Era of Covid is over
No one understands Husserl
It’s Husserl’s fault.
Edmund Husserl, General Information
Born in Prossnitz (Moravia) and was trained in mathematics.
Published on the philosophy of mathematics
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Irritated Frege who thinks he did psychologism
Psychologism: treating logical or mathematical concepts on a different basis, like consciousness or psychological experiments.
This made Husserl extremely frustrated, which made him write his ”Logical Investigations” instead.
”Against Psychologism”
Became a professor in Göttingen, center of mathematics at the time.
Published Ideas 1 in 1913.
Published lots of introductions to phenomenology, none of which are very introductory.
He transferred to Freiburg in 1916 and stayed there.
Retired in 1928, succeeded by Heidegger who ”killed” him.
Published the cartesian meditations, a lecture from the College de France. A little bit introductory.
Nuremburg laws expelled Husserl from the university, and so went to Prague to hold the ”Crisis of the European sciences” in 1935 after which he soon died (he published only parts of the lectures during his life, the rest of which was posthumous).
In 1938 father Herman van Breda rescued his manuscripts and took them to Leuven.
Franz Brentano was really the father of phenomenology but Husserl usually gets the title anyways.
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Psychology on a psychological basis, empirically. Trying to secure an entirely independent field.
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Trying to defend the reality of mental phenomena.
The fundamental trait of mental phenomena is intentionality, ”intentional in-existance”.
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Does not refer to aim or goal.
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It refers to stretching, tending or a movement towards something.
”Every mental phenomena is characterised by what the scholastics of the middle ages called the intentional (mental) in-existance of an object, and what we might call, though not wholly unambiguously, referens to a content, direction towards an object or immanent objectivity. Every mental phenomenon includes something as object within itself, altough they ddo not do so in the same way.”
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All mental phenomena are always pointing towards something that isn’t themselves.
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What Descartes does is to establish a dichotomy between body and mind.
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But with the notion of intentionality, this dichotomy seems to somehow break apart.
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One does not feel in the first place and then find an object of that feeling, rather there is an imminent objectivity in the feeling, moving towards some object.
Phenomenology follows the maxim: Back to the things themselves.
”zuruck zu den Sachsen selbst”
To understand this maxim we need to understand Brentano:
He wants to secure an independent place for psychological phenomena, with its own laws different from material.
The things themselves indicate that we need to focus on circumscribing the domain of mental phenomena without imposing external phenomena on it.
”In the phenomenological maxim we hear a double demand: 1. to do research that is autochthonously demonstrative, to provide demonstrations rooted in native ground (the demand to do demonstrative work, then 2. to arrive and to secure this ground once more, which is the way Husserl understood his philosophical effort (the demand to lay open the ground).
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Heidegger in History of the Concept of Time.
Thinking deals with transcendent objects whilst perception deals only with imminent objects, whilst both are intending.
Evidence as ”having-something”
Evidence occurs particularly in a transitory manner, when you pass from something that is vague to something that is clear; the fulfillment (or lack of) of an empty idea.
Things-in-themselves – noumena, phenomena (Kant, not Husserl)
Phenomena are some kind of residue to Husserl, it survives the phenomenological reduction, Epoche´.
Phenomena as the things themselves, not the things-in-themselves. Husserl no longer cares for Being in the same way that Kant does.
Ego as the phenomenal field, the field of ”things themselves”.
”The epoche can also be said to be the radical and universal method by which I apprehend myself purely: as Ego, and iwth my own pure conscious life, in and by which the entire Objective world exists for me and is precisely as it is for me.
After Husserl:
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The problem of solipsism: ”There is only one Ego”.
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How does the Transcendental Ego access the Others? The problems of intersubjectivity and embodiment will become central in post-Husserlian phenomenology.
”Herbert Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological movement”
The German phase:
Max Scheler, Martin Heidegger, H. -G. Gadamer
The French phase:
Sartre, Levinas, Merleau-Ponty, Paul Ricoeur, Henri, Derrida, Marion.