Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Phenomenology

  • Could the Visible Surface of a Physical Thing be a Mental Item?

    The Sparring Partner offers the following tetrad for our delectation.  1) I take this to be the visible surface of a desk. 2) It is almost certain that this in fact [is] the visible surface of a desk, but it is possible that it is not (it may be the result of a highly realistic…

  • Butchvarov’s Paradox of Antirealism and Husserl’s Paradox of Human Subjectivity

    New and improved! Originally posted in October, 2015. For a longish review and critique of the Butchvarov volume mentioned below, see my "Butchvarov on the Dehumanization of Philosophy," Studia Neoaristotelica, vol. 13, no. 2 (2016), pp. 181-195. Butchvarov and Husserl are clearly related to my present and ongoing rehearsal of the problematic of Kantian transcendental…

  • Excerpts from Husserl’s Crisis of the European Sciences

    Here

  • Demarcation and Directedness: Notes on Brentano

    Here again is the famous passage from Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (1874): Every mental phenomenon is characterized by what the Scholastics of the Middle Ages called the intentional (or mental) inexistence of an object, and what we might call, though not wholly unambiguously, reference to a content, direction toward an object (which is not…

  • A Reader Asks about Existence and Instantiation

    My responses are in blue. Hello, Dr. Vallicella. I am a reader of your blog. I just read your article "Existence: Two Dogmas of Analysis" in Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives in Metaphysics (eds. Novotny and Novak, Routledge, 2014, pp. 45-75 , and I thought it was fantastic. I will have to read it again at some point.…

  • Notes on the Introduction to Michel Henry, Incarnation: A Philosophy of Flesh

    I have Steven Nemes to thank for introducing me to the thought of Michel Henry. I recall as a graduate student in the 'seventies  having seen a big fat tome published in 1973 by Martinus Nijhoff entitled The Essence of Manifestation by one Michel Henry. I may have paged through parts of it back then,…

  • Too Late Again!

    Every once in  while I will get the notion to send  'fan mail' to a philosopher whose work I am reading and for whose work I am grateful.  But I am sometimes too late. The search for an e-mail address turns up an obituary. The last time this occurred was when I wanted to congratulate…

  • A Discussion with Lukas Novak about Transcendental Idealism and the Transcendental Ego

    The extended comment thread below began life in the comments to Why Did I Move Away from Phenomenology? (13 October 2020) ……………………….. Dear Bill, You have exactly nailed my fundamental problem with transcendental idealism by this: What is this transcendental ego if it is the purely subjective source of all ontic validity, Seinsgeltung? Does it exist?…

  • On the Manifold Meanings of ‘World’

    A reader asked whether the concept world in the transcendental-phenomenological sense is a limit concept.  Before addressing that question, and continuing the series on limit concepts, a survey of the several senses of 'world ' is in order, or at least those senses with some philosophical or proto-philosophical relevance. 1) In the planetary sense, the…

  • Steven Nemes’ Review of Dietrich von Hildebrand’s Ethics: Some Questions

    The review is a well written and very fair summary of von Hildebrand's book. (I read portions of the latter in graduate school days but I do not currently have it in my library.)  Here is the review's main critical passage together with my remarks. [Von] Hildebrand’s arguments for the objectivity of value therefore seem…

  • 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…

  • 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,…

  • 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…