Showing papers in "Review of Metaphysics in 1985"

Husserl’s Transcendental Phenomenology and Essentialism

Abstract: There are two conflicting motives in Husserlian phenomenology, one of which leads, in my view, to a more genuinely transcendental philosophy. According to one of its original programmes, phenomenology was to be a descriptive science of essences and essential structures of various regions of phenomena and also of the empty region of object in general. The concern with meanings, as contradistinguished from essences, is equally original; it pervades the Prolegomena and the first three of the Logical Investigations and, of course, the first volume of the Ideas. But the specifically phenomenological enterprise of clarification of meanings — and this is the second of the two motives — slowly moves to the forefront, for a while overshadowed by the essentialism of the beginning, but later on freed from it and reasserting its primacy as the philosophical activity par excellence. The concern with essences affiliates phenomenology to the classical rationalistic tradition, while the concern with meanings brings it closer to the empiricistic tradition. If in the former enterprise phenomenology appears to be an essentialism of Aristotelian sort, in the latter, Hume remains its acknowledged precursor.

Teleological Time: A Variation on a Kantian Theme

Abstract: AN this paper I would like to suggest that by reconstructing the relationship between time and teleology (finality)?as this rela tionship might be implied by Kant's theory?one of the most complicated problems of this theory may be solved. This problem concerns a construction of time suitable to the particular needs of Kant's doctrines of the history of reason and philosophy, or of the history of mankind, which proceeds according to the total imper ative of morality (to bring the world nearer the state of "the supreme good on earth"). Teleological time, a concept which I shall attempt to present in this paper, has to do with the two employments of judgment (Urteilskraft), the determinant and the reflective. This teleological time is not merely a form of intuition, nor is it subject to the schematism of deterministic causality, and it is exempt from some impediments which render rational history, in the domains of theory and praxis alike, impossible, if indeed such a history requires time. Thus, I shall attempt in this paper to suggest a solution to the so-called Kantian "antinomy of history":1 Kant's theory employs time as a form of intuition,