Acknowledgements Preface 1. Content 2. Experiential conceptualism 3. Conceptualism and knowledge 4. Against experiential conceptualism 5. Conceptual and nonconceptual content 6. The contents of perception 7. To the things themselves Bibliography.

Perception and Knowledge: A Phenomenological Account

First of all, I would like to thank Dr. Leswin Laubscher, the current Chair of the Psychology Department at Duquesne University, for inviting me to speak to the department more than half a century after I started my career here as a phenomenological psychologist. It is also my first visit to the department in more than a quarter of a century, so you must forgive me if certain nostalgic feelings come through. However, it is good to see that there is still a phenomenological presence in the department because the development of a phenomenological psychology was the very raison d’etre of the department. In my talk today, I shall try to indicate how we believed that the application of phenomenological philosophical thought to psychology would be helpful to a psychology that wanted to understand human persons in an adequate way. If in the 1950s some of us found psychology to be lacking, what was wrong with it and how would one go about correcting it? What was holding back its vigorous development? Why was our understanding of the human person not advancing the way that our knowledge of nature was progressing? Well, for one thing, the human person was not so much the theme of the research psychologists of that era as an animal was, and if a human was thematized, it was not the essential human that was studied so much as human phenomena with primarily sensorial and physiological manifestations. Why did this state of affairs exist? Because psychology strove to become a natural science and the phenomena that were studied had to show characteristics that were similar to nature and they had to have an empirical basis. In that era, whether or not such an approach clarified human phenomena was not as important as psychology’s scientific status. More important than the clarification of human phenomena was psychology’s determination to be a natural science, although mainstream psychologists honestly believed they were doing both.

https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/features/hum-42-233.pdf

Phenomenological Philosophy as the Basis for a Human Scientific Psychology

Husserl’s Logical Investigations has undergone explicitly conceptualist and non-conceptualist interpretations. For Richard Cobb-Stevens, he has extended understanding into the domain of sensuous intuition, leaving no simple perceptions that are actually separated from higher-level understanding. According to Kevin Mulligan, Husserl does in fact sunder nominal and propositional seeing from the simple or straightforward—and yet interpretative—seeing of particulars. To see simply is not to exercise an individual meaning or a general concept. Arguing that Logical Investigations provides evidence for both views, I endeavour to show that the account of perceptual consciousness in Husserl’s subsequent work is far more clear and consistent. It is one of growing beyond the situation portrayed by Mulligan and into the one explicated by Cobb-Stevens. Though they are notionally separable, pre-conceptual syntheses at the passive and noematic levels are inevitably interwoven with conceptual and categorial articulations in a developed consciousness.

Understanding and simple seeing in Husserl

An argument is made for the relevance of phenomenological hermeneutics to economics, with special attention to recent debates on hermeneutics among economists of the Austrian school of Ludwig von Mises and F. A. Hayek. Hermeneutics is explicated in the context of Husserlian phenomenology, with special attention to phenomenology's Aristotelian roots. Naive and methodological forms of “objectivism”; are contrasted with hermeneutics, which recovers the horizons of scientific knowledge: the whole, and the activities of the human knower. Finally, the charges that hermeneutics entails pernicious forms of relativism and historicism are confronted.

Hermeneutics: A protreptic

This paper accomplishes three goals. First, the essay demonstrates that Edmund Husserl’s theory of meaning consciousness from his 1901 Logical Investigations is internally inconsistent and falls apart upon closer inspection. I show that Husserl, in 1901, describes non-intuitive meaning consciousness as a direct parallel or as a ‘mirror’ of intuitive consciousness. He claims that non-intuitive meaning acts, like intuitions, have substance and represent their objects. I reveal that, by defining meaning acts in this way, Husserl cannot account for our experiences of countersensical, absurd, or impossible meanings. Second, I examine how Husserl came to recognize this 1901 mistake in his 1913/14 Revisions to the Sixth Logical Investigation (Husserliana XX-1/2). I discuss how he accordingly reformulates his understanding of non-intuitive meaning acts from the ground up in those Revisions, where this also allows for him to properly account for the experience of impossible meanings. Instead of describing them as mirrors of intuitions, Husserl takes non-intuitive meaning acts to be modifications of intuitions, where they have no substance and do not represent their objects. Finally, in the conclusion to this essay, I demonstrate how this fundamental change to his understanding of meaning consciousness forced Husserl to revise other central tenets of his philosophy, such that the trajectory of his thought can only be properly understood in light of these revisions to his theory of non-intuitive meaning consciousness.

Smashing Husserl’s Dark Mirror: Rectifying the Inconsistent Theory of Impossible Meaning and Signitive Substance from the Logical Investigations

La theorie des termes syntaxiques ("est", "et", etc.) chez Husserl et leur fonctionnement dans l'"intuition categorielle". L'intuition categorielle comme "presentification" d'un "fait articule". Les differentes varietes d'absence d'un objet categoriel. La theorie de la "recognition simple". Comparaison des theories de Husserl avec celles de la philosophie analytique: peut-on assumer correctement le probleme de la designabilite des choses sans aborder philosophiquement la question de la "presentification"? Quel concept de la philosophie peut-on tirer de la reflexion phenomenologique sur la "presentification"?.

Robert Sokolowski

Papers

7. Husserl's Concept of Categorial Intuition