Husserl Studies

Over four decades, Habermas has put to paper many critical remarks on Husserl’s work as occasion has demanded. These scattered critical engagements nonetheless do add up to a coherent (if contestable) position regarding the project of transcendental phenomenology. This essay provides a comprehensive reconstruction of the arguments Habermas makes and offers a critical assessment of them. With an eye in particular to the theme of intersubjectivity (a theme of fundamental interest to both thinkers), it is argued that Habermas’s arguments do indeed show up deficiencies in Husserlian phenomenology and yet that they do not succeed in proving that we must abandon the methods and tasks of phenomenological research. On the contrary, it is argued that phenomenological methods may well be needed in order to investigate certain philosophical questions that Habermas’s theory of communication has thus far only partially addressed.

Recent philosophy of mind has seen an increase of interest in theories of intentionality in offering a functional account of mental states. The standard intentionalist view holds that mental states can be exhaustively accounted for in terms of their representational contents. An alternative view proposed by Tim Crane, called impure intentionalism, specifies mental states in terms of intentional content, mode, and object. This view is also suggested to hold for states of sensory awareness. This paper primarily develops an alternative to the impure intentionalist account of states of sensory awareness. On the basis of Husserl's phenomenological work, I argue that a focus on intentionality at the level of sensory awareness is phenomenologically implausible. The final part offers an alternative functional account of sensory awareness based on what Husserl called 'immanent association'.

Husserl, in a number of texts, suggests a theory of intersubjectivity or social
cognition based on an embodied, intermodal perception. This perceptual
experience of the other person involves a kinaesthetic reverberation
of the perceived action of the other in our own sensory-motor system. This Husserlian analysis explicates certain aspects of a theory that on the
surface is close to Scheler’s, but is offered in details that not only went
beyond Scheler, but that find support in contemporary scientific evidence,
and specifically the neuroscience of mirror neurons. This constitutes an important but only partial explanation of social cognition – specifically the part that directly
contributes to what developmental psychologists term primary intersubjectivity. Aron Gurwitsch develops, within a Heideggerian framework, another important
aspect of what would be a fuller explanation – specifically he emphasizes
the contribution of our involvement in pragmatic contexts to gain more
sophisticated understandings of others. Unfortunately he does this at the
expense of giving up Husserl’s insights into the perceptual processes that
allow us to key into others in the first place.

Timo Miettinen, Husserl and the Idea of Europe, Northwestern University Press, Northwestern University Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, 2020, 245 pp, ISBN 9780810141483. Esteban Marín-Ávila This book offers much more than what the title might suggest, at least to some non-European readers. With abundant erudition, Timo Miettinen contextualizes some of the core ethical and political ideas of Husserl's latter works, especially-but not only-The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology and the texts closely associated with it and published in Husserliana VI, such as the Prague and the Vienna Lectures. These core ethical and political ideas are situated in relation to their early development in Husserl's works but also, and more importantly, in relation to the intellectual debates of the time when they were written and to the history of philosophy as a whole, in particular to those moments in which Husserl identified the irruption and renewals of this history: Greek and modern philosophy. With this, Miettinen sheds new light on Husserl's original contributions to the areas of ethics and politics.

In spite of their opposite methods, Fichte's deductive process and Husserl's reduction cope with the same challenge: they aim to explain how the sensible world is dependent on reflixivity. As perception is generally linked with natural existence, and pure passivity, the deepest significance of transcendental thought in those philosophies consists in equalizing phenomenon and reflexion. In the heart of bodily life, some spiritual theme has to be found. Fichte defines action as the quantification of freedom, and freedom is effectively achieved in the sensible world. Human perception reveals freedom altogether in corporal movements as in the surrounding world (Umwelt). The Fichtean theory of acknowledgment assumes this goal. In the same way, Husserl's reduction explains how significance proceeds from the body (Leib). The Husserlian analysis of kinesthesis and the radical experience of the hand touching the other hand both introduce to the status of pre-reflection. However the complete resolution of the question is given by Fichte: Intelligibility may exist in the sensible world as the metaphysical concept of phenomenon (Erscheinung) in the last Fichtean philosophy expresses the idea of the Absolute pervading the sensible.

This paper draws a comparison between Theodor W. Adorno and Edmund Husserl according to a mended dialogue in the aesthetic field. In this regard, the essay does not ponder over the customary critique on the so-called idealistic phase of phenomenology, embodied by Ideas pertaining to a pure phenomenology and to a Phenomenological philosophy, and copes with the genetic stage of Husserl's thought, signified by Formal and transcendental logic and Cartesian meditations. The relevant influence of Husserl's philosophy on Adorno's aesthetics springs out of the last and mature phase of transcendental phenomenology. It results, notably , from a renewed notion of intentionality whereby a critical concern with sub-jectivity contributes reshaping the core on which artworks detect and conceal the rational purport of intentio so that their thingly feature reconfigures the status of the aesthetic subject. As a result, Adorno's aesthetics may earn a new perspective on the questioned relationship between subject and object through the comparison with Husserl's phenomenology.