Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Husserl

  • If You Understood, You’d Agree!

    There is a privileging of one's position whereby every objection can only be proof of misunderstanding. I get this privileging impression from Eugen Fink. One example is on p. 47 of The Sixth Cartesian Meditation.

  • Husserl, Thomas, and Sister Adelgundis

    Some of us live within the tension between the autonomy of reason and  obedient faith and trust.  On the one side, we are admirers of Edmund Husserl with his  ethos of critical examination, of cautious inquiry  painstaking and protracted, of scholarly sobriety; we share his fear of error, of doxastic over-extension; we subscribe to an…

  • Edith Stein on Sister Clara and Edmund Husserl

    A search on 'Sister Adelgundis' turned up the following which I reproduce from this interesting weblog. Pax Christi! Dear Sister Adelgundis, Our greetings go from one death-bed to the other.  Our Sister Clara departed today for eternity, very gently, after a year of suffering.  I commended our dear Master [Husserl] to her often, and will…

  • Kleingeld meine Herren, Kleingeld!

    Edmund Husserl used to say that to his seminarians to keep them careful and wissenschaftlich and away from assertions of the high-flying and sweeping sort.  "Small change, gentlemen, small change!" Unfortunately, the philosophical small change doesn't add up.  Specialization, no matter how narrow and protracted, no matter how carefully pursued, fails to put us on…

  • Edith Stein: Faith, Reason, and Method: Theocentric or Egocentric?

    August 9th is the feast day of St. Theresa Benedicta of the Cross in the Catholic liturgy.  She is better known to philosophers as Edith Stein (1891-1942), brilliant Jewish student of and assistant to Edmund Husserl, philosopher, Roman Catholic convert, Carmelite nun, victim of the Holocaust at Auschwitz, and saint of the Roman Catholic Church.…

  • Thomism and Husserlian Phenomenology: Combinable?

    Over the phone the other night, Steven Nemes told me that his project is to synthesize Thomism and phenomenology. I expressed some skepticism. Here are my reasons. Part I: Methodological Incompatibility Essential to Thomism is the belief that the existence of God can be proven a posteriori by human reason unaided by divine revelation.  Thus…

  • Excerpts from Enzo Paci, Phenomenological Diary

    May 30, 1957         Glory has no meaning, power has no meaning, your personal success has no meaning. Vanity. That vanity which Husserl always fought. And he was sincere. He did indeed love truth and live for truth. Glory is the mundane, and the meaning of life reveals itself only in the negation of the mundane,…

  • Ruminations on the Dative of Disclosure

    Steven Nemes comments on my long Husserl entry: [Robert] Sokolowski’s reflections in his Introduction to Phenomenology (Cambridge University Press, 2000) are also helpful. He maintains that the transcendental ego is not substantially different than the empirical ego. In other words, the transcendental ego is not some different substance from the empirical ego, i.e. the [animated]…

  • Why Did I Move Away from Phenomenology? Part I

    I met with Steven Nemes recently for a productive and intense discussion of people, politics, religion, and in particular the metaphysics of individuality and possibility.  I think of Nemes as my 'philosophical grandson.' Although never formally my student, he discovered my A Paradigm Theory of Existence when he was a freshman at Arizona State University,…

  • Husserl, Knight of Reason

    Edmund Husserl was born on this date in 1859. How do we honor a philosopher? By re-enacting his thoughts, sympathetically, yet critically. Amicus Plato sed magis amica veritas. Ich muss meinen Weg gehen so sicher, so fest entschlossen und so ernst wie Duerers Ritter, Tod und Teufel.    "I must go my way as surely,…

  • Is the World Inconceivable Apart from Consciousness?

    That depends. It depends on what 'world' means. Steven Nemes quotes Dermot Moran on the former's Facebook page: [1] In contrast to the outlook of naturalism, Husserl believed all knowledge, all science, all rationality depended on conscious acts, acts which cannot be properly understood from within the natural outlook at all. [2] Consciousness should not…

  • Intentionality in Thomas and Husserl

    My Serbian correspondent Milosz sent me a reference to an article in which we read: What attracted these Catholics to Husserl was his theory of intentionality—the notion that human consciousness is always consciousness “of” something. This appealed to Catholics because it appeared to open a way beyond the idealism of modern philosophy since Kant, which…

  • The Philosopher and the Christian

    For Vito Caiati ………………….. George W. Bush once referred to Jesus Christ as his favorite political philosopher, thereby betraying both a failure to grasp what a philosopher is and who Jesus claimed to be. Jesus Christ is not a philosopher.  The philosopher is a mere lover of wisdom.  His love is desirous and needy; it…

  • Lev Shestov on Edmund Husserl

    In Memory of a Great Philosopher It is just at this point that we find the most enigmatic and significant contribution of Husserl's philosophy. For here the question arises: Why did Husserl demand with such extraordinary insistence that I read Kierkegaard? For Kierkegaard, in contrast to Husserl, sought the truth not in reason but in…

  • Edmund Husserl, Tobacco-Logische Untersuchungen

    Real philosophers smoke.  Excerpt: I. Materials (from Husserl’s letters)1 Husserl asks Johannes Daubert to order cigars from tobacconist Rennert in Munich (November 11, 1906): For Saturday (for an evening of pleasant company) I would need a good import, say around 40 or 45 DM per thousand, but only a small box of 25. It is…