Intersubjectivity And Transcendental Idealism

The threat of solipcism nagged Husserl. The question of the status of others occupied him during the last years of his life and remained a question that seemed to challenge the foundation of his life's work. This book offers new answers to this persistent philosophical question by defining the question in specifically Husserlian terms and by means of a careful examination of Husserl's later texts, including the unpublished Nachlass.

The threat of solipcism nagged Husserl. The question of the status of others occupied him during the last years of his life and remained a question that seemed to challenge the foundation of his life's work. This book offers new answers to this persistent philosophical question by defining the question in specifically Husserlian terms and by means of a careful examination of Husserl's later texts, including the unpublished Nachlass.

This volume aims to illuminate the history of modern European philosophy in terms of Kant's revolutionary insight about the fundamental standpoint of philosophical enquiry. A team of experts explores the transcendental project as developed in the thought of Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Wittgenstein.

This book presents a new interpretation of Kanta??s theory of knowledge that emphasizes the coherence and plausibility of his doctrine of transcendental idealism. Many interpreters believe that Kanta??s transcendental idealism is an incoherent theory. Some have attempted to respond to this charge. Yet, as the author demonstrates, the interpretations that seek to vindicate Kanta??s theory continue to be committed to some claims that evoke the charge of incoherence. One type of claim which does so is connected to the contradictory notion of subjective necessity. The other type of claim is related to the supposition that knowledge of the reality of appearances entails knowledge of the reality of things in themselves. The interpretation presented in this book does not involve any of these claims. Part One of this book presents an analysis of Kanta??s concept of a priori knowledge and of his response to skepticism about synthetic a priori knowledge that specifies the content of such knowledge without invoking the notion of subjective necessity. Part Two presents an account of the non-spatiotemporality of things in themselves that does not entail knowledge of the reality of things in themselves. Part Three presents a new interpretation of transcendental synthesis, the transcendental "I" and of the role of transcendental self-consciousness in synthetic a priori knowledge which emphasizes the originality of Kanta??s account of self-knowledge and subjectivity. The arguments presented in this book relate Kanta??s ideas to current debates in epistemology, metaphysics and the philosophy of mind in a way that underscores their invaluable relevance to present-day philosophical discourse.

A fresh approach to the study of Husserl that gives detailed analysis of the themes in both his earlier and later works

The volume gathers together over twenty contributions that emerged from a conference held in in honour of Dermot Moran on the occasion of his retirement from University College Dublin. The book explores the contribution of phenomenology to empathy, intersubjectivity, affectivity, and the constitution of the cultural and social world, from both a historical and an applied philosophical perspective. Theoretical and methodological differences in approach notwithstanding, phenomenologists have converged in the recognition that self and others are fundamentally related, and have provided fine-grained accounts of the origin, forms, and implications of such relationship. The volume critically reconstructs and further develops central aspects of this body of research within a pluralistic framework. It offers a renewed investigation of the work of classical phenomenologists like Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty, as well as an original application of phenomenological concepts and theories to contemporary discussions on intentionality, culture, emotions, and morality. The book provides insights for scholars in phenomenological philosophy as well as in philosophy of mind and interpersonal and social experience.

According to James R. Mensch, a minimal requirement for ethics is that of guarding against genocide. In deciding which races are to live and which to die, genocide takes up a standpoint outside of humanity. To guard against this, Mensch argues that we must attain the critical distance required for ethical judgment without assuming a superhuman position. His description of how to attain this distance constitutes a genuinely new reading of the possibility of a phenomenological ethics, one that involves reassessing what it means to be a self. Selfhood, according to Mensch, involves both embodiment and the self-separation brought about by our encounter with others—the very others who provide us with the experiential context needed for moral judgment. Buttressing his position with documented accounts of those who hid Jews during the Holocaust, Mensch shows how the self-separation that occurs in empathy opens the space within which moral judgment can occur and obligation can find its expression. He includes a reading of the major moral philosophers—Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Mill, Arendt, Levinas—even as he develops a phenomenological account of the necessity of reading literature to understand the full extent of ethical responsibility. Mensch's work offers an original and provocative approach to a topic of fundamental importance.

Dan Zahavi offers an in-depth and up-to-date analysis of central and contested aspects of the philosophy of Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology. What is ultimately at stake in Husserl's phenomenological analyses? Are they primarily to be understood as investigations of consciousness or are they equally about the world? What is distinctive about phenomenological transcendental philosophy, and what kind of metaphysical import, if any, might it have? Husserl's Legacy offers an interpretation of the more overarching aims and ambitions of Husserlian phenomenology and engages with some of the most contested and debated questions in phenomenology. Central to its interpretative efforts is the attempt to understand Husserl's transcendental idealism. Zahavi argues that Husserl was not a sophisticated introspectionist, not a phenomenalist, nor an internalist, not a quietist when it comes to metaphysical issues, and not opposed to all forms of naturalism. Husserl's Legacy argues that Husserl's phenomenology is as much about the world as it is about consciousness, and that a proper grasp of Husserl's transcendental idealism reveals the fundamental importance of facticity and intersubjectivity.