Spear, Andrew D. "Husserl on Intentionality and Intentional Content." INTERNET ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY November 6, 2011.

Edmund Husserl (1859—1938) was an influential thinker of the first half of the twentieth century. His philosophy was heavily influenced by the works of Franz Brentano and Bernard Bolzano, and was also influenced in various ways by interaction with contemporaries such as Alexius Meinong, Kasimir Twardowski, and Gottlob Frege. In his own right, Husserl is considered the founder of twentieth century Phenomenology with influence extending to thinkers such as Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and to contemporary continental philosophy generally. Husserl’s philosophy is also being discussed in connection with contemporary research in the cognitive sciences, logic, the philosophy of language, and the philosophy of mind, as well as in discussions of collective intentionality. At the center of Husserl’s philosophical investigations is the notion of the intentionality of consciousness and the related notion of intentional content (what Husserl first called ‘act-matter’ and then the intentional ‘noema’). To say that thought is “intentional” is to say that it is of the nature of thought to be directed toward or about objects. To speak of the “intentional content” of a thought is to speak of the mode or way in which a thought is about an object. Different thoughts present objects in different ways (from different perspectives or under different descriptions) and one way of doing justice to this fact is to speak of these thoughts as having different intentional contents. For Husserl, intentionality includes a wide range of phenomena, from perceptions, judgments, and memories to the experience of other conscious subjects as subjects (inter-subjective experience) and aesthetic experience, just to name a few. Given the pervasive role he takes intentionality to play in all thought and experience, Husserl believes that a systematic theory of intentionality has a role to play in clarifying and founding most other areas of philosophical concern, such as the theory of consciousness, the philosophy of language, the philosophy of logic, epistemology, and the philosophies of action and value. This article presents the key elements of Husserl’s understanding of intentionality and intentional content, specifically as these are developed in his works Logical Investigations and Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. . . .

http://www.iep.utm.edu/huss-int/

Behnke, Elizabeth A. "Husserl's Phenomenology of Embodiment." INTERNET ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY July 7, 2011.

For Husserl, the body is not a physical substance, but a central, vibrant perspective relative to which our understanding of the world is oriented. It is a locus of distinctive sorts of sensations felt firsthand by the embodied experiencer, and it is a coherent system of movement possibilities by which we experience our situated, practical-perceptual life as an arrow to a new perspective. To identify such experiential structures of embodiment, Husserl must identify not only the ways in which the natural sciences approach the body, but also the ways we have tacitly taken natural-scientific assumptions into our everyday understanding of embodiment. Husserl’s phenomenological investigations eventually lead to the notion of “kinesthetic consciousness”, which is not a consciousness of movement, but a consciousness of motility (the ability to move freely and responsively). In Husserl’s phenomenology of embodiment, the body is a center of experience, and both its movement capabilities and its distinctive register of sensations play a key role in his account of how we encounter other people in the shared space of a coherent and ever-explorable world. Many of Husserl’s theories were taken up by such later figures in the phenomenological tradition as Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, who gave them an ontological interpretation. However, Husserl’s main focus is epistemological, and for him, embodiment is not only a means of practical action, but an essential part of the deep structure of all knowing. . . .

http://www.iep.utm.edu/phenembo/

Peucker, Henning. Review of Joaquim Siles i Borras, THE ETHICS OF HUSSERL'S PHENOMENOLOGY. NDPR (March 2011).

Siles i Borràs, Joaquim.  The Ethics of Husserl's Phenomenology: Responsibility and Ethical Life.  London: Continuum, 2010.

First the bad news: this book is not, as the reader might well expect on the basis of its title, a book on Husserl's ethics. Joaquim Siles i Borràs does not investigate Husserl's ethics and does not even take into account the two volumes in the Husserliana series containing the majority of Husserl's ethical writings (28 and 37), which incidentally have not yet been translated into English. Instead, this book investigates the hidden ethos or moral attitude that underlies Husserl's phenomenology as a whole and its development. Thus, Siles i Borràs understands ethics not simply as dealing with moral normativity, but rather in a much broader sense. As a result, he attempts to show that Husserl's phenomenological epistemology in general and its basic methodological principle of presuppositionlessness in particular have ethical relevance. This basic principle calls for radical freedom from prejudice and dogmatism as an ethical demand, a demand that the later Husserl combines with an ideal of absolute and universal self-responsibility. Thus Siles i Borràs sees phenomenology as ultimately grounded in an ethical attitude of reflective self-responsibility. Ethics is therefore not secondary to epistemology but founds it on the basis of an ethical demand of rigor and radical self-responsibility. The thesis of this book is that this ethical demand -- it would perhaps be better to speak about the ethos of the phenomenological philosophy than of its ethics -- guides Husserl's work and drives its development of increasing radicalization from beginning to end. This leads Siles i Borràs to a set of slightly ambiguous claims, viz., that phenomenology (i) is "an ethical project" (5), (ii) is an "ethical life" (18, 49), (iii) is an "ethical inquiry" (19, 30) or -- perhaps most precisely -- (iv) is motivated by an ethical demand (19). . . .

Visit: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=23049.

McIntyre, Ronald. Review of David Hyder, et al., eds. SCIENCE AND THE LIFE WORLD. NDPR (July 2010).

Hyder, David, and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, eds.  Science and the Life-World: Essays on Husserl's Crisis of the European Sciences.  Stanford: Stanford UP, 2009.

This collection of essays addresses themes in Husserl's last work, the unfinished Crisis of the European Sciences, written in the years 1934-37. (The Crisis as we now have it, including several important appendices, was not published until 1954, although the first two parts were published in 1936 and the influential appendix called "The Origin of Geometry" in 1939.)

In relation to Husserl's earlier work the Crisis includes a number of new themes, or themes newly emphasized and developed, that are important not only to phenomenologists but also to philosophers and historians of science. Perhaps the central notion in the Crisis -- and certainly the most famous -- is what Husserl calls the "Lebenswelt," the "life-world." The life-world is key to Husserl's account of what he sees as "the crisis" of the European sciences and its diagnosis. This account leads Husserl to articulate a conception of "Europe" defined by the ideal of rationality and the universality of knowledge, and of the history of European science and mathematics since the time of the ancient Greeks as a pursuit guided by this ideal. The pursuit would seem to have reached its goal with the advent of what Husserl calls "Galilean science," in which nature is described in terms of purely objective, mathematical laws. But Husserl sees this victory as Pyrrhic, for reasons I will discuss shortly. The Crisis also introduces a new emphasis on "historicity": Husserl explicitly recognizes science as an historical cultural product, and his analysis of its current state leads him to an unusual kind of search for the life-world "origins" of formal geometry and mathematical natural science -- a search that is partly "historical" and partly "ahistorical" or conceptual.

These are the main themes addressed in the twelve essays the volume comprises. David Hyder's "Introduction," which gives a helpful overview of each of the essays and their relations to one another, groups the essays under three main headings: Husserl's theory of science and the notion of the life-world (essays by David Woodruff Smith, Dagfinn Føllesdal, Ulrich Majer, and Ian Hacking), the theory of history implicit in the Crisis (David Carr, Michael Friedman, Rodolphe Gasché, Eva-Marie Engelen, and Michael Hampe), and the dissemination and application of Husserl's theory of science in the Crisis (Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, David Hyder, and Friedrich Steinle). However, as is characteristic of Husserl's work, all of the themes of the Crisis are interrelated, and each of the essays overflows whatever area one might assign it to. I will discuss them in relation to the themes I noted above. . . .

Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=20447.

Knies, Kenneth. Review of Nicolas De Warren, HUSSERL AND THE PROMISE OF TIME. NDPR (June 2010).

De Warren, Nicolas. Husserl and the Promise of Time: Subjectivity in Transcendental Phenomenology. Cambridge: CUP, 2009.

The topic of de Warren's study, inner-time consciousness, is hardly discussed in phenomenological circles without an invocation of its "notorious difficulty." Indeed, Husserl never ceased returning to what he himself often called the most difficult of all phenomenological problems. The difficulties of time-consciousness, moreover, do not concern a particularly vexing topic within a defined field and method of philosophical research. As de Warren's title indicates, the very promise of phenomenology as transcendental philosophy hinges upon its ability to describe the concrete experiencing in which all possible domains of transcendent being are displayed. This experiencing is itself temporal in its nature or "sense of being" (30). Coming to terms with the difficulties of time-consciousness is thus necessary if descriptions of phenomenologically defined themes are not to remain ignorant of the most basic structures inherent in experience itself. This task that Husserl has bequeathed to his followers is complicated by the fact that his on-going efforts to understand time not only trace a course of self-criticism but also attain a dizzying level of abstraction and diagrammatic modeling. The danger is that engaging the analytic difficulties of Husserl's account will empty the time problem of its profundity. The question that was to lead phenomenological investigation into the most intimate core of subjectivity would instead occupy the mind with logical constructions and conceptual puzzles that fail to resonate with our unceasing sense of ourselves as living through time.

Phenomenologists, historians of modern philosophy, and philosophers of time should all benefit from de Warren's confrontation with the difficulties of time-consciousness. De Warren's study operates with an impressive density of insight at multiple levels. It explains the methodological importance of time-consciousness for Husserl's philosophical program. It clearly presents the historical developments in the questioning of time most relevant to Husserl's inheritance of the problem from Brentano. It identifies the special difficulties posed for phenomenology by the question of time, and traces one path along which Husserl made progress in resolving them. Finally, it indicates how Husserl's mature understanding of time contributes to an account of inter-subjectivity and genesis within a transcendental framework. In all of this, de Warren confronts the complexity of Husserl's descriptions without losing sight of the fact that they are meant to answer to and make comprehensible our rich awareness of being in time. This book is a bold traversal of territory scouted and surveyed by pioneers like Bernet, Brough, Held, Lohmar, Kortooms, Sokolowski and Zahavi. It is not simply an exercise in Husserl scholarship, but an original "take" on what Husserl was grappling with in thinking about time. Its lack of encyclopedic breadth in its treatment of Husserl is more than made up for in its direct articulation of a compelling, if contentious, philosophy of time. . . .

Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=20267.

Cfp: "The Roots of Europe," Institute of Philosophy Edith Stein, International Academy of Philosophy, Granada, June 30-July 2, 2009.

In celebrating 150 years of Edmund Husserl´s birth, and 55 years of the complete publication of The Crisis of European Sciences, the Institute of Philosophy Edith Stein and the International Academy of Philosophy are organizing an International Conference in Granada under the title "The Roots of Europe." The conference aims to join specialists in Husserl's work, in phenomenology and in European studies to reflect on the cultural, moral and spiritual roots of Europe. Visit the conference webpage here: http://www.if-edithstein.org/actividades/ing/Acticongreso2.php.

Bergo, Bettina. Review of Soren Overgaard's WITTGENSTEIN AND OTHER MINDS. NDPR (March 2009).

Overgaard, Soren. Wittgenstein and Other Minds: Rethinking Subjectivity and Intersubjectivity with Wittgenstein, Levinas, and Husserl. London: Routledge, 2007. Søren Overgaard's Wittgenstein and Other Minds (WM) makes two interesting contributions to the Wittgenstein literature. First, it approaches contemporary debates about the problem of "other minds" (WM 2) as a conceptual and ontological problem -- viz., how we conceive of mind in the first place (before turning to determinations concerning the minds of others). It also extends that question to ethics, since the way in which we pose the question of other minds, or subjects, frequently concerns what behaviors are appropriate to adopt in regard to those others. This is notably the case when questions of human well being, or suffering, arise. Overgaard's second contribution is his lucid reading of the middle and later Wittgenstein, including a close examination of the philosopher's posthumous Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology. Overgaard follows Wittgenstein's "problems" approach to other minds in light of concerns that prove irreducibly ethical. The author's conviction, which he demonstrates systematically, is that the later Wittgenstein does indeed help us "to think differently about the issue at hand," which he terms "intersubjectivity," thereby displacing it from rigidly epistemological frameworks. Showing the importance of Wittgenstein's thought for ethical questions also means reading him rightly, and that requires navigating past four potential dangers. The first argues that Wittgenstein's "community account" or social conception of mind evacuates most, if not all, dimensions of subjectivity in favor of a pre-existing social context. The second danger lies in the claim that, in Wittgenstein, the very idea of a subject, present differently to itself than it is to others, is eliminated. Both dangers, the individualist versus the anti-individualist, and the immanentist versus the anti-immanentist one, are exaggerations of Wittgenstein's own arguments and weaken the claims he makes for a social understanding of mind, against an inaccessible or sequestered immanence. What Overgaard proposes to do, by way of elucidation, is to reopen the problem of solipsism as it arose in debates about intentionality. He then traces Heidegger's and Sartre's criticisms of Husserlian intentionality and indicates, finally, how Levinas's conception of the asymmetrical call coming from the Other supplements both Husserl's and Sartre's rather solipsistic "intersubjectivity." Overgaard concludes that, taken together, Sartre and Levinas give us a way past solipsism that resonates with significant concerns of the later Wittgenstein, writing on philosophical psychology. To be sure -- and unlike these "continental" philosophers -- Wittgenstein was concerned with the grammar operative in ethical language games, as in the asymmetry between first and third person statements. . . . Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=15450.

Cfp: "Self, Ego, Person: Commemorating Husserl's 150th Anniversary," Center for Subjectivity Research, University of Copenhagen, October 8-9, 2009.

Speakers:

• Jocelyn Benoist (Paris/Chicago), "Phenomenological Psychology as Anti-Reductionist Externalism"
• David Carr (Emory, Atlanta), "Temporality and Personality in Husserl"
• Steven Crowell (Rice, Houston): "Subject and Person"
• Natalie Depraz (Rouen): "Self-Givenness and First-Person Givenness"
• John Drummond (Fordham, New York), "Virtuous Persons"
• Sara Heinämaa (Helsinki), "Person: Habituation, Style, and Capacity"
• Dieter Lohmar (Köln), "A History of the Ego - in Husserl’s Phenomenology"
• Eduard Marbach (Bern), "Poor I – Pure or Impure, After All? Husserl's Notion of ‘I’ Revisited"
• Liangkang Ni (Sun Yat-Sen, Guangzhou), "Two Ways of Thinking ‘I’"
• Shigeru Taguchi (Yamagata), "Beyond Plurality and Monistic Origin: the Concept of ‘Primal Ego’ in Husserl"
• Dan Zahavi (Copenhagen): "Self and Other in Husserl"

"Phenomenology, Sciences, Philosophy," Conference on 150th Anniversary of Husserl's Birthday, Husserl Archives, Louvaine, Belgium, April 1-4, 2009.

In April 2009 the Husserl-Archives Leuven will hold a four-day conference in occasion of Edmund Husserl's 150th birthday. The director of the Husserl-Archives, Prof. Ullrich Melle, has prepared a brief document on the conference topic, available in English and German. Prof. Robert Sokolowski will hold the Husserl Memorial Lecture on Wednesday April 1, 18.00 as an opening for our conference. On Thursday 2 and Friday 3 the programme will consist of morning sessions 9.00-12.00 and afternoon sessions 14.00-17.00. On Saturday 4 there will only be morning sessions and the conference will end at 13.00. Keynote Speakers: Robert Sokolowski John Drummond Klaus Held Rudolf Bernet Ernst Wolfgang Orth Donn Welton Besides these plenary sessions, the conference will feature 20 further parallel sessions with invited guest speakers (a complete list will be provided soon). For more information, contact Carlo Ierna or visit: http://www.hiw.kuleuven.be/hiw/eng/husserl/conference2009.php.

Kelly, Sean. "Review of David Woodruff Smith's HUSSERL." TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT April 25, 2008.

So what exactly is phenomenology, and what precisely does it have to offer? It is useful to return to Sartre. What excited him so much about the prospect of phenomenology, as we saw, is that it is devoted almost entirely to describing things. Indeed, description is so central to phenomenology in all of its phases that Heidegger could say, in one of his early lecture courses, that "the phrase descriptive phenomenology is, at bottom, tautological". Description stands in contrast to all the other things a philosopher might be doing when engaging philosophically with a given domain: causal explanation, rational reconstruction, transcendental argument, conceptual analysis, theory-building, and so on. The idea behind phenomenology is that simply describing the phenomena, as completely and accurately as possible and without importing into the description unwarranted presuppositions about how the domain described is or must be, is already a devilishly difficult project. And one can see why. If one has tacit presuppositions about what the phenomena of a given domain are like - as one is bound to with any sufficiently interesting domain - then learning to separate out the phenomena as they actually are from one's presuppositions about them will require a certain kind of discipline. The commitment to this discipline was implicit in the famous battle cry of the phenomenologists: "Zu den Sachen selbst!" ("To the things themselves!"). . . . Read the whole review here: http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/files/tls_kelly_husserl_published_version.doc.

Smith, Caitlin. "Edmund Husserl and the Crisis of Europe." MODERN AGE 48.1 (2006).

EDMUND HUSSERL (1859-1938) was the last great European rationalist, albeit a unique and even paradoxical one: the father of phenomenology but also of existentialism; the Cartesian whose researches in the end eviscerate the cogito; the mathematician-logician whose ultimate concern was spirit. The final phase of his thought, like the final phase of his life, unfolded in Nazi Germany in the years just prior to the Second World War. . . . Husserl was to suffer persecution at the hands of the Nazis (and even at the hands of his erstwhile disciple Martin Heidegger) but his death in 1938 spared him the fate of his fellow Jews. And like so many German Jews, Husserl was thoroughly assimilated, more German than Jew, the product of high German intellectual culture, the “Good European” profoundly concerned with the destiny of a contemporary Europe dominated by Heidegger on the one hand and the Vienna Circle on the other; the rationalist offended, astonished, and challenged by the philosophical irrationalism, skepticism, and mysticism of his day and among his own disciples. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.mmisi.org/ma/48_01/smith.pdf.

"Methods of Husserl's Phenomenology," Cologne-Leuven Summer School in Phenomenology, Cologne, May 13-17, 2008.

This Summer School is held in English language and it should give an insight in the basic methods of Husserlian phenomenology. The center of the cours will be the method of constitutional analysis, the eidetic method, the reductive methods and genetic intentional-analysis. These methods will be presented in lectures, each day in the time 10-13.00 together with a discussion on this topics. In the afternoon in the time 15-17.00 there will be a textual analysis that should go into some details and in this way help to enhance the understanding. The lecturers are: Prof. Dr. U. Melle (Leuven), Prof. Dr. D. Lohmar (Köln), Dr. H. Peucker (Paderborn) und Dr. J. Brudzinska (Köln / Warschau). We are planning for a level that should help to inform intensively on the topic of methods in phenomenology on a medium level but we are also open for discussions of methodical questions on the level of doctoral students and postdocs.This cours will be also handled as a "Hauptseminar" for the students of the cologne university. To get a qualified certificate for this Hauptseminar a written paper on a topic to be determined by the is expected. This international Summer School is open for students from all countries. Because we have no financial support to offer for participiants we strongly encourage you to apply for short term grants at your university or other institutions. Time: Tuesday-Saturday 13-17. Mai 2008 Each day 10-13.00 and 15-17.00 Room: University of Cologne, Main Building, Room 4.016 IMPORTANT: Written registration is required because of limited capacities!Registration is to be done with the secretary of the Cologne Husserl-Archive:monika.heidenreich@uni-koeln.de

Godelek, Kamuran. "Review of Matheson Russell's HUSSERL: A GUIDE FOR THE PERPLEXED." METAPSYCHOLOGY ONLINE REVIEWS 12.1 (2008).

Russell, Matheson. Husserl: a Guide for the Perplexed. London: Continuum, 2006. The founder of modern phenomenology, Edmund Husserl, is one of the most intriguing figures in twentieth-century philosophy. One reason for this is that Husserl, perhaps more so than any other philosopher of the early decades of this century, represents a transition from one philosophical culture to another. For his thought bears the stamp of two very different intellectual worlds: on the one hand, one can discern in his writings the philosophical posture of the mid-to-late nineteenth century, characterized by a deep commitment to the idea of science as the prism within which everything both social and natural is fused. On the other hand, Husserl's thought prepared the ground for the development of a very different philosophical attitude, one that had already made itself felt in Europe by the end of the nineteenth century. This attitude is characterized by a profound distrust of all system, of any claim to hold the ultimate key to reality in its myriad of manifestations. . . . Read the rest here: http://metapsychology.mentalhelp.net/poc/view_doc.php?type=book&id=3998.

CFP: 38th Annual Meeting, Husserl Circle, Marquette University, June 26-29, 2008.

The 38th International Husserl Circle Conference will take place on the campus of Marquette University in Milwaukee on June 26-29, 2008. We also encourage you to submit a paper for a talk, either in abstract or full paper submission. We prefer electronic submissions (by email, either to Sebastian or to Pol, see email addresses below). The deadline for submissions is March 1 and speakers will be notified by April 7. Please limit your talk to 20-30 minutes and commentators have ca. 10 minutes to respond, to leave ample time for discussion. In the case of an acceptance, we will be asking you to submit your full paper ca. one month ahead of the conference to include it in the booklet that will be made available to all participants. We are expecting a good number of paper submissions; hence, in the event that we have too many submissions to include in the program, we will give preference to full papers over abstracts. We also ask you to identify yourself in your submissions, as we intend to include a significant percentage of graduate students or scholars who have not yet presented at the Husserl Circle. If you are willing to also serve as a commentator for another paper and/or chair a session, please indicate that with your application. You are also welcome to only serve as commentator or session chair; please let us know if you would be able to attend and willing to take over one of these functions. As additional feature, we are planning to have a session (3-4 papers) from undergraduate students. Hence, please pass this call for papers on to the undergraduates at your institutions who you think are qualified to give a talk. We have arranged lodging in the beautifully renovated Ambassador Hotel, which is walking distance from campus. We have negotiated a room block for the weekend of June 26-29 starting at $ 89 per night. To make reservations, please call toll free at (888) 322-3326 or visit http://www.ambassadormilwaukee.com/. When making a reservation, please mention the Marquette University conference rate. We will also provide student dormitory housing (multi-occupancy rooms) at a lower rate. More information on this will follow in a later letter. The Marquette campus is walking distance to downtown with its sites, museums and restaurants. Milwaukee is a city of 600,000 inhabitants located on the shore of Lake Michigan eighty miles north of Chicago. Milwaukee’s Airport, Mitchell International, is served by several airlines. Another option is to fly in to Chicago; there are several ways of traveling from Chicago to Milwaukee (buses, Amtrak). For further information on how to reach Milwaukee, please visit http://www.marquette.edu/about/plan_a_visit.shtml. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to send us an email (sebastian.luft@mu.edu or pol.vandevelde@mu.edu). For further information, go to: http://www.husserlcircle.org/milwaukee.html.

De Warren, Nicolas. "Review of Kevin Hermberg's HUSSERL'S PHENOMENOLOGY: KNOWLEDGE, OBJECTIVITY AND OTHERS." NDPR November 1, 2007.

Recent reappraisals of transcendental phenomenology have increasingly underscored and explored the central role of inter-subjectivity for Husserl's brand of transcendental idealism. Though little of Husserl's interest in inter-subjectivity surfaced in his published writings (with the exception of the Cartesian Meditations), this interest is apparent in Husserl’s unusually impressive quantity of manuscripts, many of which are available in three hefty Husserliana (XIII-XV) volumes published in 1973. This re-discovery of transcendental inter-subjectivity forcefully challenges a misconstrued Cartesian image of phenomenology that inexplicably still plagues the reception of Husserl's seminal thinking. For Husserl, inter-subjectivity is both a constituted phenomenon in need of clarification and a constituting monadic multiplicity that contributes decisively to the objective world's transcendence, open to all and any possible experiencing subject. . . . Read the rest of the review here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=11524.