Horizon. Studies in Phenomenology

9-44

Authors: Sergei Nikonenko

The matter of the article is to give an outline of American theories of intentionality and to compare it with E. Husserl’s phenomenology. It is one of the first Russian systematic studies of American theories on intentionality that is represented here. It is John Searle’s philosophy that is the main American theory of intentionality. Some other thinkers (R. Chisholm, J. Findlay, N. Rescher, E. Thompson, D.W. Smith, etc.) are studied here too. Searle treats intentionality as a natural quality of consciousness. He forbids the linguistic approach; intentionality is understood from the point of view of humanistic (internal) realism. Intentionality is successive when the subject is satisfied by his acquaintance with the object. The main feature of intentionality is aspectuality that has the subject of not eliminated subjectivity of any conscious act and the first person ontology. Searle proposes the collective intentionality that is analogous to phenomenological intersubjectivity. E. Thompson proposes the synthetic theory of intentionality that unites phenomenology, philosophy of consciousness and neural science. D.W. Smith proposes the theory of intentional context. He rejects the study of atomistic intentional acts. Husserl’s and Searle’s theories of phenomenology may be united in several main points: 1. Experience is an internal process; 2. Experience cannot be separated of aspectuality; 3. Intentionality cannot be eliminated in any conscious act; 4. The other mind can be considered only from internal point of view; 5. There is collective intentionality of mankind. There are several distinctions between Husserl and Searle: 1. Searle is an realist on intentionality, Husserl puts on an idealistic concept of it; 2. Searle considers intentionality from empirical point of view, not from the rationalist one; 3. Searle is an adept of skepticism about self, he rejects transcendental concept of cogito. But irrespective of distinctions there is convergence of analytical and phenomenological views in contemporary philosophy of consciousness.

58-78

Authors: Corijn Van Mazijk

Over the past years McDowell’s conceptualist theory has received mixed phenomenological reviews. Some phenomenologists have claimed that conceptualism involves an over-intellectualization of human experience. Others have drawn on Husserl’s work, arguing that Husserl’s theory of fulfillment challenges conceptualism and that his notion of “real content” is non-conceptual. Still others, by contrast, hold that Husserl’s later phenomenology is in fundamental agreement with McDowell’s theory of conceptually informed experience. So who is right? This paper purports to show that phenomenology does not have to choose between any of these positions. Central to the outline I offer is that there are multiple approaches to non-conceptual content in play today. By separating them we can begin to oversee the diversity of phenomenological contributions to the debate about non-conceptual content. I conclude that current literature presents us with at least three sound phenomenological accounts of non-conceptual content, but also that these are generally not incompatible with conceptualism.

97-115

Authors: Sergei Kulikov

The subject of our research is the features of naturalism and of historicism in the whole system of the scientific worldview. The author identifies and describes the types of naturalism, achieving the purpose of clarification of circumstances in which its separate options become complementary ways of scientific understanding of reality. The resulting picture is enriched with the features of historicism, introducing the element of relativity to the scientific views of the world. Special attention is paid to the possibility to reconstruct the eidos of science as a generalized ideal of research activities. The research methodology includes the implementation of the phenomenological research program, the foundations of which were laid in the works of Husserl. This program allows us to understand the idea of science in the framework of the ideal of cognitive activity, the roots of which date back to the writings of Aristotle. The phenomenological perspective of our research allows us to see the essential characteristics of both naturalism and historicism, to identify options for their constructive engagement. The result reveals a possibility to make a nontrivial conclusion about the relation between naturalism and historicism, for the debate of naturalism and of historicism, taken by itself, i.e. as relatively independent phenomenon, opens horizons of the internally unified consciousness understood in science in two ways. The first one is a set of research intentions of the validity; the second one coincides with the implicit dependence of the scientific worldview from the orientation to the historical changes of the foundations of self-reflection of science that, in fact, form the semantic structure of scientific knowledge as a unique ideal for research activities.

140-160

Authors: Vitaly Lekhtsier

This article focuses on the phenomenological aspects of Cheryl Mattingly’s empirical research. Cheryl Mattingly is one of the brightest representatives of modern American medical anthropology. Medical anthropology – actively developing social science – often, especially since the end of the 80-ies of the last century, refers to the conceptual resources of phenomenological philosophy to justify their methodological and value priorities. Such reference is connected with the attention of medical anthropologists to the subjective experience of illness and health, to the meaning of suffering, to patients’ storytelling, to situational effects of clinical interactions, to the changes in the life-world of man caused by serious chronic diseases. The first part of the article explicates the theoretical framework of the version of the applied phenomenology, which is offered by Mattingly in her long-term research conducted in 1990s and 2000 years. The subject of these research works was clinical interactions between occupational therapists and their patients. The analysis of these interactions is based on Paul Ricoeur’s phenomenologically grounded thesis that between the narrative and the experience of time there is an isomorphism thanks to the binding force of the plot. Mattingly brings the concept of narrative and a series of accompanying characteristics from the sphere of philosophical narratology to the sphere of phenomenology of (inter)action. The main idea of Mattingly is that the action itself has a narrative structure, – in the sense that actors themselves perform emplotment of interaction, configure the current events in a way that they are built into a whole, namely therapeutic history in which each successive episode of therapy follows from the previous one. The second part of the article illustrates on example of real therapy session how these ideas work in practice, in the process of the interpretation of particular therapeutic interactions. In general, we are planning to show that, although Mattingly’s appeal to phenomenological context is not systematic, and it is more correct to speak of the phenomenological “motives” in her work, it can be treated as one of the most interesting applications of phenomenological philosophy in the field of social sciences.

181-191

Authors: Alexander Frolov

We present here a Russian translation of the 8th paragraph of Husserl’s book “Experience and Judgment” (1939). The paragraph includes a systematic outline of the phenomenological conception of horizonedness, while in no other Husserl’s book – from “Ideas I” to “Crisis” –we can find a fragment dealing with the idea of horizon elaborated so deep. The idea however is a substantial element of Husserl’s conceptualization of experience as an open, indefinite process. In the 7th paragraph of “Experience and Judgment” the world is conceived as a universal “ground of certainty”, upon which all our experience is based, and in the 8th paragraph the intentional structure of experience (mostly as perception) is explicated. That structure is characterized as horizontal. The crucial difference here is between the “inner horizon” and the “outer horizon” of an object. The outer horizon stretches finally into the “world-horizon” – the ultimate, universal horizon comprising all partial horizons and perspectives. In its turn, typization functions here as a way of representation of objects laying beyond the field of what is given. Typization also covers latent aspects of present objects and concerns even their patent aspects. The most general type, according to Husserl, is “object as such” – a basic category of formal ontology. The idea of horizon has been a fundamental principle of classical phenomenology. Nowadays it provokes hot discussions among such authors as Jean-Luc Marion, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jacques Derrida. The discussions relate to the very essence of phenomenology. That’s why we find publication of the fragment to be important.

201-210

Authors: Dalius Jonkus

This publication presents three manuscripts of the famous Russian-Lithuanian philosopher Vasily Sesemann. We offer publications of essays on Scheler, Bergson and Lossky – these are the texts of Sesemann’s manuscript collection, which is located in Vilnius University (F122-104, F122-105, F122-106). This group of essays is integral. All these essays, in one way or another address the issue of the philosophical understanding of intuition, which Sesemann discussed in all his major works. Essays are dedicated to the philosophers who somehow influenced the author’s position. The texts were written during his stay in the camp of the GULAG (1950-1955) in Taishet (Irkutsk region). It is known that Sesemann taught Western philosophy and aesthetics for other prisoners. We can assume that these essays refer to the materials or recordings of his lectures. Among the prisoners in the same camp was Dandaron, who later became a famous scientist and created the original version of neo-Buddhism. While preparing manuscripts for publication it was discovered that in the posthumously published “Letters on Buddhism” Dandaron often recounts the thoughts of Sesemann, especially when it comes to understanding of intuition. In Dandaron’s handwritten archive in Ulan-Ude are the manuscripts, which, according to the titles and topics discussed, coincide with the manuscripts of Sesemann. From the available data we conclude that the manuscripts found in Dandaron’s archive – “The relationship between matter and spirit” and “Aesthetics” – are the recordings of Sesemann’s lectures.

235-240

Authors: Jakub Bużniak

The report presents an overview of the International Conference on “Phenomenology and Practice: The 2nd Conference on Traditions and Perspectives of the Phenomenological Movement In Central and Eastern Europe” that took place on September 8-10, 2016 at the Institute of Philosophy, Sociology and Journalism, University of Gdansk, Poland. The report characterizes the structure of the conference, presents the conference attendees and introduces the main ideas of key lectures given by the guests.

265-271

Authors: Man-To Tang

The review provides an outline of the book and critically examines the Heideggerean hermeneutic phenomenological approach developed by F. W von Herrmann to the refutation of Husserl’s phenomenology. Reviewer traces four essential differences in author’s critical analysis of the two phenomenological approaches by Heidegger and Husserl, and problematizes several difficulties in the author’s interpretation of Husserl’s phenomenology. On the one hand, the reviewer shows that Husserl’s phenomenology, at least, can be interpreted in two ways, namely the static approach and the genetic approach. Husserl’s genetic phenomenology, especially in Crisis, explicitly expresses his hermeneutic character. Therefore, von Herrmann’s interpretation may not be faithful to Husserl’s phenomenology as a whole. On the other hand, von Herrmann develops Heidegger’s idea of the primacy of a-reflective hermeneutics, which is a pre-theoretical primordial science. With reference to K. Popper’s and K. Jaspers’ criteria of science, the reviewer doubts that the development, which aims at going beyond reflective and theoretical science, can still be regarded as a science because it cannot meet any established criterion.