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Husserl on Reason, Reflection, and Attention

Profile image of Hanne JacobsHanne Jacobs

2016, Research in Phenomenology

https://doi.org/10.1163/15691640-12341338
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20 pages

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Abstract

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.

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References (53)

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