Horizon. Studies in Phenomenology

389-408

Authors: WITOLD PŁOTKA

This article is an attempt to present Husserl’s phenomenology as a moderate form of rationalism. By ‘moderate rationalism’ is understood, first, a theory that does not exclude the problem of irrationality, and that comprehends the rational as a correlate of the irrational. Second, it is a theory that performs its analyses by adopting the thesis that evidence can be achieved at many levels and grades. Here perfect evidence can also appear as imperfect. Yet this imperfect evidence (as an equivalent to unreason) can be a subject of evidential inquiry (as an equivalent to reason). The argument is that moderate rationalism is connected with the transcendental character of phenomenology and leads to the perennial reconsideration of the question of evidence (Evidenz). A basic claim is that irrationality is to be understood in terms of possible vague levels and grades of evidence. By developing ‘moderate rationalism’ thus understood, one is interested in understanding reason, that is, in the question of the essence of reason in its correlation with unreason. Here, moderate rationalism is directly interested not in rational arguments, but in ‘elucidation’ of reason. It is argued that phenomenology of reason also investigates ‘irrational evidence,’ for example, background evidence, evidence with respect to others, as well as all forms of fallible evidence. Therefore, the main question of moderate rationalism is Husserl’s question of evidence.

442-459

Authors: YAROSLAV SLININ

ranz Brentano takes as a premise of his theory that along with an external experience there is an internal experience. The external experience introduces us into the world of things that are transcendental with regard to our consciousness. The internal experience helps us to read the structure of the consciousness itself. While the basis of the external experience is censorial perception, the basis of the internal experience is internal perception. The internal perception shows that the consciousness is a sequence of acts in the flow of our internal time. According to Brentano each act of consciousness is an intention or an orientation towards an object, which can be called an intentional object. Intentions together with their objects are immanent with regard to consciousness. Among the acts of external experience are censorial perception, imagination, contemplation, desire, will, and etc. There is no agreement within philosophers on the issue of the relation between intentional objects of the acts of that type and transcendental things. On this basis, Brentano believes that the data of the external experience acts is not obvious. On the contrary, the data of the internal experience is obvious since the objects of inner perception are the acts of consciousness, and so the inner experience has nothing that is transcendent with regard to consciousness. Brentano points out that scholastic philosophers have already been aware of human consciousness intentional nature. The article investigates the theory of soul powers of Meister Eckhart. According to Eckhart soul powers are, among others, censorial perception, imagination, intellect, and will. The results of their contact with objects that belong to the external, created world are the images of that objects in soul. Hence, soul powers correspond to intentions of external experience acts, and images in soul correspond to the intentional objects of that acts. Furthermore, Eckhart argues that another power intended not towards external, created world, but towards consciousness profundity can be woken up in souls of specially prepared human beings. Eckhart refers to this ‘honorable’ intention as to ‘light’ or ‘spark’ of the soul. This ‘spark’ is fully related to the inner experience and meets God on its own way not in the capacity of an image, but at first hand and in a manifest manner. However, it is important to note that according to Eckhart Holy Trinity is only an intermediate point on the way of ‘honorable’ intention. The intentional object that is at the very end on the way of ‘honorable’ intention is allegorically called by Eckhart the Profundity of Profundity, Silent Desert, and Undivided Silence.

487-501

Authors: GEORGY CHERNAVIN

The article deals with Wittgenstein’s interpretation of the Heideggerian thesis “the nothing noths.” The phenomenological utterances are, according to him, “unarticulated sounds.” We discuss the following unsettling situation: theses of phenomenological philosophy (in this case of existential phenomenology), transferred to the field of philosophy of language, lose their meaning, turn into “incompetent sounds.” How is mutual understanding possible if, in the course of a philosophical discussion, the words (coming from one of the interlocutors or from both of them) turn into unarticulated sounds? Nevertheless, despite the alleged “incomprehensibility” of phenomenological expressions, Wittgenstein wants to “pay tribute” to Heidegger and he is looking for similar motives in his own philosophy. The most important of these motives is the one of philosophical disquiet. Wittgenstein goes through the options of how to understand “the nothing noths,” not so much questioning what Heidegger wanted to say, but rather why he wanted to say it. What can make a philosopher utter a tautology? Is this strange phrase the symptom of something else? What does it replace, displaces? What hurts a philosopher, if he has such a strange verbal behavior? The first hypothesis of Wittgenstein is that the author of the statement “the nothing noths” wants to get rid of a philosophical disquiet. This is Wittgenstein’s own motive—an indistinct intellectual disquiet, a “mental cramp,” a “hair on the tongue” from which it is necessary to get rid of. Then Wittgenstein (quite in the spirit of Carnap) reflects on the fact that the phrase “the nothing noths” can be eliminated by introducing a notation in which this sentence cannot be written. Wittgenstein believes that the disquiet will go away with this unhappy sentence and tries to treat the “sick” verb “to noth” applying to it various metaphors: a landscape or a maritime metaphor, a mechanical, an architectural, a decorative, a didactic and, finally—a digestive one. Oddly enough, it is from here (from the metaphor of stomach pain) that Wittgenstein takes a step toward the apt remark that “the words of phenomenologists are inarticulate sounds.”

516-535

Authors: JAKUB ČAPEK

The recent philosophy of Renaud Barbaras counts among the most original contributions to the phenomenology of life. My article examines it in the light of some conceptual observations based on the works of Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty. The early phenomenological texts illustrate the complexity of the phenomenological approach to the living inasmuch as “life” can be said in different ways, it is plural in meaning; further, life is also plural in that it can be attributed to a plurality of beings (consciousness, organisms, certain forms of existence, etc.). When developing his own account, Barbaras starts from a profound analysis of the phenomenological idea of correlation and comes to a new notion of life which is no longer attributed to organisms but to the world. The article critically follows this move from the life of organisms to the life of the world and articulates certain questions that this move can raise. The background of these questions is the double plurality of the notion of life. Even though saying that “life” has multiple meanings and attributions is purely formal and general, this multiplicity can serve as a ground for the phenomenological analysis of the way life is indeed experienced in its different meanings.

573-601

Authors: STATHIS LIVADAS

This article deals with a core matter of continental philosophy which is the nature of the ego taken as a concept originating in the subjective idealism of the German school of the early nineteenth century and further developed in its various ramifications throughout the twentieth century. The main philosophical positions I will discuss are Husserl’s phenomenology of the ego in his later transcendental phase, the Heideggerean view of the nature of Dasein, and Sartre’s approach of the Being-for-itself as mainly exposed in Being and Nothingness. The central idea defended throughout this article is that self-constituting temporality as immanently induced may serve as a common foundation of the nature of the transcendental ego both in the Husserlian phenomenology and in the Heideggerean and Sartrean alternative positions; further, I will hold that, as consequence, the ultimate question about the possibility of an ontology of the pure ego is transposed to the question of the origin and foundation of inner temporality. Yet, in this case one is set to face anew the circularity of an infinite regression in terms of reflecting-reflected and the inevitability of the subjective character of the origin of temporality. Besides this key question—a primary issue of this article—I will address the issue of the convergences and differences regarding aspects of the essential nature of the Husserlian ego, the Heideggerean Dasein, and the Sartrean Being-for-itself, especially regarding the widely debated topic of the ‘exteriority’ of the latter two ‘egological’ concepts with regard to the world in contrast to the ‘interiority’ of the Husserlian absolute ego.

613-631

Authors: PETR ŠPECIÁN

The article explores novel directions in the phenomenology of economics. It analyzes how the approaches of Till Düppe and Alfred Schütz, both inspired by Edmund Husserl, may shed light on the historical development of economics. I examine the substance and meaning of economics in the context of the forceful criticism of the whole discipline recently raised by Düppe. This examination uncovers important weaknesses and omissions inherent in Düppe’s argument against the economists’ scientific aspirations. The analysis of the social scientific endeavors by Alfred Schütz who develops a phenomenologically informed ‘telescopic’ concept of an ideal type is then shown to be a more fruitful and methodologically rigorous way towards understanding the developments within economics. The Schützian view permits us to see how abstract economic models originate in the experience of the life-world and are continuous with it. Accordingly, the historical development of economic science may be viewed as consisting from two broadly defined phases, where at first the formalism is steadily increasing (the ‘zooming out’ phase) and later the discipline converges back to context-specific empirical examinations (the ‘zooming in’ phase). A case study concentrating on the economic theory of politics illustrates that both the drive towards abstraction that has culminated around 1950s and the more recent ‘zooming in’ is methodologically legitimate from the phenomenological point of view. I conclude that economics has never been completely severed from the paramount reality of the everyday life and for decades the interconnection has been growing stronger by the day.

641-669

Authors: NIKOLAI HARTMANN; EKATERINA ANANIEVA

he article by German philosopher of first half of XX century N. Hartmann gives an idea about his position in the contra-opposition of leading realistic philosophic projects of both XIX and XX centuries. Brought up in neokantinean tradition of Marburg’s school N. Hartmann yet in his early works (Über das Seinsproblem in der griechischen Philosophie vor Plato and Des Proklus Diadochus philosophische Anfangsgründe der Mathematik) showed his interest by ontology problematic and chose the hard way of polemic and even contra-opposition towards the school which had brought him up. The reasons for such his position were explained in his works published in 1920-1930. The project of “new ontology” polemically targeted not only gnoseologism of neokantian tradition, but also viewed development of phenomenological philosophy in a different way. As one of early strong points of this conception Hartmann chose contra-opposition of logical and ontological reality. Later to this he jointed his interest for cathegorial analysis and to apriorism. That is why categories of ontology turned out to be most primordial points of proclaimed theory. His article “Gegel and the Problem of Real Dialectic” published for the first time in 1935 in Blatter für Deutsche Philosophie allowed N. Hatmann settled his reasons for critic of Hegel’s philosophy, first of all, of Hegel’s dialectic. His called Hegel’s philosophy like phenomenology and this his point of view was naturally argued by Hegel’s interest towards “Phenomenology of Spirit,” but dialectical component of Hegel’s philosophy, as well as interest for categorial analysis allowed Hartmann advance hypothesis about a special significance of “Science of Logic” for giving ground for a realistic ontology. Significantly for that work, as one of opponents of his philosophic program Hartmann chose marxist explanation of Hegel’s philosophy. The latter was also considered by Hartmann as realistic philosophy. This polemics with marxism let go beyond the philosophy of nature into the area of social and follow up a succession of prerequisites advanced by Hartmann in conformity with of different parts of being.

676-706

Authors: SAUL KRIPKE; ALEXANDER PROKHOROV

Readers are invited to examine the translation of the lengthy paper “Vacuous Names and Fictional Entities” by Saul Aaron Kripke. In this work, the American philosopher and logician discusses the semantics of proper names. He severely criticizes the theories of reference based on Russell and Frege speculations. The focus of his attention is the predicate of existence. Kripke is challenged by the theories arguing that existence either is not a real predicate or is not a predicate at all. He shows that a predicate of existence can be truly trivial but only in a limited manifold of cases. He characterizes as a modal fallacy the impossibility to pass the limits of this narrow manifold where the doctrine of triviality of the predicate is being mistakenly universalized. To vindicate his own view, he appeals the sphere of fiction and myth, to the domain of legends and pretense. Kripke discusses counterfactual statements and propositions referring topossible worlds in relation to objects of fiction and fantasy. The core of his argumentation is the ontology of pretense describing particular kind of abstract entities. The heroes of his philosophical reflections are Sherlock Holmes and Hamlet, Moses and Jabberwocky, unicorns and bandersnatches. Kripke asks when such creatures actually exist, and how propositions about them change their truth-value in dependence on a source, a context and modality. Vivid and inventive examples help the author to illustrate a set of problems perplexing for contemporary thinkers and offer his own original solutions.

725-732

Authors: TOMAS ŠINKŪNAS

he report presents an overview of the international conference “Phenomenology of Emotions. Traditions and Perspectives of the Phenomenological Movement in Central and Eastern Europe,” which was held on the 12th and 13th of October at Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas, Lithuania. The report briefly summarizes the main aim of the conference as well as the aim of the conference series as such, it briefly presents keynote addresses, outlines the structure of the conference, and finally presents information about the participants and their talks.

740-759

Authors: ALEXANDR POGONYAILO

The project of rewriting the history of structuralism conceived and partially realized by philosophers implies clarifying relationship between structuralism and phenomenology. It transcends the scope of research in history of science and in history of philosophy (phenomenology) because discussing such a significant scholarly and philosophical phenomenon of the first half of the past century which still exists, albeit with the prefix ‘post,’ ineluctably involves ‘post-science,’ ‘post-philosophy’ and all kinds of ‘posts’ including post-politics. This is due to the turning point that we are going through and to the crisis (in the positive sense of the word) of all the concepts and ideas habitual for the European and global culture, above all as far as science and philosophy are concerned. In this context it is instructive to address the history of formation of structuralism, its development in interaction with different currents of thought, notably with phenomenology and finally, that of its transformation into poststructuralism.