Phenomenology of reflection

The article explores a gradual refinement of the notion of reflection in Husserlian phenomenology. In his early period, Husserl takes phenomenological reflection to attain adequate evidence, since its object is self-given in an absolute and complete manner. However, this conception of reflection does not remain unchanged. Husserl later realizes that immanent perception or phenomenological reflection also involves a certain horizonality and naivety that has to do with its temporal nature and must be queried in a further critical, apodictic reflection. Focusing more on the notion of apodicticity than adequacy, Husserl subsequently ascribes a new methodological role to reflection: instead of a mere epistemic warrant that guarantees for us the ultimate truth of our experiential life once and for all, phenomenological reflection ensures the strictness of phenomenology insofar as it entails an ethical-existential dimension as the norm of a life-form where the subject pursues full self-understanding and self-justification.

2013

In this article, I consider whether and how Husserl’s transcendental phenomenological method can initiate a phenomenological way of life. The impetus for this investigation originates in a set of manuscripts written in 1926 and published in Zur phänomenologischen Reduktion where Husserl suggests that the consistent commitment to and performance of phenomenological reflection can change one’s life to the point where a simple return to the life lived before this reflection is no longer possible. Husserl identifies this point of no return with becoming a transcendental idealist. I propose a way of understanding Husserl’s claim that transcendental idealism makes a simple return to life before phenomenological reflection impossible. I then suggest that a phenomenological way of life is characterized by an epistemic modesty that follows from Husserl’s transcendental idealism and consider whether and how such a phenomenological way of life is a life worth living.

Research in Phenomenology, 2016

In this paper I spell out Husserl’s account of the exercise of rationality and show how this exercise is tied to the capacity for critical reflection. In the first section I discuss Husserl’s views on what rationally constrains our intentionality. Then, I localize the exercise of rationality in the positing that characterizes attentive forms of intentionality and argue that when attentive to something we are also pre-reflectively aware of what speaks for and against our taking something to be a certain way (section 2). I further argue that the rare occasions in which this pre-reflective awareness gives way to reflective deliberation are due to what Husserl calls the sedimentation of sense and what one might call the overdetermination of sense that follows from it (section 3). After having presented what I take to be Husserl’s account of the exercise of rationality, I contrast this account to a compelling Kantian inspired account of the activity of reason that has recently been developed by Matthew Boyle (section 4). I argue that Husserl delimits the scope of the exercise of rationality differently, and I show how this implies different accounts of the self.

Phaenomenologica

In this paper I work on the problem of the phenomenological reflection upon the living present in Husserl's last analysis of time and try, by following his manuscripts chronologically, to bring out how Husserl carries out his reflections upon the living present in those manuscripts, and how he himself understands these reflections. It will be discovered through this chronological research that Husserl, in his late manuscripts on time, carries out his reflections upon the living present based on the self-touching or inner primal consciousness of the functioning Ego, and that he, wavering between epistemological and ontological perspectives in those manuscripts, comes finally to present an epistemological-ontological method of reflective exhibition grounded on the self-touching consciousness. Lastly, a further epistemological-ontological interpretation will be attempted to clarify what the self-touching consciousness really is and how the reflection is founded in it.

This volume brings together essays by leading phenomenologists and Husserl scholars in which they engage with the legacy of Edmund Husserl’s philosophy. It is a broad anthology addressing many major topics in phenomenology and philosophy in general, including articles on phenomenological method; investigations in anthropology, ethics, and theology; highly specialized research into typically Husserlian topics such as perception, image consciousness, reality, and ideality; as well as investigations into the complex relation between pure phenomenology, phenomenological psychology, and cognitive science. TABLE OF CONTENTS: Preface by U. Melle PART I The Nature and Method of Phenomenology 1 Husserl on First Philosophy by R. Sokolowski 2 Le sens de la phénoménologie by M. Richir 3 Transzendentale Phänomenologie? by R. Bernet 4 Husserl and the ‘absolute’ by D. Zahavi 5 Husserls Beweis für den transzendentalen Idealismus by U. Melle 6 Phenomenology as First Philosophy: A Prehistory by S. Luft 7 Der methodologische Transzendentalismus der Phänomenologie by L. Tengelyi PART II Phenomenology and the Sciences 8 Husserl contra Carnap : la démarcation des sciences by D. Pradelle 9 Phänomenologische Methoden und empirische Erkenntnisse by D. Lohmar 10 Descriptive Psychology and Natural Sciences: Husserl’s early Criticism of Brentano by D. Fisette 11 Mathesis universalis et géométrie : Husserl et Grassmann by V. Gérard III Phenomenology and Consciousness 12 Tamino’s Eyes, Pamina’s Gaze: Husserl’s Phenomenology of Image-Consciousness Refashioned by N. de Warren 13 Towards a Phenomenological Account of Personal Identity by H. Jacobs 14 Husserl’s Subjectivism: The “thoroughly peculiar ‘forms’” of Consciousness and the Philosophy of Mind by S. Crowell 15 “So You Want to Naturalize Consciousness?” “Why, why not?” – “But How?” Husserl meeting some offspring by E. Marbach 16 Philosophy and ‘Experience’: A Conflict of Interests? by F. Mattens PART IV Phenomenology and Practical Philosophy 17 Self-Responsibility and Eudaimonia by J. Drummond 18 Möglichkeiten und Grenzen einer phänomenologischen Theorie des Handelns: Überlegungen zu Davidson und Husserl by K. Mertens 19 Husserl und das Faktum der praktischen Vernunft:Anstoß und Herausforderung einer phänomenologischen Ethik der Person by S. Loidolt 20 Erde und Leib: Ort der Ökologie nach Husserl by H.R. Sepp PART V Reality and Ideality 21 The Universal as “What is in Common”: Comments on the Proton-Pseudos in Husserl’s Doctrine of the Intuition of Essence by R. Sowa 22 Die Kulturbedeutung der Intentionalität: Zu Husserls Wirklichkeitsbegriff by E.W. Orth 23 La partition du réel : Remarques sur l’eidos, la phantasia, l’effondrement du monde et l’être absolu de la conscience by C. Majolino 24 Husserl’s Mereological Argument for Intentional Constitution by A. Serrano de Haro 25 Phenomenology in a different voice: Husserl and Nishida in the 1930s by T. Sakakibara 26 Thinking about Non-Existence by L. Alweiss 27 Gott in Edmund Husserls Phänomenologie by K. Held"

This article analyses the fundamental relation between Husserl’s theory of reflection in the first volume of the Ideas pertaining to a pure phenomenology and the two main concepts upon which transcendental phenomenology is grounded: namely, description and reduction. Although the concept of reflection was already used in the Logical Investigations, Husserl revised it entirely thanks to his analysis of time-consciousness in the 1905 Lectures. Reflection thus appears as a key-concept in understanding the ‘turn’ that led Husserl to deeply modify his descriptive method in order to move to transcendental phenomenology.

Phenomenology as Critique – Why Method Matters, Andreea Smaranda Aldea, David Carr, and Sara Heinämaa (Eds.), Routledge, 2022

Following Husserl’s development of a radical self-reflective method during the 1920s and 1930s, this chapter argues that Husserl’s mature (Crisis) phenomenology is a distinct form of radical immanent critique and explicates what ‘radical’ and ‘immanent’ mean in the context of Husserl’s historical-eidetic method of inquiry. Beyond this, the chapter also makes the case that by developing a synthetic-genetic as well as generative account, we can vindicate Husserl’s Ideas I insight that the imagination is a necessary condition for the possibility of phenomenology. Imagining consciousness emerges as capable of ‘critical’ possibility constitution across different attitudes, everyday as well as theoretical. In order to make this latter case about the methodological import of the imagination, the chapter builds on Husserl’s 1920s analyses of reflection in memory or reflection in ‘experiencing again’ and sheds light on what ‘reflection in imagination’ is able to accomplish.

The central thesis of this paper is to specify the main features of Husserl's phenomenology and also its significance in philosophy. The first section of this paper will examine Husserl's main features of phenomenology, which are; the mind and the body, the epoché, consciousness and intentionality, inter-subjectivity and also the life-world. Then, I will proceed to examine the importance of Husserl's theories in philosophy.

Philosophy of Mind: The Key Thinkers , 2013

Philosophical Inquiries X/2 , 2022

Dan Zahavi's latest book on Husserl has many merits. Not only does it offer a clear, sharp, and detailed reconstruction of the Husserlian phenomenological project, but it also stands out for its ambitious aim of highlighting the usefulness of a sound reading of historical texts to address theoretical questions. To do this, Zahavi choses to focus less on the analyses Husserl devoted to various concrete topics than on the general "methodological and metaphilosophical" (p. 2) aspects of his philosophy. These latter correspond to the three topics evoked in the book's subheading, which one might summarize into three questions: What does a phenomenological method amount to? Is phenomenology necessarily a transcendental philosophy? And what (if any) metaphysical implications does it entail? Despite the massive interpretative work that Husserlian scholarship has been undertaking during the last decades, a great deal of unjustified prejudices and misunderstandings on these issues remains. Thus, for instance, Husserl's approach is often misinterpreted as introspectivist, internalist, representationalist, phenomenalistic, solipsistic, Cartesian-to mention only a few. Throughout the book, Zahavi sweeps away many of them one by one, by showing them as baseless when compared with a cautious reading of Husserl's theses. Admittedly, not all the controversies faced in the book derive from such superficial and rough readings. Quite the contrary, most of them have challenged appreciable scholars, and even the phenomenologists who worked close to Husserl himself. This is chiefly the case for the question as to how to understand Husserl's claim of idealism. And, as I perceive it, the several reflections carried on are basically different steps to address and settle this issue and discuss its main implications, in the light of contemporary philosophy. In this sense, the core of the book is represented by chapter 4, in which Zahavi illustrates the kind of idealism Husserl was committed to. The three forerunning chapters deal with the methodological role of reflection to carry phenomenological investigation (ch. 1) and with Husserl's conceptions of phenomenology before (ch. 2) and after (ch. 3) the so-called transcendental turn.