Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 10

[Constance]

In a search re Nagel's seminal paper, I came upon a link to the following break-down of Nagel's major points concerning subjectivity and the impenetrability of the mind-body problem. I think this outline of Nagel's reasoning in the paper can be very helpful for any readers that have not yet understood the bases from which phenomenological thought has developed.

WHAT IS IT LIKE TO BE A BAT

 

[smcder]

E. Kaelin: “The Visibility of Things Seen: A Phenomenological View of Painting.”

 

[Soupie]

So the question is do you adhere to a particular model of consciousness?

I don't know what term is best describe how I currently think about the MBP. I do have a preference for or favor certain approaches over others.

I struggle with dualism—the idea that the mind and brain have separate origins and natures, etc. I struggle with strong, biological emergence. Etc.

However, if I've learned anything from this discussion, it's that we currently have no models of the MBP that don't challenge current paradigms.

I suspect that there will be scientific—or otherwise—discoveries in the future that will inform our understanding of the MBP.

 

[Constance]

A brief extract from Stevens's "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction" --

“Two things of opposite natures seem to depend
On one another, as Logos depends
On Eros, day on night, the imagined

On the real. This is the origin of change.
Winter and spring, cold copulars, embrace
And forth the particulars of rapture come.

Music falls on the silence like a sense,
A passion that we feel, not understand.
Morning and afternoon are clasped together

And North and South are an intrinsic couple
And sun and rain a plural, like two lovers
That walk away together as one in the greenest body.”



Biagio G. Tassone, The relevance of Husserl’s phenomenological exploration of interiority to contemporary epistemology

The relevance of Husserl’s phenomenological exploration of interiority to contemporary epistemology

"...As a consequence of transcendental intentional analysis what is “interior” now gains yet another perspective from which to be apprehended in relation to objective structures. The phenomenological reduction (later undergoing yet another critical modification into what can be called an “apodictic” reduction, cf. Husserl, 2002: 178) is now articulated by Husserl as incrementally allowing further and more radically dynamic perspectives on interiority.20 The later Husserl introduces the term “transcendental experience” in order to study what he calls these “essential structures” revealed by deeper insights into passive aspects of consciousness. In his exploration of internal time consciousness . . . ."

Phenomenology and Time-Consciousness

Edmund Husserl, founder of the phenomenological movement, employs the term "phenomenology" in its etymological sense as the activity of giving an account (logos) of the way things appear (phainomenon). Hence, a phenomenology of time attempts to account for the way things appear to us as temporal or how we experience time. Phenomenology offers neither metaphysical speculation about time’s relation to motion (as does Aristotle), nor the psychological character of time’s past and future moments (as does Augustine), nor transcendental-cognitive presumptions about time as a mind-dependent construct (as does Kant). Rather, it investigates the essential structures of consciousness that make possible the unified perception of an object that occurs across successive moments. In its nuanced attempts to provide an account of the form of intentionality presupposed by all experience, the phenomenology of time-consciousness provides important contributions to philosophical issues such as perception, memory, expectation, imagination, habituation, self-awareness, and self-identity over time. Within the phenomenological movement, time-consciousness is central. The most fundamental and important of all phenomenological problems, time-consciousness pervades Husserl’s theories of constitution, evidence, objectivity and inter-subjectivity. Within continental philosophy broadly construed, the movements of existential phenomenology, hermeneutics, post-modernism and post-structuralism, as well as the work of Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Hans George Gadamer and Jacques Derrida, all return in important ways to Husserl’s theory of time-consciousness. After devoting considerable attention to Husserl’s reflections on time-consciousness, this article treats the developments of the phenomenological account of time in Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty.

Table of Contents

1. Husserl, Phenomenology, and Time-consciousness
   1. Phenomenological Reduction and Time-Consciousness
   2. Phenomenology, Experienced Time and Temporal Objects
   3. Phenomenology Not to be Confused with Augustine’s Theory of Time
   4. Phenomenology and the Consciousness of Internal Time: Living-Present
   5. The Living-Present’s Double-Intentionality
2. Heidegger on Phenomenology and Time
   1. Heidegger and Dasein’s Temporality
3. Sartre and the Temporality of the “For-Itself”
4. Merleau-Ponty and the Phenomenology of Ambiguity: The Subject as Time
5. References and Further Reading
   1. Primary Sources
   2. Secondary Sources

1. Husserl, Phenomenology, and Time-Consciousness

Phenomenology maintains that consciousness, in its very nature as activity, is intentional. In its care for and interest in the world, consciousness transcends itself and attends to the world by a myriad of intentional acts, e.g., perceiving, remembering, imagining, willing, judging, etc.—hence Husserl’s claim that intentional consciousness is correlated (that is, co-related) to the world. Although the notion of intentionality includes the practical connotations of willful interest, it fundamentally denotes the relation conscious has to objects in the world. Of these many modes of intentionality, time-consciousness arguably constitutes the central one for understanding consciousness’s intentional, transcending character. Put differently, time-consciousness underscores these other intentional acts because these other intentional acts presuppose or include the consciousness of internal time. For this and other reasons, Husserl, in his On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893-1917) (1991), deemed time-consciousness the most “important and difficult of all phenomenological problems” (PCIT, No. 50, No. 39). Together with Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Syntheses (2001), Cartesian Meditations (1997) and Die ‘Bernaur Manuskripte’ über das Zeitbewußtseins 1917/18 (2001), this work seeks to account for this fundamental form of intentionality that the experience of temporal (e.g., spatial and auditory) and non-temporal (e.g., mathematical and logical) objects alike presupposes.

All experience entails a temporal horizon, according to phenomenology. This claim seems indisputable: we rush, we long, we endure, we plan, we reminisce, we perceive, we speak, we listen, etc. To highlight the difficulty and importance of explaining the structures of consciousness that make possible the experience of time, Husserl, like his contemporaries Henri Bergson and William James, favored the example of listening to a melody. For a melody to be a melody, it must have distinguishable though inseparable moments. And for consciousness to apprehend a melody, its structure must have features capable of respecting these features of temporal objects. Certainly, we can “time” the moments of a temporal object, a melody, with discrete seconds (measured by clocks). But this scientific and psychological account of time, which, following Newton, considers time as an empty container of discrete, atomistic nows, is not adequate to the task of explaining how consciousness experiences a temporal object. In this case of Newtonian time, each tone spreads its content out in a corresponding now but each now and thus each tone remains separated from every other. Newtonian time can explain the separation of moments in time but not the continuity of these moments. Since temporal objects, like a melody or a sentence, are characterized by and experienced as a unity across a succession, an account of the perception of a temporal object must explain how we synthesize a flowing object in such a way that we (i) preserve the position of each tone without (ii) eliminating the unity of the melody or (iii) relating each tone by collapsing the difference in the order between the tones.

Bergson, James and Husserl realized that if our consciousness were structured in such a way that each moment occurred in strict separation from every other (like planks of a picket fence), then we never could apprehend or perceive the unity of our experiences or enduring objects in time otherwise than as a convoluted patchwork. To avoid this quantitative view of time as a container, Husserl’s phenomenology attempts to articulate the conscious experience of lived-time as the prerequisite for the Newtonian, scientific notion of time’s reality as a march of discrete, atomistic moments measured by clocks and science. In this way, Husserl’s approach to time-consciousness shares much in common with these popular nineteenth Century treatments of time-consciousness. Yet to appreciate fully Husserl’s account of time-consciousness—the uniqueness of his contribution beyond other popular nineteenth Century accounts (deWarren 2008), and the priority he affords it in his own thinking—we first must understand phenomenology’s methodological device, the phenomenological reduction.

a. Phenomenological Reduction and Time-consciousness

Husserl believed that every experience for intentional consciousness has a temporal character or background. We experience spatial objects, both successive (e.g., a passing automobile) and stationary (e.g., a house), as temporal. We do not, on the other hand, experience all temporal objects (e.g., an imagined sequence or spoken sentence) as spatial. For the phenomenologist, even non-temporal objects (e.g., geometrical postulates) presuppose time because we experience their timeless character over time; for example, it takes time for me to count from one to five although these numbers themselves remain timeless, and it takes some a long time to understand and appreciate the force of timeless geometrical postulates (PCIT § 45; see Brough 1991). To this point, common sense views of time may find Husserl agreeable. Such agreement ceases, however, for those who expect Husserl to proclaim that time resembles an indefinite series of nows (like seconds) passing from the future through the present into the past (as a river flows from the top of a mountain into a lake). This common sense conception of time understands the future as not-yet-now, the past as no-longer-now, and the present as what now-is, a thin, ephemeral slice of time. Such is the natural attitude’s view of time, the time of the world, of measurement, of clocks, calendars, science, management, calculation, cultural and anthropological history, etc. This common sense view is not the phenomenologist’s, who suspends all naïve presuppositions through the reduction.

Phenomenology’s fundamental methodological device, the "phenomenological reduction,” involves the philosopher’s bracketing of her natural belief about the world, much like in mathematics when we bracket questions about whether numbers are mind-independent objects. This natural belief Husserl terms the “natural attitude,” under which label he includes dogmatic scientific and philosophical beliefs, as well as uncritical, every-day, common sense assumptions. Not a denial of the external world, like Descartes methodologically proposed, the phenomenological reduction neutralizes these dimensions of the natural attitude towards experience in order to examine more closely experience and its objects just as they appear to conscious experience (Ideas I §§ 44-49; Sokolowski 2000). Put less technically, one could consider phenomenology a critical rather than habitual or dogmatic approach to understanding the world. To call phenomenology a critical enterprise means that it is an enterprise guided by the goal of faithfully describing what experience gives us—thus phenomenology’s famed return to the things themselves—rather than defaulting to what we with our dogmas and prejudices expect from experience—thus phenomenology’s famed self-description as a “pressupositionless science” (Logical Investigations). . . ."


Also valuable:

Phenomenology and Time-Consciousness | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

 

[Constance]

ps, wondering if @William Strathmann can provide a better translation than Google Translate does of the quote from St. Augustine placed as an epigraph at the beginning of the paper by Biagio G. Tassone linked in the main body of my post just above:

"Noli foras ire, in te redi, in interiore homine habitat veritas.
St. Augustine, De Vera Religione, XXXIX. 72

 

[Constance]

pps, I think it's notable -- and encouraging -- that the Tassone paper was published online by Nature.com two months ago. It's not, to my knowledge, the kind of paper normally published by Nature.

 

[smcder]

I don't know what term is best describe how I currently think about the MBP. I do have a preference for or favor certain approaches over others.

I struggle with dualism—the idea that the mind and brain have separate origins and natures, etc. I struggle with strong, biological emergence. Etc.

However, if I've learned anything from this discussion, it's that we currently have no models of the MBP that don't challenge current paradigms.

I suspect that there will be scientific—or otherwise—discoveries in the future that will inform our understanding of the MBP.

I struggle with dualism—the idea that the mind and brain have separate origins and natures, etc. I struggle with strong, biological emergence. Etc.

Do the various fundamental aspects of the physical have separate origins and natures? Do electromagnetic fields and quarks have separate origins and natures for example? Is that a similar kind of duality to the one you struggle with in mind/brain? Saying the mind and the brain are ontologically the same - but, due to our perceptions (which can only come from that same place ...) is where you sneak in your dualism ...

Strong, biological emergence - it could be that what we recognize as consciousness may well require biological organization - but that doesn't make consciousness necessarily a creatio of biology ... much less an ex nihilo one.

 

[smcder]

A brief extract from Stevens's "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction" --

“Two things of opposite natures seem to depend
On one another, as Logos depends
On Eros, day on night, the imagined

On the real. This is the origin of change.
Winter and spring, cold copulars, embrace
And forth the particulars of rapture come.

Music falls on the silence like a sense,
A passion that we feel, not understand.
Morning and afternoon are clasped together

And North and South are an intrinsic couple
And sun and rain a plural, like two lovers
That walk away together as one in the greenest body.”



Biagio G. Tassone, The relevance of Husserl’s phenomenological exploration of interiority to contemporary epistemology

The relevance of Husserl’s phenomenological exploration of interiority to contemporary epistemology

"...As a consequence of transcendental intentional analysis what is “interior” now gains yet another perspective from which to be apprehended in relation to objective structures. The phenomenological reduction (later undergoing yet another critical modification into what can be called an “apodictic” reduction, cf. Husserl, 2002: 178) is now articulated by Husserl as incrementally allowing further and more radically dynamic perspectives on interiority.20 The later Husserl introduces the term “transcendental experience” in order to study what he calls these “essential structures” revealed by deeper insights into passive aspects of consciousness. In his exploration of internal time consciousness . . . ."

Phenomenology and Time-Consciousness

Edmund Husserl, founder of the phenomenological movement, employs the term "phenomenology" in its etymological sense as the activity of giving an account (logos) of the way things appear (phainomenon). Hence, a phenomenology of time attempts to account for the way things appear to us as temporal or how we experience time. Phenomenology offers neither metaphysical speculation about time’s relation to motion (as does Aristotle), nor the psychological character of time’s past and future moments (as does Augustine), nor transcendental-cognitive presumptions about time as a mind-dependent construct (as does Kant). Rather, it investigates the essential structures of consciousness that make possible the unified perception of an object that occurs across successive moments. In its nuanced attempts to provide an account of the form of intentionality presupposed by all experience, the phenomenology of time-consciousness provides important contributions to philosophical issues such as perception, memory, expectation, imagination, habituation, self-awareness, and self-identity over time. Within the phenomenological movement, time-consciousness is central. The most fundamental and important of all phenomenological problems, time-consciousness pervades Husserl’s theories of constitution, evidence, objectivity and inter-subjectivity. Within continental philosophy broadly construed, the movements of existential phenomenology, hermeneutics, post-modernism and post-structuralism, as well as the work of Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Hans George Gadamer and Jacques Derrida, all return in important ways to Husserl’s theory of time-consciousness. After devoting considerable attention to Husserl’s reflections on time-consciousness, this article treats the developments of the phenomenological account of time in Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty.

Table of Contents

1. Husserl, Phenomenology, and Time-consciousness
   1. Phenomenological Reduction and Time-Consciousness
   2. Phenomenology, Experienced Time and Temporal Objects
   3. Phenomenology Not to be Confused with Augustine’s Theory of Time
   4. Phenomenology and the Consciousness of Internal Time: Living-Present
   5. The Living-Present’s Double-Intentionality
2. Heidegger on Phenomenology and Time
   1. Heidegger and Dasein’s Temporality
3. Sartre and the Temporality of the “For-Itself”
4. Merleau-Ponty and the Phenomenology of Ambiguity: The Subject as Time
5. References and Further Reading
   1. Primary Sources
   2. Secondary Sources

1. Husserl, Phenomenology, and Time-Consciousness

Phenomenology maintains that consciousness, in its very nature as activity, is intentional. In its care for and interest in the world, consciousness transcends itself and attends to the world by a myriad of intentional acts, e.g., perceiving, remembering, imagining, willing, judging, etc.—hence Husserl’s claim that intentional consciousness is correlated (that is, co-related) to the world. Although the notion of intentionality includes the practical connotations of willful interest, it fundamentally denotes the relation conscious has to objects in the world. Of these many modes of intentionality, time-consciousness arguably constitutes the central one for understanding consciousness’s intentional, transcending character. Put differently, time-consciousness underscores these other intentional acts because these other intentional acts presuppose or include the consciousness of internal time. For this and other reasons, Husserl, in his On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893-1917) (1991), deemed time-consciousness the most “important and difficult of all phenomenological problems” (PCIT, No. 50, No. 39). Together with Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Syntheses (2001), Cartesian Meditations (1997) and Die ‘Bernaur Manuskripte’ über das Zeitbewußtseins 1917/18 (2001), this work seeks to account for this fundamental form of intentionality that the experience of temporal (e.g., spatial and auditory) and non-temporal (e.g., mathematical and logical) objects alike presupposes.

All experience entails a temporal horizon, according to phenomenology. This claim seems indisputable: we rush, we long, we endure, we plan, we reminisce, we perceive, we speak, we listen, etc. To highlight the difficulty and importance of explaining the structures of consciousness that make possible the experience of time, Husserl, like his contemporaries Henri Bergson and William James, favored the example of listening to a melody. For a melody to be a melody, it must have distinguishable though inseparable moments. And for consciousness to apprehend a melody, its structure must have features capable of respecting these features of temporal objects. Certainly, we can “time” the moments of a temporal object, a melody, with discrete seconds (measured by clocks). But this scientific and psychological account of time, which, following Newton, considers time as an empty container of discrete, atomistic nows, is not adequate to the task of explaining how consciousness experiences a temporal object. In this case of Newtonian time, each tone spreads its content out in a corresponding now but each now and thus each tone remains separated from every other. Newtonian time can explain the separation of moments in time but not the continuity of these moments. Since temporal objects, like a melody or a sentence, are characterized by and experienced as a unity across a succession, an account of the perception of a temporal object must explain how we synthesize a flowing object in such a way that we (i) preserve the position of each tone without (ii) eliminating the unity of the melody or (iii) relating each tone by collapsing the difference in the order between the tones.

Bergson, James and Husserl realized that if our consciousness were structured in such a way that each moment occurred in strict separation from every other (like planks of a picket fence), then we never could apprehend or perceive the unity of our experiences or enduring objects in time otherwise than as a convoluted patchwork. To avoid this quantitative view of time as a container, Husserl’s phenomenology attempts to articulate the conscious experience of lived-time as the prerequisite for the Newtonian, scientific notion of time’s reality as a march of discrete, atomistic moments measured by clocks and science. In this way, Husserl’s approach to time-consciousness shares much in common with these popular nineteenth Century treatments of time-consciousness. Yet to appreciate fully Husserl’s account of time-consciousness—the uniqueness of his contribution beyond other popular nineteenth Century accounts (deWarren 2008), and the priority he affords it in his own thinking—we first must understand phenomenology’s methodological device, the phenomenological reduction.

a. Phenomenological Reduction and Time-consciousness

Husserl believed that every experience for intentional consciousness has a temporal character or background. We experience spatial objects, both successive (e.g., a passing automobile) and stationary (e.g., a house), as temporal. We do not, on the other hand, experience all temporal objects (e.g., an imagined sequence or spoken sentence) as spatial. For the phenomenologist, even non-temporal objects (e.g., geometrical postulates) presuppose time because we experience their timeless character over time; for example, it takes time for me to count from one to five although these numbers themselves remain timeless, and it takes some a long time to understand and appreciate the force of timeless geometrical postulates (PCIT § 45; see Brough 1991). To this point, common sense views of time may find Husserl agreeable. Such agreement ceases, however, for those who expect Husserl to proclaim that time resembles an indefinite series of nows (like seconds) passing from the future through the present into the past (as a river flows from the top of a mountain into a lake). This common sense conception of time understands the future as not-yet-now, the past as no-longer-now, and the present as what now-is, a thin, ephemeral slice of time. Such is the natural attitude’s view of time, the time of the world, of measurement, of clocks, calendars, science, management, calculation, cultural and anthropological history, etc. This common sense view is not the phenomenologist’s, who suspends all naïve presuppositions through the reduction.

Phenomenology’s fundamental methodological device, the "phenomenological reduction,” involves the philosopher’s bracketing of her natural belief about the world, much like in mathematics when we bracket questions about whether numbers are mind-independent objects. This natural belief Husserl terms the “natural attitude,” under which label he includes dogmatic scientific and philosophical beliefs, as well as uncritical, every-day, common sense assumptions. Not a denial of the external world, like Descartes methodologically proposed, the phenomenological reduction neutralizes these dimensions of the natural attitude towards experience in order to examine more closely experience and its objects just as they appear to conscious experience (Ideas I §§ 44-49; Sokolowski 2000). Put less technically, one could consider phenomenology a critical rather than habitual or dogmatic approach to understanding the world. To call phenomenology a critical enterprise means that it is an enterprise guided by the goal of faithfully describing what experience gives us—thus phenomenology’s famed return to the things themselves—rather than defaulting to what we with our dogmas and prejudices expect from experience—thus phenomenology’s famed self-description as a “pressupositionless science” (Logical Investigations). . . ."


Also valuable:

Phenomenology and Time-Consciousness | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

That last paragraph I think is very helpful on understanding the reduction and the natural attitude.

Put less technically, one could consider phenomenology a critical rather than habitual (naive) or dogmatic (scientific) approach to understanding the world.

 

[Soupie]

Do the various fundamental aspects of the physical have separate origins and natures?

Of course I don't know but my "preference" would be for models that say no.

My language as we all know isn't always consistent, but when it comes to phenomenal consciousness and matter, I've tried to use the phrase "with respect to." For example, consciousness is fundamental with respect to matter/energy. That is, consciousness is not secondary with respect to matter; but at the same time, there are likely more fundamental processes underlying consciousness and matter/energy.

Re biological emergence of consciousness. What you describe is the approach I favor. What humans think of as consciousness (what I might call subjective experience) has everything to do with the physical human body.

But I would say that phenomenal consciousness does not emerge from the body but is rather the substrate of which subjective experiences consist. I believe there may be other pathways to subjective experience besides biology.

But we don't want to go down this rabbit hole again.

Re dualism What my approach does is explain how a seeming ontological dualism between mind and body is merely a perspectival dualism.

 

[Constance]

Re dualism What my approach does is explain how a seeming ontological dualism between mind and body is merely a perspectival dualism.

Actually what you and the physicalist and/or computationalist theorists you follow have on offer is not yet an explanation but a hypothesis yet to be proved -- i.e., that consciousness as it is experienced in living organisms already exists in the q substrate. I hope you won't take offense at my saying so.

 

[Constance]

That last paragraph I think is very helpful on understanding the reduction and the natural attitude.

Put less technically, one could consider phenomenology a critical rather than habitual (naive) or dogmatic (scientific) approach to understanding the world.

This extract from the SEP article on Husserl is helpful in foregrounding the developments of Husserl's critical philosophy, phenomenological methodology, and increasing phenomenological insights from the 1890s until his death in 1938. That whole SEP article is excellent.

". . . After a brief military service in Vienna, Husserl followed Masaryk's advice and studied with Brentano from 1884–86. Brentano's lectures on psychology and logic had a lasting impact on Husserl, as had his general vision of a strictly scientific philosophy. Brentano then recommended Husserl to his pupil Carl Stumpf in Halle, who is perhaps best known for his Psychology of Tone (two volumes, 1883/90). This recommendation enabled Husserl to prepare and submit his habilitation dissertation On the Concept of Number (1887) with Stumpf.

That thesis was later integrated into Husserl's first published monograph, Philosophy of Arithmetic, which appeared in 1891. In this work, Husserl combined his mathematical, psychological and philosophical competencies to attempt a psychological foundation of arithmetic (see Willard 1984, pp. 38–118; Bell 1990, pp. 31–84). The book was, however, criticized for its underlying psychologism in a review by Gottlob Frege. It seems that Husserl took that criticism very seriously (see Føllesdal 1958), although it is far from clear that the author of Philosophy of Arithmetic regards logic as a branch of psychology, as “strong psychologism” (Mohanty 1982, p. 20) has it. In any case, Husserl sharply attacked that kind of psychologism (raising about eighteen objections in total; see Soldati 1994, pp. 117 ff) and developed the philosophical method he is nowadays famous for: phenomenology.

In 1900/01 his first phenomenological work was published in two volumes, titled Logical Investigations. The first volume contains a forceful attack against psychologism, whereas the (much larger) second volume consists of six “descriptive-psychological” and “epistemological” investigations into (I) expression and meaning, (II) universals, (III) the formal ontology of parts and wholes (mereology), (IV) the “syntactical” and mereological structure of meaning, (V) the nature and structure of intentionality as well as (VI) the interrelation of truth, intuition and cognition. Husserl now adheres to a version of platonism that he derived from ideas of Hermann Lotze and especially Bernard Bolzano, where he embeds platonism about meaning and mental content in a theory of intentional consciousness (see Beyer 1996).

In the first decade of the 20th century, Husserl considerably refined and modified his method into what he called “transcendental phenomenology”. This method has us focus on the essential structures that allow the objects naively taken for granted in the “natural attitude” (which is characteristic of both our everyday life and ordinary science) to “constitute themselves” in consciousness. (Among those who influenced him in this regard are Descartes, Hume and Kant.) As Husserl explains in detail in his second major work, Ideas (1913), the resulting perspective on the realm of intentional consciousness is supposed to enable the phenomenologist to develop a radically unprejudiced justification of his (or her) basic views on the world and himself and explore their rational interconnections.

Husserl developed these ideas in Göttingen, where—thanks to his Logical Investigations and the support by Wilhelm Dilthey, who admired that work and recommended Husserl to the Prussian ministry of culture—he received an associate professorship (“Extraordinariat”, later turned into a “Persönliches Ordinariat”) in 1901. From 1910/11 and 1913, respectively, he served as founding (co-)editor of Logos (in the first issue of which his programmatic article “Philosophy as a Rigorous Science” appeared, containing a critique of naturalism) and of the Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Research (opening with his Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy). Husserl stayed in Göttingen until 1916. It is here that he made his most important philosophical discoveries (cf. Mohanty 1995), such as the transcendental-phenomenological method, the phenomenological structure of time-consciousness, the fundamental role of the notion of intersubjectivity in our conceptual system, the horizon-structure of our singular empirical thought, and more. In later works—most notably in On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1928), Formal and Transcendental Logic (1929), Cartesian Meditations (1931), The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (1954) and Experience and Judgement (1939)—these results were developed further and put into new contexts, such as the path-breaking project of linking the basic notions of science back to their conceptual roots in the pre-scientific (regions of the) “lifeworld” (Crisis).

In the year 1916 Husserl became Heinrich Rickert's successor as full professor (“Ordinarius”) in Freiburg/Breisgau, where (among many other things) he worked on passive synthesis (cf. Husserliana, vol. XI, XXXI). He gave four lectures on Phenomenological Method and Phenomenological Philosophy at University College, London, in 1922 (cf. Husserliana, vol. XXXV). In 1923 he received a call to Berlin, which he rejected. Husserl retired in 1928, his successor being his (and Rickert's) former assistant Martin Heidegger (whose major work Being and Time had been published in Husserl's Yearbook in 1927). In 1929 he accepted an invitation to Paris. His lectures there were published as Cartesian Meditations in 1931. In the same year, Husserl gave a number of talks on “Phenomenology and Anthropology”, in which he criticized his two “antipodes”, Heidegger and Max Scheler (cf. Husserl 1997). In 1933 Hitler took over in Germany. Husserl received a call to Los Angeles but rejected. Because of his Jewish ancestors, he became more and more humiliated and isolated. In 1935 he gave a series of invited lectures in Prague, resulting in his last major work, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology.

Edmund Husserl died on April 27, 1938 in Freiburg. His manuscripts (more than 40,000 pages in total) were rescued by the Franciscan Herman Leo Van Breda, who brought them to Leuven (Belgium), where the first Husserl archive was founded in 1939. (Today, there are further archives in Freiburg, Cologne, Paris, New York and Pittsburgh.) Since 1950 the Husserl archives are editing Husserl's collected works, Husserliana. . . . ."

Edmund Husserl (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

 

[Randall]

... It seems obvious to me that we have been spinning our wheels for a long time in this thread ...

Couldn't agree more, and this guy seems to make a lot of sense as to why ...

Colin McGinn

 

[smcder]

Couldn't agree more, and this guy seems to make a lot of sense as to why ...

Colin McGinn

I thought you said you keep up with this thread...??

Lol

 

[smcder]

This extract from the SEP article on Husserl is helpful in foregrounding the developments of Husserl's critical philosophy, phenomenological methodology, and increasing phenomenological insights from the 1890s until his death in 1938. That whole SEP article is excellent.

". . . After a brief military service in Vienna, Husserl followed Masaryk's advice and studied with Brentano from 1884–86. Brentano's lectures on psychology and logic had a lasting impact on Husserl, as had his general vision of a strictly scientific philosophy. Brentano then recommended Husserl to his pupil Carl Stumpf in Halle, who is perhaps best known for his Psychology of Tone (two volumes, 1883/90). This recommendation enabled Husserl to prepare and submit his habilitation dissertation On the Concept of Number (1887) with Stumpf.

That thesis was later integrated into Husserl's first published monograph, Philosophy of Arithmetic, which appeared in 1891. In this work, Husserl combined his mathematical, psychological and philosophical competencies to attempt a psychological foundation of arithmetic (see Willard 1984, pp. 38–118; Bell 1990, pp. 31–84). The book was, however, criticized for its underlying psychologism in a review by Gottlob Frege. It seems that Husserl took that criticism very seriously (see Føllesdal 1958), although it is far from clear that the author of Philosophy of Arithmetic regards logic as a branch of psychology, as “strong psychologism” (Mohanty 1982, p. 20) has it. In any case, Husserl sharply attacked that kind of psychologism (raising about eighteen objections in total; see Soldati 1994, pp. 117 ff) and developed the philosophical method he is nowadays famous for: phenomenology.

In 1900/01 his first phenomenological work was published in two volumes, titled Logical Investigations. The first volume contains a forceful attack against psychologism, whereas the (much larger) second volume consists of six “descriptive-psychological” and “epistemological” investigations into (I) expression and meaning, (II) universals, (III) the formal ontology of parts and wholes (mereology), (IV) the “syntactical” and mereological structure of meaning, (V) the nature and structure of intentionality as well as (VI) the interrelation of truth, intuition and cognition. Husserl now adheres to a version of platonism that he derived from ideas of Hermann Lotze and especially Bernard Bolzano, where he embeds platonism about meaning and mental content in a theory of intentional consciousness (see Beyer 1996).

In the first decade of the 20th century, Husserl considerably refined and modified his method into what he called “transcendental phenomenology”. This method has us focus on the essential structures that allow the objects naively taken for granted in the “natural attitude” (which is characteristic of both our everyday life and ordinary science) to “constitute themselves” in consciousness. (Among those who influenced him in this regard are Descartes, Hume and Kant.) As Husserl explains in detail in his second major work, Ideas (1913), the resulting perspective on the realm of intentional consciousness is supposed to enable the phenomenologist to develop a radically unprejudiced justification of his (or her) basic views on the world and himself and explore their rational interconnections.

Husserl developed these ideas in Göttingen, where—thanks to his Logical Investigations and the support by Wilhelm Dilthey, who admired that work and recommended Husserl to the Prussian ministry of culture—he received an associate professorship (“Extraordinariat”, later turned into a “Persönliches Ordinariat”) in 1901. From 1910/11 and 1913, respectively, he served as founding (co-)editor of Logos (in the first issue of which his programmatic article “Philosophy as a Rigorous Science” appeared, containing a critique of naturalism) and of the Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Research (opening with his Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy). Husserl stayed in Göttingen until 1916. It is here that he made his most important philosophical discoveries (cf. Mohanty 1995), such as the transcendental-phenomenological method, the phenomenological structure of time-consciousness, the fundamental role of the notion of intersubjectivity in our conceptual system, the horizon-structure of our singular empirical thought, and more. In later works—most notably in On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1928), Formal and Transcendental Logic (1929), Cartesian Meditations (1931), The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (1954) and Experience and Judgement (1939)—these results were developed further and put into new contexts, such as the path-breaking project of linking the basic notions of science back to their conceptual roots in the pre-scientific (regions of the) “lifeworld” (Crisis).

In the year 1916 Husserl became Heinrich Rickert's successor as full professor (“Ordinarius”) in Freiburg/Breisgau, where (among many other things) he worked on passive synthesis (cf. Husserliana, vol. XI, XXXI). He gave four lectures on Phenomenological Method and Phenomenological Philosophy at University College, London, in 1922 (cf. Husserliana, vol. XXXV). In 1923 he received a call to Berlin, which he rejected. Husserl retired in 1928, his successor being his (and Rickert's) former assistant Martin Heidegger (whose major work Being and Time had been published in Husserl's Yearbook in 1927). In 1929 he accepted an invitation to Paris. His lectures there were published as Cartesian Meditations in 1931. In the same year, Husserl gave a number of talks on “Phenomenology and Anthropology”, in which he criticized his two “antipodes”, Heidegger and Max Scheler (cf. Husserl 1997). In 1933 Hitler took over in Germany. Husserl received a call to Los Angeles but rejected. Because of his Jewish ancestors, he became more and more humiliated and isolated. In 1935 he gave a series of invited lectures in Prague, resulting in his last major work, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology.

Edmund Husserl died on April 27, 1938 in Freiburg. His manuscripts (more than 40,000 pages in total) were rescued by the Franciscan Herman Leo Van Breda, who brought them to Leuven (Belgium), where the first Husserl archive was founded in 1939. (Today, there are further archives in Freiburg, Cologne, Paris, New York and Pittsburgh.) Since 1950 the Husserl archives are editing Husserl's collected works, Husserliana. . . . ."

Edmund Husserl (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Husserl - Philosophy as a Rigorous Science [New Translation] | Consciousness | Science

 

[smcder]

This extract from the SEP article on Husserl is helpful in foregrounding the developments of Husserl's critical philosophy, phenomenological methodology, and increasing phenomenological insights from the 1890s until his death in 1938. That whole SEP article is excellent.

". . . After a brief military service in Vienna, Husserl followed Masaryk's advice and studied with Brentano from 1884–86. Brentano's lectures on psychology and logic had a lasting impact on Husserl, as had his general vision of a strictly scientific philosophy. Brentano then recommended Husserl to his pupil Carl Stumpf in Halle, who is perhaps best known for his Psychology of Tone (two volumes, 1883/90). This recommendation enabled Husserl to prepare and submit his habilitation dissertation On the Concept of Number (1887) with Stumpf.

That thesis was later integrated into Husserl's first published monograph, Philosophy of Arithmetic, which appeared in 1891. In this work, Husserl combined his mathematical, psychological and philosophical competencies to attempt a psychological foundation of arithmetic (see Willard 1984, pp. 38–118; Bell 1990, pp. 31–84). The book was, however, criticized for its underlying psychologism in a review by Gottlob Frege. It seems that Husserl took that criticism very seriously (see Føllesdal 1958), although it is far from clear that the author of Philosophy of Arithmetic regards logic as a branch of psychology, as “strong psychologism” (Mohanty 1982, p. 20) has it. In any case, Husserl sharply attacked that kind of psychologism (raising about eighteen objections in total; see Soldati 1994, pp. 117 ff) and developed the philosophical method he is nowadays famous for: phenomenology.

In 1900/01 his first phenomenological work was published in two volumes, titled Logical Investigations. The first volume contains a forceful attack against psychologism, whereas the (much larger) second volume consists of six “descriptive-psychological” and “epistemological” investigations into (I) expression and meaning, (II) universals, (III) the formal ontology of parts and wholes (mereology), (IV) the “syntactical” and mereological structure of meaning, (V) the nature and structure of intentionality as well as (VI) the interrelation of truth, intuition and cognition. Husserl now adheres to a version of platonism that he derived from ideas of Hermann Lotze and especially Bernard Bolzano, where he embeds platonism about meaning and mental content in a theory of intentional consciousness (see Beyer 1996).

In the first decade of the 20th century, Husserl considerably refined and modified his method into what he called “transcendental phenomenology”. This method has us focus on the essential structures that allow the objects naively taken for granted in the “natural attitude” (which is characteristic of both our everyday life and ordinary science) to “constitute themselves” in consciousness. (Among those who influenced him in this regard are Descartes, Hume and Kant.) As Husserl explains in detail in his second major work, Ideas (1913), the resulting perspective on the realm of intentional consciousness is supposed to enable the phenomenologist to develop a radically unprejudiced justification of his (or her) basic views on the world and himself and explore their rational interconnections.

Husserl developed these ideas in Göttingen, where—thanks to his Logical Investigations and the support by Wilhelm Dilthey, who admired that work and recommended Husserl to the Prussian ministry of culture—he received an associate professorship (“Extraordinariat”, later turned into a “Persönliches Ordinariat”) in 1901. From 1910/11 and 1913, respectively, he served as founding (co-)editor of Logos (in the first issue of which his programmatic article “Philosophy as a Rigorous Science” appeared, containing a critique of naturalism) and of the Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Research (opening with his Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy). Husserl stayed in Göttingen until 1916. It is here that he made his most important philosophical discoveries (cf. Mohanty 1995), such as the transcendental-phenomenological method, the phenomenological structure of time-consciousness, the fundamental role of the notion of intersubjectivity in our conceptual system, the horizon-structure of our singular empirical thought, and more. In later works—most notably in On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1928), Formal and Transcendental Logic (1929), Cartesian Meditations (1931), The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (1954) and Experience and Judgement (1939)—these results were developed further and put into new contexts, such as the path-breaking project of linking the basic notions of science back to their conceptual roots in the pre-scientific (regions of the) “lifeworld” (Crisis).

In the year 1916 Husserl became Heinrich Rickert's successor as full professor (“Ordinarius”) in Freiburg/Breisgau, where (among many other things) he worked on passive synthesis (cf. Husserliana, vol. XI, XXXI). He gave four lectures on Phenomenological Method and Phenomenological Philosophy at University College, London, in 1922 (cf. Husserliana, vol. XXXV). In 1923 he received a call to Berlin, which he rejected. Husserl retired in 1928, his successor being his (and Rickert's) former assistant Martin Heidegger (whose major work Being and Time had been published in Husserl's Yearbook in 1927). In 1929 he accepted an invitation to Paris. His lectures there were published as Cartesian Meditations in 1931. In the same year, Husserl gave a number of talks on “Phenomenology and Anthropology”, in which he criticized his two “antipodes”, Heidegger and Max Scheler (cf. Husserl 1997). In 1933 Hitler took over in Germany. Husserl received a call to Los Angeles but rejected. Because of his Jewish ancestors, he became more and more humiliated and isolated. In 1935 he gave a series of invited lectures in Prague, resulting in his last major work, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology.

Edmund Husserl died on April 27, 1938 in Freiburg. His manuscripts (more than 40,000 pages in total) were rescued by the Franciscan Herman Leo Van Breda, who brought them to Leuven (Belgium), where the first Husserl archive was founded in 1939. (Today, there are further archives in Freiburg, Cologne, Paris, New York and Pittsburgh.) Since 1950 the Husserl archives are editing Husserl's collected works, Husserliana. . . . ."

Edmund Husserl (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

I'm reading this (section 2) along with it for context:

Phenomenology and Natural Science | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

 

[smcder]

Philosophy as Rigorous Science

Naturalistic Philosophy

Naturalism is a consequence of the discovery of nature, of nature in the sense of a unity of spatiotemporal Being subject to exact laws of nature. With the step-by-step realization of this idea in ever newer natural sciences that justify a superabundance of rigorous cognitions, naturalism too spread out ever farther. In much the same way historicism later arose as a consequence of the“discovery of history” and the founding of ever newer human sciences. In keeping with their respective habits of interpretation, the natural scientist is inclined to regard everything as nature, whereas the investigator in the human sciences is inclined to regard everything as spirit, as a historical construct, and thus both thereby misinterpret whatever cannot be so regarded. Hence the naturalist, to focus particularly on him for the moment, sees nothing but nature and first and foremost physical nature. Everything that is is either itself physical, belonging to the unitary nexus of physical nature, or it is indeed something psychical, but then something changeable that merely depends on the physical, at best a secondary, “parallel accompanying fact.”All beings are of a psychophysical nature, that is, univocally determined in accordance with firm laws. Nothing essential to us changes in this interpretation when, in the sense of positivism (whether the variety that relies on a naturalistically interpreted Kant or one that renews and consistently builds on Hume), physical nature is resolved sensualistically into complexes of sensations, into colors, tones, pressures, etc., and by the same token the so-called psychical is also resolved into complementary complexes of the same or still other “sensations.” What characterizes all forms of extreme and consistent naturalism, from popular materialism on down to the most recent sensation-monism and energeticism, is, on the one hand, the naturalization of consciousness, including all intentionally immanent givens of consciousness, and, on the other hand, the naturalization of ideas and thus of all absolute ideals and norms. In the latter respect naturalism cancels itself out, without noticing it. If we take formal logic as an exemplary index of all ideality, then, as is well known, the formal-logical principles, the so-called laws of thought, are interpreted by naturalism as the natural laws of thought. That this involves a counter sense of the variety that characterizes every theory that is skeptical in a pregnant sense has been proved in detail elsewhere.

 

[smcder]

And this essay by Taylor Carman, not sure if we've read it before ...

Phenomenology as Rigorous Science

 

[Soupie]

Looking at a brain and concluding that it can't be identical to the mind is akin to looking at sonar equipment with sonar equipment and concluding that they are not identical.

 

[smcder]

Looking at a brain and concluding that it can't be identical to the mind is akin to looking at sonar equipment with sonar equipment and concluding that they are not identical.

 

[smcder]

This extract from the SEP article on Husserl is helpful in foregrounding the developments of Husserl's critical philosophy, phenomenological methodology, and increasing phenomenological insights from the 1890s until his death in 1938. That whole SEP article is excellent.

". . . After a brief military service in Vienna, Husserl followed Masaryk's advice and studied with Brentano from 1884–86. Brentano's lectures on psychology and logic had a lasting impact on Husserl, as had his general vision of a strictly scientific philosophy. Brentano then recommended Husserl to his pupil Carl Stumpf in Halle, who is perhaps best known for his Psychology of Tone (two volumes, 1883/90). This recommendation enabled Husserl to prepare and submit his habilitation dissertation On the Concept of Number (1887) with Stumpf.

That thesis was later integrated into Husserl's first published monograph, Philosophy of Arithmetic, which appeared in 1891. In this work, Husserl combined his mathematical, psychological and philosophical competencies to attempt a psychological foundation of arithmetic (see Willard 1984, pp. 38–118; Bell 1990, pp. 31–84). The book was, however, criticized for its underlying psychologism in a review by Gottlob Frege. It seems that Husserl took that criticism very seriously (see Føllesdal 1958), although it is far from clear that the author of Philosophy of Arithmetic regards logic as a branch of psychology, as “strong psychologism” (Mohanty 1982, p. 20) has it. In any case, Husserl sharply attacked that kind of psychologism (raising about eighteen objections in total; see Soldati 1994, pp. 117 ff) and developed the philosophical method he is nowadays famous for: phenomenology.

In 1900/01 his first phenomenological work was published in two volumes, titled Logical Investigations. The first volume contains a forceful attack against psychologism, whereas the (much larger) second volume consists of six “descriptive-psychological” and “epistemological” investigations into (I) expression and meaning, (II) universals, (III) the formal ontology of parts and wholes (mereology), (IV) the “syntactical” and mereological structure of meaning, (V) the nature and structure of intentionality as well as (VI) the interrelation of truth, intuition and cognition. Husserl now adheres to a version of platonism that he derived from ideas of Hermann Lotze and especially Bernard Bolzano, where he embeds platonism about meaning and mental content in a theory of intentional consciousness (see Beyer 1996).

In the first decade of the 20th century, Husserl considerably refined and modified his method into what he called “transcendental phenomenology”. This method has us focus on the essential structures that allow the objects naively taken for granted in the “natural attitude” (which is characteristic of both our everyday life and ordinary science) to “constitute themselves” in consciousness. (Among those who influenced him in this regard are Descartes, Hume and Kant.) As Husserl explains in detail in his second major work, Ideas (1913), the resulting perspective on the realm of intentional consciousness is supposed to enable the phenomenologist to develop a radically unprejudiced justification of his (or her) basic views on the world and himself and explore their rational interconnections.

Husserl developed these ideas in Göttingen, where—thanks to his Logical Investigations and the support by Wilhelm Dilthey, who admired that work and recommended Husserl to the Prussian ministry of culture—he received an associate professorship (“Extraordinariat”, later turned into a “Persönliches Ordinariat”) in 1901. From 1910/11 and 1913, respectively, he served as founding (co-)editor of Logos (in the first issue of which his programmatic article “Philosophy as a Rigorous Science” appeared, containing a critique of naturalism) and of the Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Research (opening with his Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy). Husserl stayed in Göttingen until 1916. It is here that he made his most important philosophical discoveries (cf. Mohanty 1995), such as the transcendental-phenomenological method, the phenomenological structure of time-consciousness, the fundamental role of the notion of intersubjectivity in our conceptual system, the horizon-structure of our singular empirical thought, and more. In later works—most notably in On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1928), Formal and Transcendental Logic (1929), Cartesian Meditations (1931), The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (1954) and Experience and Judgement (1939)—these results were developed further and put into new contexts, such as the path-breaking project of linking the basic notions of science back to their conceptual roots in the pre-scientific (regions of the) “lifeworld” (Crisis).

In the year 1916 Husserl became Heinrich Rickert's successor as full professor (“Ordinarius”) in Freiburg/Breisgau, where (among many other things) he worked on passive synthesis (cf. Husserliana, vol. XI, XXXI). He gave four lectures on Phenomenological Method and Phenomenological Philosophy at University College, London, in 1922 (cf. Husserliana, vol. XXXV). In 1923 he received a call to Berlin, which he rejected. Husserl retired in 1928, his successor being his (and Rickert's) former assistant Martin Heidegger (whose major work Being and Time had been published in Husserl's Yearbook in 1927). In 1929 he accepted an invitation to Paris. His lectures there were published as Cartesian Meditations in 1931. In the same year, Husserl gave a number of talks on “Phenomenology and Anthropology”, in which he criticized his two “antipodes”, Heidegger and Max Scheler (cf. Husserl 1997). In 1933 Hitler took over in Germany. Husserl received a call to Los Angeles but rejected. Because of his Jewish ancestors, he became more and more humiliated and isolated. In 1935 he gave a series of invited lectures in Prague, resulting in his last major work, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology.

Edmund Husserl died on April 27, 1938 in Freiburg. His manuscripts (more than 40,000 pages in total) were rescued by the Franciscan Herman Leo Van Breda, who brought them to Leuven (Belgium), where the first Husserl archive was founded in 1939. (Today, there are further archives in Freiburg, Cologne, Paris, New York and Pittsburgh.) Since 1950 the Husserl archives are editing Husserl's collected works, Husserliana. . . . ."

Edmund Husserl (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

It seems to me a long, strange road from Husserl's ambitions to neuro-phenomenology.

The basic claim to me, is that there are structures of consciousness and this can be determined, to some degree, methodically and rigorously by phenomenology. Heidegger's challenge is that we are already thrown into a world and there is no end to our pre-suppositions, our situated-ness in the world.

Neuro-phenomenologists seem to me to be trying to get their bearings in relation to brain science - here is the phenomenology, check against the neurology - and vice-versa. That is fascinating work as is the work of Panksepp - the paper I read over the summer has impressed more than anything recently - I'll try to pull it up.

Panksepp's work seems to me the best argument against dualism and for bio-logical emergence (see also Tyler Burge on representational mind begins with arthropods: Perception: Origins of Mind (Tyler Burge, UCLA)) so that there is a definite place to point to a beginning of mind in nature. Now, that doesn't disprove metaphysics - but it seems to me that it will always be possible to tell a metaphysical story - so that the second most impressive thing to me in the last year or so is Rorty's neo-pragmatism, the idea that we can never get that transcendental argument (continental or analytic) we can never have philosophic proof but that we do have truth, in everyday life and in our science.