Husserl on Personal Level Explanation

Phenomenology and Mind, no. 15, eds. Roberta De Monticelli and Francesca De Vecchi, Firenze University Press, pp.92–103., 2019

This paper clarifies the distinction that Edmund Husserl makes between two different ways of understanding other persons, their actions and motivations: the experiential or empirical way, on the one hand, and the genuinely or authentically intuitive way, on the other hand. The paper argues that Husserl's discussion of self-understanding clarifies his concept of the intuitive understanding of others and allows us to explicate what is involved in it: not just the grasping of the other's actual motivations of action but also the grasping of her motivational possibilities. The paper ends by discussing the dynamic character of the personal subject.

The Turning Points of the New Phenomenological Era, 1991

Forthcoming in The History of Mind in the 19th Century, ed. Sandra Lapointe (Routledge)

A Phenomenological Theory of Occurrent Thought and Husserl's Intentionality, 2025

A phenomenologically based theory of occurrent thinking called TMDOT was developed and a portion of it will be presented here because it appears to lend validation to, clarify, explicate, and further distinguish between two forms of Husserlian intentionality critical to the constitution of objects, both of which are posited as existing during occurrent thoughts. For Husserl, there is an intentionality occurring in the substratum of meaning generation through intentional acts of consciousness, one that is directly linked to another stratum, the purpose of which is to express that meaning. The theory focuses on the phenomenological differences between these two forms of intentionality, their different cognitive functions, and the phenomenally based ways in which they connect to each other to facilitate their respective roles. TMDOT appears to support Husserl's phenomenological observations and descriptions of two types of intentional acts and how they experientially and temporally connect to each other during the occurrent thought process. In turn, his views about the nature of such acts appear to lend credence to said theory. Cognitive and neuroscientific research results incorporated into TMDOT are presented, ones which seem to support and expand upon Husserl's understanding of the nature of intentional acts utilized in the constitution of objects and upon his beliefs about the existence and functioning of an Ego-pole in conscious experiencing.

Meaning and Truth (eds. Sorin Costreie & Mircea Dumitru), pp. 91-110, 2015

In his fifth Logical Investigation, Husserl intensely scrutinizes three possible significations of the concept of consciousness. In these analyses, he also strives to clearly delineate between two types of consciousness: psychological and phenomenological. The goal of this paper is to show that the way in which the (psychical) act is conceived and defined, according to the Husserlian approach, as a lived, intentional experience plays an essential role in clarifying the distinction between the empirical-psychological level of consciousness (where the act as a lived experience manifests itself) and its eidetic or ideal level (wherein any type of objectivity is constituted as such). Moreover, I shall try to argue that the notion of act conceived in this manner had influenced and decisively determined the development of the entire Husserlian phenomenology and theory of knowledge exactly because it explains how knowledge in general is constituted from an objective point of view. Another highly relevant distinction that needs to be dealt with in this context is the difference that Husserl establishes between the descriptive and intentional contents of the act. I shall try to show that this distinction presupposes in fact a previous conceptual determination of the noema (undertaken jointly with the analysis of the noetical components of consciousness at this level), and that the way in which the relationship between these two strands of consciousness is described determines further and in a fundamental manner the development of the idea of intentionality itself.

2023

Proponents of phenomenal intentionality are half-hearted regarding phenomenology. On the one hand, they acknowledge that phenomenal intentionality is unique from the first-person perspective. On the other hand, considering how the intentional relation can have non-existent relata, they interpret the relationality of phenomenal intention using the notion of relation derived from the third-personal perspective, which requires the relata to exist. Surprisingly, Husserl is not so interested in these ontological problems of intentionality as Brentano and Meinong did, despite the central role of intentionality in his system. To overcome the phenomenal intentionalists’ half-heartedness and explain Husserl’s relative indifference, I propose that phenomenal intentionality is relational, but in a way that goes beyond ontology. A relation in ontology is unifying what exists to a totality. This does not apply to phenomenal intentionality. I argue for this from the metaontological status of an entity’s meaningfulness: the meaningfulness is not yet an entity, but what makes an entity intelligible as such an entity. It is substantialized in phenomenological reflection. Phenomenal intentionality is how the intentional experience and the intended entity become intelligible in a correlative way. It cannot be embedded in ontology; rather, it makes ontology intelligible – hence, it is metaontologically relational. The metaontological status of meaningfulness is the best solution to the tension in Husserl’s theory of meaning. According to the post-Logical Investigations Husserl, meaning has ideality, but this ideality is neither the one of an essence (pace the West Coast Reading) nor the one of an idealized mathematical point. Rather, meaning is ideal but particular. Meaning, as Husserl argued, is discovered as the Intended as Such (das Vermeinte als solche) in reflection. This notion allows various interpretations. If we consider it as identical to the intended entity in the reflected state, then we have no idea how the reflection can mysteriously shed a new light on this entity (say, a physical one) that endows it with ideality (pace the East Coast Reading). An alternative interpretation is to take the Intended as Such as the meaningfulness in which one intends the entity. For the sake of analysis, this meaningfulness is treated as an entity during reflection, but pre-reflectively, it is not yet an entity. In this way, one can explain Husserl’s paradoxical descriptions: This meaningfulness is just at the same place as the intended entity but is neither identical to it nor a part of it. Hence, the metaontological status of meaningfulness provides the best explanation for Husserl’s theory of meaning. The metaontological status of meaningfulness can dissipate the paradox around the notion of constitution, if constitution of an intentional object’ means that the subject contributes to the object’s meaning-obtaining rather than participates in its Dasein and Sosein. It also explains Husserl’s indifference regarding the ontological status of intentional objects, so long as Husserl is only concerned about how entities obtain their meaningfulness (namely, intentionality). It also justifies the transcendentality of subjectivity in the Husserlian sense: The subject is not a part of the world; rather, the world obtains its meaningfulness through the subject.

De Gruyter eBooks, 2015

1998

Philosophy, 2013

In this essay I ague that the mainstream ‘Standard Story’ of action – according to which actions are bodily motions with the right internal mental states as their causal triggers (e.g., ‘belief-desire-pairs’, ‘intentions’) – gives rise to a deeply problematic conception of inter-subjective action-understanding. For the Standard Story, since motivating reasons are internal mental states and bodily motions are not intrinsically intentional, an observer must ascribe internal states to others to make rational sense of their outwardly observable bodily motions. I argue this is both phenomenologically distorted and requires, on pain of infinite regress, a deeper, non-inferential, practical-perceptual form of understanding: ‘knowledge-how’, in a broadly Rylean sense. Recognizing the irreducible role of practical-perceptual knowledge-how in inter-subjective understanding, I argue, undermines core assumptions of the Standard Story concerning what an agent can directly perceive in interacting...

European Journal of Philosophy, 2024

The most contentious tenet of Husserl’s phenomenology of feelings is his conclusion that there is an analogy between axiological reason and theoretical reason. Simply, Husserl asserts that the axiological validation of feelings is analogical to the theoretical validation of judgments. While the scholarship has debated the merits of Husserl’s analogy over the last 120 years, this paper presents a new accurate interpretation, because it is the first to highlight how Husserl develops this analogy by most often comparing the fulfillment of judgments to the fulfillment of wish feeling intentions. Specifically, I examine how Husserl analogizes wish fulfillment to theoretical fulfillment at different times; in the 1901 Logical Investigations, in his 1908 Lectures on Ethics, and in 1910 manuscripts from Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins. In light of this original interpretation, I conclude by arguing – contra popular readings – that Husserl does not over-intellectualize feelings and their validation.