30, 485) will result in a radicalization of the idea of the pre-predicative in the direction of facticity that is not entirely captured in the "space of meaning" but which nevertheless grounds such "space of meaning" and can still be analyzed, as the former, in normative terms.
Many philosophers identify normativity as the distinctive mark of intentionality. Among them, Joh... more Many philosophers identify normativity as the distinctive mark of intentionality. Among them, John McDowell has underscored the need to overcome any form of dualism between reason and nature in order to properly account for the way in which such norms can be about the world around us, dubbing this project a “rehabilitation of empiricism”. Steven Crowell argues that McDowell’s notion of experience falls short in accounting for the way in which we can experience the world as normative and is hence insufficient for rehabilitating empiricism in McDowell’s sense. In this paper, we will contend that Crowell’s attempt to provide a phenomenological account of intentionality goes quite far in the right direction but is nevertheless incomplete. If in fact Crowell succeeds in placing norms in nature through his phenomenological account of perceptual experience, he still shares with McDowell the idea that intentionality proper is to be identified with full-fledged normative contentful capacities. We argue that this commitment leads him to reject the possibility of accounting for the way in which intentional agents are themselves placed in nature. We will claim that placing intentional agents in nature is not only possible, but also necessary for bringing Crowell’s and McDowell’s respective projects of rehabilitating empiricism to completion. Finally, we sketch a strategy for successfully conducting this task.
It is a well-acknowledged fact that Husserl’s phenomenology can be adequately characterized as tr... more It is a well-acknowledged fact that Husserl’s phenomenology can be adequately characterized as transcendental philosophy. Nevertheless, whether Husserl’s phenomenology and notion of the transcendental can be conceived as continuous with Kant’s critical philosophy and own transcendental program is a far more complicated issue. Since Iso Kern’s monumental work (Kern 1964), many have attempted to explain to what extent Husserl follows Kant and where exactly he has found the limits of critical philosophy In order to cut through some of the brambles in this monumental discussion, one might adopt a more modest and focused strategy by attempting to show that we cannot prima facie exclude the possibility of understanding the phenomenological use of ‘transcendental’ in its legitimate Kantian sense. To compare their uses of this term would require examining the various places where Husserl’s and Kant’s paths seem to diverge. In this paper, I will look at one such divergence, namely, Husserl’s later insistence (proper to his genetic phenomenological writings from at least 1917 onwards) on including in the field of phenomenological inquiry allegedly causal, pre-personal, cognitive mechanisms: e.g. instincts, drives, stimuli (Reize), passive associations, and the like. The inquiry into such themes seems to indicate a decided abandonment of Kantian transcendentalism and an endorsement of some hybrid form of a priori analysis and naturalistic inquiry. This evaluation of Husserl’s genetic phenomenology seems prima facie valid. However, my main contention in this paper will be that Husserl’s genetic analysis—at least in part—can be understood as a way of defending a transcendental perspective in the strong sense and overcoming some of the flaws Husserl found in Kant’s critical philosophy. I will claim that Husserl’s appeal to mechanisms is transcendentally motivated: if transcendental philosophy is the inquiry into the conditions of possibility of cognition in terms of the justification of the validity of our claims to knowledge, analyzing the mechanisms involved and their transcendental role contributes to understanding what rational grounding is and how rational norms can inform our cognitive processes. This is a question that troubled Husserl ever since the Prolegomena to Pure Logic and that led him to contend one of Kant’s central methodological distinctions, the one between questions of genesis and questions of validity.
This paper tackles a problem that is central to a phenomenological idea of transcendentality, nam... more This paper tackles a problem that is central to a phenomenological idea of transcendentality, namely, the problem about whether transcendental statements can be grounded in experience. According to phenomenology we should only accept philosophical descriptions that can be traced back to experience as their legitimazing source. As a consequence, in order for transcendental descriptions to find justification, we must at least be able to point to an experience whose content we know when we know the description in question is justified. So for a transcendental statement such as “Time is the form of intuition,” we would need to be able to specify what we know as its content, i.e. what would be the case if it were true. It is worth noting that the discussion is usually laid out in terms of what that knowledge justifies (that is, it is not about our mental facts but about the epistemic justificatory potential of what we know). So, for instance, a Humean would say that all we know is that we have experienced things as being in time until now or some empirical truth like that. But this would not ground our usual cognitive practice of assessing our experience, including our future experience, in light of what such statements describe. In a nutshell, if something does not adjust to time, it will not count as a legitimate object of experience. So what we know is not just how things stand but rather how things ought to be. But how can we justify statements about this ought? What makes me acknowledge, in the above example, time as a condition to which any object must adjust to even count as an object at all? The kind of experience we are searching for in order to justify transcendental statements is then an experience of an ought. But is there such an experience? Drawing on some Husserlian and Heideggerian ideas, I will claim that in order to find such an experience we need to shift our attention to the realm of practical philosophy. It is precisely through the peculiar way in which we grasp the reasons that govern our agency as rational beings whereby we can find a model for the right kind of transcendental experience. This will have some interesting consequences for the methodological import of what is sometimes taken to be a minor contribution of phenomenology, namely, its conception of agency.
In this paper, I will tackle a question that has been absent in the literature, namely, what is H... more In this paper, I will tackle a question that has been absent in the literature, namely, what is Heidegger’s conception of color-perception. Heidegger himself, who discusses at length other kinds of experiences, is silent about the topic. But why does Heidegger pay so little attention to colors, which are, for Husserl, for instance, a prime case for phenomenological analysis? A simple answer would be that colors, as such, become phenomenologically relevant only within an ontology of atomistic property-bearing entities (or as Heidegger calls it, of Vorhandenheit), an ontology such as Husserl’s, which is one of the favorite targets of Heidegger’s criticisms. Nevertheless, I think this approach to the problem is wrongheaded for two reasons: First, even if we start from the phenomenological fact that we cannot experience colors as separated and independent from colored objects and that we cannot experience objects outside a holistic temporally extended net of other objects, that does not allow us to eo ipso put aside questions regarding how we are to think about colors. Adams (2016, p. xviii) distinguishes between first-order and second-order claims about colors. While the former are claims about objects and colors as properties (e.g. ‘This brick is orange’), the latter are “claims about the nature of color properties themselves” (Ibid). Though it seems we are able to produce first-order claims without acknowledging second-order ones, it is far from obvious that the questions arising from the latter are philosophically unproblematic. Thus, adequately examining Heidegger’s take on colors requires that we consider whether Heidegger might be said to engage with these second-order color questions. I aim to show that Heidegger manages to shed light on the debate concerning second-order questions even though he does not explicitly address such problems. Second, if what I just said opens a path to inquire into Heidegger’s contribution to the debate about colors, I also argue that this inquiry into Heidegger’s take on colors may prove fruitful for understanding his approach to experience, in general, and perception, in particular. In order to do so we need to challenge the assumption made by Dreyfus, Wrathall, and others that I will call the either-theory-or-praxis assumption. According to it, there are (at least) two heterogeneous ways of experiencing something: we can experience it as a tool, a piece of equipment, a meaningful part of our practical coping or we can experience it as an isolated, atomic, independent item from a theoretical perspective. There are many textual grounds to challenge such conclusion. I will not engage with the question of how to read Heidegger on these matters, but rather assume that once we abandon the either-theory-or-praxis assumption we can gain a new insight on the problem of color. The idea is this: Heidegger’s description of experience does not privilege some phenomena (say, tools or meanings) vis-à-vis others (things, colors and the like), but rather a way of understanding experience in general (as organized in terms of a whole of meaningful relations where each single thing is defined by its normative import for the whole, i.e. a relational view) vis-à-vis a way of understanding it in terms of atomic items and stratified properties. I will call this conception of experience a normative-conceptual one (Golob, 2014). But since the world is obviously populated by colors, numbers and atoms, just as much as it is by tools, pieces of art and people, in order to be successful such a conception must be able to accommodate things such as colors, in particular, and perceptual experiences, in general. Now the question is what is to be said about colors from a normative-conceptual approach to experience such as Heidegger’s. Are colors a counterexample to Heidegger’s normative-conceptualism or, to the contrary, can colors be accounted for in normative-conceptualist terms? This is the question I would like to tackle in this paper. My strategy will be to engage with the supposed challenges that color perception poses to conceptualism in general. So-called arguments from the fine-grainedness of perception (Speaks, 2005) find in colors a prime example of non-conceptual content. In particular, I would like to analyze some examples presented by Sean Kelly designed to show that color perception is a very good candidate for denying conceptualism, i.e the thesis that contents of experience involve a form of articulation that is at least similar to the one expressed in judgment. I will claim, on the contrary, following a Heideggerian strategy, that color perception is an excellent candidate for showing in what sense conceptualism is true, precisely by analyzing Kelly’s examples of color sorting.
Recently, Emil Lask’s work has been the object of renewed interest.
As it has been noted, Lask’s ... more 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 fr om 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.
El presente artículo se propone analizar una serie de llamativas coincidencias entre el pensamien... more El presente artículo se propone analizar una serie de llamativas coincidencias entre el pensamiento tardío de Husserl y el pensamiento temprano de Heidegger – en particular en torno a tópicos como la muerte, la finitud, la negatividad y la posibilidad – a partir de la puesta en primer plano de ujn problema metodológico crucial para la fenomenología: el de la legitimación de las propias descripciones del ámbito de la subjetividad originaria. Ello conduce a Husserl, pretendo mostrar, al abandono de una noción estrecha de donación y legitimación asociada a la intuitividad y al desarrollo de una fenomenología constructiva centrada la pregunta por lo inconstituible y por el modo en que la esfera propiamente constituyente puede darse, si bien siempre indirectamente, en la experiencia, en el sentido de lo que Montavont ha llamado un “trascendental a posteriori”. Es allí donde las coincidencias con Heidegger saldrán a la luz.
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Since Iso Kern’s monumental work (Kern 1964), many have attempted to explain to what extent Husserl follows Kant and where exactly he has found the limits of critical philosophy
In order to cut through some of the brambles in this monumental discussion, one might adopt a more modest and focused strategy by attempting to show that we cannot prima facie exclude the possibility of understanding the phenomenological use of ‘transcendental’ in its legitimate Kantian sense. To compare their uses of this term would require examining the various places where Husserl’s and Kant’s paths seem to diverge.
In this paper, I will look at one such divergence, namely, Husserl’s later insistence (proper to his genetic phenomenological writings from at least 1917 onwards) on including in the field of phenomenological inquiry allegedly causal, pre-personal, cognitive mechanisms: e.g. instincts, drives, stimuli (Reize), passive associations, and the like. The inquiry into such themes seems to indicate a decided abandonment of Kantian transcendentalism and an endorsement of some hybrid form of a priori analysis and naturalistic inquiry.
This evaluation of Husserl’s genetic phenomenology seems prima facie valid. However, my main contention in this paper will be that Husserl’s genetic analysis—at least in part—can be understood as a way of defending a transcendental perspective in the strong sense and overcoming some of the flaws Husserl found in Kant’s critical philosophy. I will claim that Husserl’s appeal to mechanisms is transcendentally motivated: if transcendental philosophy is the inquiry into the conditions of possibility of cognition in terms of the justification of the validity of our claims to knowledge, analyzing the mechanisms involved and their transcendental role contributes to understanding what rational grounding is and how rational norms can inform our cognitive processes. This is a question that troubled Husserl ever since the Prolegomena to Pure Logic and that led him to contend one of Kant’s central methodological distinctions, the one between questions of genesis and questions of validity.
Drawing on some Husserlian and Heideggerian ideas, I will claim that in order to find such an experience we need to shift our attention to the realm of practical philosophy. It is precisely through the peculiar way in which we grasp the reasons that govern our agency as rational beings whereby we can find a model for the right kind of transcendental experience. This will have some interesting consequences for the methodological import of what is sometimes taken to be a minor contribution of phenomenology, namely, its conception of agency.
Nevertheless, I think this approach to the problem is wrongheaded for two reasons:
First, even if we start from the phenomenological fact that we cannot experience colors as separated and independent from colored objects and that we cannot experience objects outside a holistic temporally extended net of other objects, that does not allow us to eo ipso put aside questions regarding how we are to think about colors. Adams (2016, p. xviii) distinguishes between first-order and second-order claims about colors. While the former are claims about objects and colors as properties (e.g. ‘This brick is orange’), the latter are “claims about the nature of color properties themselves” (Ibid). Though it seems we are able to produce first-order claims without acknowledging second-order ones, it is far from obvious that the questions arising from the latter are philosophically unproblematic. Thus, adequately examining Heidegger’s take on colors requires that we consider whether Heidegger might be said to engage with these second-order color questions. I aim to show that Heidegger manages to shed light on the debate concerning second-order questions even though he does not explicitly address such problems.
Second, if what I just said opens a path to inquire into Heidegger’s contribution to the debate about colors, I also argue that this inquiry into Heidegger’s take on colors may prove fruitful for understanding his approach to experience, in general, and perception, in particular. In order to do so we need to challenge the assumption made by Dreyfus, Wrathall, and others that I will call the either-theory-or-praxis assumption. According to it, there are (at least) two heterogeneous ways of experiencing something: we can experience it as a tool, a piece of equipment, a meaningful part of our practical coping or we can experience it as an isolated, atomic, independent item from a theoretical perspective. There are many textual grounds to challenge such conclusion. I will not engage with the question of how to read Heidegger on these matters, but rather assume that once we abandon the either-theory-or-praxis assumption we can gain a new insight on the problem of color. The idea is this: Heidegger’s description of experience does not privilege some phenomena (say, tools or meanings) vis-à-vis others (things, colors and the like), but rather a way of understanding experience in general (as organized in terms of a whole of meaningful relations where each single thing is defined by its normative import for the whole, i.e. a relational view) vis-à-vis a way of understanding it in terms of atomic items and stratified properties. I will call this conception of experience a normative-conceptual one (Golob, 2014).
But since the world is obviously populated by colors, numbers and atoms, just as much as it is by tools, pieces of art and people, in order to be successful such a conception must be able to accommodate things such as colors, in particular, and perceptual experiences, in general. Now the question is what is to be said about colors from a normative-conceptual approach to experience such as Heidegger’s. Are colors a counterexample to Heidegger’s normative-conceptualism or, to the contrary, can colors be accounted for in normative-conceptualist terms? This is the question I would like to tackle in this paper.
My strategy will be to engage with the supposed challenges that color perception poses to conceptualism in general. So-called arguments from the fine-grainedness of perception (Speaks, 2005) find in colors a prime example of non-conceptual content. In particular, I would like to analyze some examples presented by Sean Kelly designed to show that color perception is a very good candidate for denying conceptualism, i.e the thesis that contents of experience involve a form of articulation that is at least similar to the one expressed in judgment. I will claim, on the contrary, following a Heideggerian strategy, that color perception is an excellent candidate for showing in what sense conceptualism is true, precisely by analyzing Kelly’s examples of color sorting.
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 fr om 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.
Since Iso Kern’s monumental work (Kern 1964), many have attempted to explain to what extent Husserl follows Kant and where exactly he has found the limits of critical philosophy
In order to cut through some of the brambles in this monumental discussion, one might adopt a more modest and focused strategy by attempting to show that we cannot prima facie exclude the possibility of understanding the phenomenological use of ‘transcendental’ in its legitimate Kantian sense. To compare their uses of this term would require examining the various places where Husserl’s and Kant’s paths seem to diverge.
In this paper, I will look at one such divergence, namely, Husserl’s later insistence (proper to his genetic phenomenological writings from at least 1917 onwards) on including in the field of phenomenological inquiry allegedly causal, pre-personal, cognitive mechanisms: e.g. instincts, drives, stimuli (Reize), passive associations, and the like. The inquiry into such themes seems to indicate a decided abandonment of Kantian transcendentalism and an endorsement of some hybrid form of a priori analysis and naturalistic inquiry.
This evaluation of Husserl’s genetic phenomenology seems prima facie valid. However, my main contention in this paper will be that Husserl’s genetic analysis—at least in part—can be understood as a way of defending a transcendental perspective in the strong sense and overcoming some of the flaws Husserl found in Kant’s critical philosophy. I will claim that Husserl’s appeal to mechanisms is transcendentally motivated: if transcendental philosophy is the inquiry into the conditions of possibility of cognition in terms of the justification of the validity of our claims to knowledge, analyzing the mechanisms involved and their transcendental role contributes to understanding what rational grounding is and how rational norms can inform our cognitive processes. This is a question that troubled Husserl ever since the Prolegomena to Pure Logic and that led him to contend one of Kant’s central methodological distinctions, the one between questions of genesis and questions of validity.
Drawing on some Husserlian and Heideggerian ideas, I will claim that in order to find such an experience we need to shift our attention to the realm of practical philosophy. It is precisely through the peculiar way in which we grasp the reasons that govern our agency as rational beings whereby we can find a model for the right kind of transcendental experience. This will have some interesting consequences for the methodological import of what is sometimes taken to be a minor contribution of phenomenology, namely, its conception of agency.
Nevertheless, I think this approach to the problem is wrongheaded for two reasons:
First, even if we start from the phenomenological fact that we cannot experience colors as separated and independent from colored objects and that we cannot experience objects outside a holistic temporally extended net of other objects, that does not allow us to eo ipso put aside questions regarding how we are to think about colors. Adams (2016, p. xviii) distinguishes between first-order and second-order claims about colors. While the former are claims about objects and colors as properties (e.g. ‘This brick is orange’), the latter are “claims about the nature of color properties themselves” (Ibid). Though it seems we are able to produce first-order claims without acknowledging second-order ones, it is far from obvious that the questions arising from the latter are philosophically unproblematic. Thus, adequately examining Heidegger’s take on colors requires that we consider whether Heidegger might be said to engage with these second-order color questions. I aim to show that Heidegger manages to shed light on the debate concerning second-order questions even though he does not explicitly address such problems.
Second, if what I just said opens a path to inquire into Heidegger’s contribution to the debate about colors, I also argue that this inquiry into Heidegger’s take on colors may prove fruitful for understanding his approach to experience, in general, and perception, in particular. In order to do so we need to challenge the assumption made by Dreyfus, Wrathall, and others that I will call the either-theory-or-praxis assumption. According to it, there are (at least) two heterogeneous ways of experiencing something: we can experience it as a tool, a piece of equipment, a meaningful part of our practical coping or we can experience it as an isolated, atomic, independent item from a theoretical perspective. There are many textual grounds to challenge such conclusion. I will not engage with the question of how to read Heidegger on these matters, but rather assume that once we abandon the either-theory-or-praxis assumption we can gain a new insight on the problem of color. The idea is this: Heidegger’s description of experience does not privilege some phenomena (say, tools or meanings) vis-à-vis others (things, colors and the like), but rather a way of understanding experience in general (as organized in terms of a whole of meaningful relations where each single thing is defined by its normative import for the whole, i.e. a relational view) vis-à-vis a way of understanding it in terms of atomic items and stratified properties. I will call this conception of experience a normative-conceptual one (Golob, 2014).
But since the world is obviously populated by colors, numbers and atoms, just as much as it is by tools, pieces of art and people, in order to be successful such a conception must be able to accommodate things such as colors, in particular, and perceptual experiences, in general. Now the question is what is to be said about colors from a normative-conceptual approach to experience such as Heidegger’s. Are colors a counterexample to Heidegger’s normative-conceptualism or, to the contrary, can colors be accounted for in normative-conceptualist terms? This is the question I would like to tackle in this paper.
My strategy will be to engage with the supposed challenges that color perception poses to conceptualism in general. So-called arguments from the fine-grainedness of perception (Speaks, 2005) find in colors a prime example of non-conceptual content. In particular, I would like to analyze some examples presented by Sean Kelly designed to show that color perception is a very good candidate for denying conceptualism, i.e the thesis that contents of experience involve a form of articulation that is at least similar to the one expressed in judgment. I will claim, on the contrary, following a Heideggerian strategy, that color perception is an excellent candidate for showing in what sense conceptualism is true, precisely by analyzing Kelly’s examples of color sorting.
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 fr om 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.