Horizon. Studies in Phenomenology

13-31

Authors: Rosemary R. P. Lerner

Unlike Kant’s practical philosophy and aesthetics that still enjoy a wide popularity, two Kantian topics that belong to his transcendental philosophy have become favourite targets of manifold attacks as out-dated and archaic, especially during the 20th century: the concept of the “transcendental” and the role of the “I think”. Yet, a century and a half later Husserl salvaged both of these concepts in their essential core, and – against the tide of his time – dealt with them anew, for he considered them revolutionary and unprecedented in history. Husserl’s phenomenological method profoundly differed from Kant’s constructive methodology – albeit his transcendental turn was also inspired by it – enabling him to overcome many of the controversial aspects of Kant’s interpretation. Thanks to Husserl’s retrieval, both concepts survived the implacable judgment of history and are currently being seriously reconsidered, in ever increasing measure, as relevant for philosophy. Although both topics are intertwined and should be dealt with jointly, this article is only concerned with some aspects that are central to the “meaning of the transcendental”. First, as it has been introduced by Kant, and second, as it has been retrieved by Husserl in its essential core, broadening its reach far beyond the merely “speculative” or “theoretical” level to which Kant confines it, in order to encompass the whole field of lived human experiences (theoretical, practical, or evaluative), as well as in cultural and scientific endeavours.

57-78

Authors: Azul Katz

The present paper explores the place that imagination and phantasy hold in the transcendental philosophies of Kant and Husserl when they are not subordinated to functions that are external to them. The Kantian imagination (Einbildungskraft) has a key function within reason, both theoretical and practical, but it seems to exhibit its true potential in the aesthetic subjective domain, as productive imagination — in addition, this aesthetic domain is defined as the most properly human. In Husserl’s work, phantasy (Phantasie) has a relevant methodological function in the intuition of essences and plays other constituting roles, for example in empathy — and therefore in intersubjectivity. Nevertheless, the Husserlian phantasy shows its full potential not when it is bound to a presentation through perception — as it does in its constituting functions, but when it is pure and moves freely in an enlarged eidetic sphere. Husserlian phantasy would not only allow the transit from facts to essences, but it would also allow the reverse path, limiting essences towards facticity. In this framework, a final consideration points to the challenges raised by the exploration of this intermediate sphere of experiences involving productive imagination and pure phantasy, regarding the hierarchy and margins of the transcendental constitution.

98-102

Authors: Francesco Pisano

Husserl’s late claim of that transcendental logic is self-founded stands in a puzzling relation with the facticity of nature. This relation concerns issues such as the traceableness of a “living present” in the immanence of living consciousness. The article considers this matter through a specific perspective, gained by reference to the project of a transcendental foundation of the science of nature. This project requires the problematic possibility of a formal determination of facticity. One could characterize the phenomenological finding of a “living present” as Husserl’s attempt to resolve the discrepancy between fact and form in a “living being” which consists of both actual materiality and transcendental ideality. This conciliatory solution remains questionable, given the impossibility to provide an a priori foundation of this synthetic moment through the self-reflexive movement of transcendental logic. However, the systematic project of transcendental phenomenology as such entails the question concerning the a priori foundation of our ordinary knowledge of facts. It seems, then, to require a solution of this sort. The problem of grounding the scientific knowledge of natural facts dates back at least to Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics. So does the need for the definition of an empirical moment of this grounding. A discussion of Kant’s Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft presents an aporetic facet of the way in which transcendental philosophy responds to this need. An analogous impasse occurs in Husserl’s mature work. The concept of “living present” holds a central role in defining Husserl’s stance towards this stalemate. The analysis of this role aims to clarify both Husserl’s specific position in the broader context of transcendental philosophy, and an aspect of the transcendental foundation of the science of nature. I conclude that this foundation must encompass a factual, non-formalizable element: a material residue, required in order to complete its reflexive movement.

137-159

Authors: Claudio Tarditi

In this text, I intend to demonstrate the relevance of Husserl’s phenomenology for the debate on Cantor’s continuum hypothesis. Once described the classical formulation of this problem by Cantor, Dedekind, Zermelo-Fraenkel, and Hilbert, I observe that the current discussion about this issue is characterized by the opposition between a Platonist (Gödel) and a formalist (Cohen) solution. Although this latter is widespread among mathematicians, a few of them still think that the continuum conjecture is relevant for a philosophical foundation of set theory and, in general, for a scientific description of reality. Most of them have been somehow inspired by Husserl's phenomenology. This is the case, for instance, for Weyl and Gödel himself, even if both of them gradually abandoned phenomenology for, respectively, constructivism/predicativism and Platonism. My aim in this text is to reconstruct this “minor” history, in order to show how Husserl’s account of the continuum, developed in different ways by Weyl and Gödel, remains the unique radical attempt to found mathematical formalization on intuition. Although the continuum, namely the phenomenological condition of both the flux of the lived-experiences and the flowing of the intuitive data, is a real leitmotiv of the phenomenological method as a whole, it plays a peculiar role in the early Husserl, notably in his lectures of 1891 on Philosophy of Arithmetic, those of 1905-1908 On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, and those of 1907 on Things and Space. In these texts, there emerges a theory of how the concept of the continuum originates in the intuition of concrete data: more precisely, the intuition of continuity is conceived as the phenomenological condition for any mathematical formalization of the continuum. This does not entail that Husserl is not committed to the problem of a rigorous formalization of the continuum. Rather, as demonstrated by his in-depth inspection of spatial perception and time-consciousness, he is fully aware of the limits of any attempt of formalizing continuity (the same limits Weyl will emphasize concerning Cantor-Dedekind’s axiom). Accordingly, it is precisely for its attempt to keep together intuition and formalization that transcendental phenomenology still plays a relevant role in the current debate about the foundation of mathematics.

186-202

Authors: Don Beith

The critical insights of transcendental philosophy and phenomenology evolve out of a tension in the nature of consciousness. On the one hand, consciousness is a synthetic activity or intentional that discloses the horizon in which meanings and objects have conditions of possibility. On the other hand, in perception we find the workings of sense that point to a dynamic, expressive origin prior to the pure activity of consciousness. Our investigation is concerned with explaining how this passivity of consciousness is itself a synthesis that arises out of our expressive bodily nature. There is a clear logical connection between the ways Immanuel Kant, Edmund Husserl, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty conceive of a synthesis within sensibility and bodily affectivity, where each thinker requires us to conceptualize nature as a mode of expressivity, with the implication that transcendental conditions of possibility must, mysteriously, happen within the very intercorporeal and temporal fields that they render possible.

223-227

Authors: Eric Beauron

In Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, Kant develops what the Critique of Pure Reason calls the “rational physiology”, which is the metaphysics of corporeal nature. The aim of this text is to specify the object in general as matter and as the “movable in space” and, for this purpose, to take into account the various properties that make possible the material donation of the object, such as rest, speed, direction, impenetrability, attraction, repulsion, etc., the so-called predicables of the pure understanding (§ 10 of the CPR). Those predicables constitute the properties that are indeed necessary to ground the natural science (mathematical physics) and are here examined from a transcendental point of view thanks to the system of the categories and principles of the Analytics of Principles. The structure of the book is thus the following: Phoronomy deals with quantity (Axioms of Intuition), the Dynamics with quality (Anticipations of Perception), the Mechanics with relations (Analogies of Experience) and the Phenomenology with modalities (Postulates of Empirical Thought). What Kant seeks to account for, then, is the applicability of the mathematics that make the intuitive and apodictic certainty possible thanks to the construction of the object in an a priori intuition. The methodological problem concerns the possibility of this a priori construction, which must be here realized in the realm of existence. How to connect the empirical properties of the object to the necessary and universal principles provided by the categories in order to account for the possibility of the mathematical construction of the object? The metaphysics of the corporeal nature is different from the transcendental cognition of the pure nature in general because it considers the transcendental schematism from the point of view of space and not of time

234-239

Authors: Paul Slama

This review presents historical and philosophical hypotheses of Chad Engelland's book by first considering the general thesis of a Heidegger transcendental philosopher, then emphasizing the importance of this theme for the treatise Sein und Zeit (1927), finally considering promises and aporia of such an interpretation for the second Heidegger. Heidegger first endorsed the program of a certain transcendental philosophy, to reject it in a second part of his work. Each time, the problem is to know what type of transcendental philosophy it is, which implies asking the question of Heidegger's relation to both transcendental philosophy of Kant and transcendental phenomenology of Husserl. Does the thought of utensility or authenticity in Being and Time refer to a transcendental questioning? And is it a Kantian or Husserlian transcendental? But also, can the thought of Ereignis and of the last God be so, as C. Engelland thinks? The reviewer insists on the importance of understanding the role of intuition in phenomenology’s relationship to Kant, but also on the link made by Heidegger between Kant's first and second Critiques, that is, between the theory and practice. Finally, it shows from the book the role of affectivity, not without indicating possible extensions including the analysis of neokantism, or Hölderlin.