Volume 26 (2017): Edition 1 (October 2017)

In what follows, I intend to address an issue which is at the boundaries of the phenomenological method of reflective explication, and that, in this sense, points to some limitations of the phenomenological approach to consciousness and mind. I am referring to an aporetic situation that is at the heart of the phenomenological analysis of passivity. On the one hand, phenomenology shows, at least indirectly, a passive life that is beyond the first steps of the activity of the ego in the receptive, affective life. This is something that is beyond the rising of an ego, and from which a phenomenology of the ego-form of subjective life could be addressed. On the other hand, the analytic and conceptual tools of the phenomenological method have no grips on this basic realm of subjective life. As a result, Husserl’s analysis of passivity starts with the evidence of a pre-affective, pre-egoic realm, from which a phenomenology of the ego could be developed. However, Husserl’s analyses end up with the denegation of this dimension, as if it was invisible for the phenomenological method. As a consequence, the starting point of the analysis is not passivity proper, but rather the primitive forms of receptivity, which is already a first layer of the activity of the ego. Instead of an analysis of the ego-polarization (the “birth” of the ego), the egoic layer of conscious life is simply presupposed. A phenomenology of the ego-form is, thus, at the same time promised and denied. This aporetic situation is visible in the alteration of the concept of a passive pre-givenness in Husserl’s Analysis Concerning Passive Synthesis.

This article reconstructs the development of Husserl’s definition of metaphysics as the ultimate science of reality in the courses and lectures written up to the year 1905. The analysis of these texts casts light on Husserl’s philosophical self-understanding in the wider context of late Nineteenth Century German philosophy as well as on the fundamental role that metaphysical interests played in the development of his thought from its earliest stage. A particular attention is devoted to Husserl’s early views about the relation between the theory of knowledge and metaphysics, whose analysis is a necessary preliminary step to address the theoretical issue of the relation between transcendental phenomenology and metaphysics.

By its very name, phenomenology seems to invoke a priority claim on phenomena. And yet it has not been necessary to wait for phenomenology in oder to have a proper account of phenomena. One need only to take a look at the history of philosophy, from Plato to Kant, as well as at the history of sciences, from physics to psychology, so as to register a wide range of uses concerning the concept of phenomenon. The understanding of what a phenomenon is, in a phenomenological sense, should therefore at least not be completely compatible with any other, if phenomenology has to exist as a discipline and as a method. That is one of the issues at stake in the debate between phenomenology and neokantianism, between Husserl, to a certain extent Brentano, and Natorp. It is on this debate that we shall draw attention, if we wish to grasp the reasons behind the phenomenological conception of the phenomenon, especially at the time of the Logische Untersuchungen.

This article intends to identify what is at stake in Stumpf’s critical assessment of Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology as a “phenomenology without phenomena”. After reconstructing the main arguments through which these two conceptions of phenomenology argue against each other, it is argued that the main issue of this debate concerns the value that is attributed to the idea of intentionality in the definition of the phenomenological program, and consequently in the very definition of the “phenomenon”. Ultimately, the question risen is that of the relationship between phenomenology and philosophy itself, depending on whether phenomenology is conceived as a propedeutic science (Stumpf) or as a fundamental science (Husserl).

This paper focus on the phenomenological theories of perception and intuitive acts in general, and aims to show the relevance of William James’ concept of fringe to understand them. Although Husserl claims that James’ analysis were carried on without the phenomenological reduction and were thus biased by psychological and physiological prejudices, the paper stresses the high value of those analysis: James’ intended to remain faithful to the meaning of lived experience and avoided any considerations where descriptions could be entangled with uncriticized philosophical theories (e.g. about the nature of brain states). The paper also aims to show that James’ importance for Husserl could be extended beyond the explanation of acts intending singular individuals to the acts intending universal objectivities and essences.

Do we appear to ourselves in a specific way that requires a phenomenological description? Do we need a phenomenology of self-knowledge? Another way to raise this question about the legitimacy of a phenomenological approach to the Self is to ask whether a philosophical analysis of the linguistic use of the personal pronouns is able to provide a satisfactory account of self-knowledge. Does the linguistic turn make phenomenology superfluous? Discussing the respective merits of the linguistic and phenomenological approaches to the concept of the Self through a crossed analysis of Sartre, Ricoeur, and Descombes, this paper stresses the complementarity between a phenomenological approach that focuses on the way we appear to ourselves and a linguistic analysis of the first-person pronoun. It claims that this relation of complementarity makes both approaches necessary to put forward the paradoxes of self-knowledge.

The issue of the event and its relation to the concept of phenomenon has been widely spread in the French phenomenology of the last decades. Firstly, this article aims at retracing some general aspects of the role of the event in what has been called the “New phenomenology in France” and raises the problem of a distinction between different uses of this concept. Secondly, it analyses in two phases the presence of this topic in Marion’s phenomenology. On the one hand, it has to be shown that the concept of the event occupies an increasingly important role in Marion’s thinking, for it characterises givenness and phenomenality as such. On the other hand, I intend to problematize the position of Marion, in so far as it leads to an integral givenness and unfolds on the basis of an ambiguous overlap of the themes of givenness and intuition. Finally, Marion’s analysis will be contrasted to Derrida’s thinking, which allows us to think at the event as an impossible that happens, as a constitutive non-givenness and therefore as an essential limitation for phenomenology.

As we turn to the lived experience of memory, we are confronted with an eerie and enigmatic possibility: the possibility to remember what we ourselves never lived. How to explain phenomenologically this enigmatic but fundamental level of spatialized memory? I would like to come back to these issues in order to face yet another fundamental question: Does a phenomenology of spatialized memory require any onto-phenomenological concretizations?

The background concern of this paper is the well-rehearsed debate on the “theological turn” (or “veerings”) in French Phenomenology that was ignited by Dominique Janicaud some 25 years ago in his vociferous critique of several leading French thinkers. It also responds to subsequent contestations against Janicaud by numerous scholars defending these thinkers radicalising of phenomenology in their attempts to account for what Emanuel Levinas had “stirred up in the phenomenological field” by re-posing the question of the philosophical status of the idea of God. What is pivotal to Janicaud in his exclusionary critique and drawing of phenomenological boundaries is to hold dearly to the method as Edmund Husserl intended. In doing so, only describable phenomena that appear (or are logically subtended to appear) provide the litmus for a bona fide phenomenology. In opening and broadening the method to include experiences of a transcendent, religious nature as the French thinkers do, orthodox Husserlian thinking places these projects into question. The purpose of this paper is to question these post-Husserlian thinkers with a more faithful reading of Husserl. I analyse three key areas to suggest a ‘divine limit’ to phenomena: first, the concept of “the phenomenon” as developed in Husserl’s project; second, the ‘status of the idea of God’ in Husserl’s writings; and third, the relevant philosophical discourse on God that emerges from the Janicaud-led debate through critical commentary on the phenomenology of the “inapparent”. As a consequence, God is argued to be a divine limit to Husserlian phenomenology, but not religious belief itself.

This paper discusses Gilbert Ryle’s image of philosophy as cartography in an attempt to explore the idea of a cartography of the phenomenon, confronting it with the sense it takes in Edmund Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology. Ryle tries to grasp the particularity of philosophical tasks as being about specific sorts of problems, not about specific sorts of objects. What is required both of a cartographer and of a philosopher is, according to him, to look at familiar spaces in wholly unusual terms. Husserlian phenomenology then, with its rediscovery of consciousness as an absolute, unbounded field, meets quite well this demand. The uncovered field of the phenomena is not a new region, opposing that of the objects as faced in the natural attitude. It is rather a completely different attitude, just as a map is not a share of the world, but a distinct orientation towards it. The phenomenon, therefore, would not be something that is there to be cartographed as much as a kind of cartography itself. A phenomenological cartography, however, is one that has its specific marks, different from those of the Rylean conception.

This paper is the attempt to provide a novel and original reconstruction of Husserl’s phenomenology, its meaning and scope, on the basis of the two “operative” concepts of Mannigfaltigkeit and Konstitution. It critically engages some current mainstream interpretations of phenomenology and suggests a different take on the idea of transcendental phenomenology.