E. Kaelin: “The Visibility of Things Seen: A Phenomenological View of Painting.”

Eugene Kaelin’s essay “The Visibility of Things Seen: A Phenomenological View of Painting.” is an investigation into the phenomenological system of paintings: how the consciousness is guided in the viewing of an aesthetic object by the intentional visual structure of the object’s “universe” (55). He begins with a critique of Roman Ingarden’s Das Literarische Kunstwerk, [...]

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J. Wild: ‘Authentic Existence: A New Approach to “Value Theory”‘

In Wild’s essay ‘Authentic Existence: A New Approach to “Value Theory,”’ he attempts to expand upon efforts made by such thinkers as Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty to designate the norming sense of particular experiences with ‘real,”genuine,’ and ‘authentic’ states. These terms and the states they apply to are observed by a newly emerging attitude towards [...]

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P. Kerszberg: ‘Natural Science and the Experience of Nature’

We began this course, and Husserl in a sense began his phenomenological project, with a concern over the “grounding” of the natural sciences. Citing extensively from Husserl’s The Crisis of European Sciences, Pierre Kerszberg’s article, “Natural Science and the Experience of Nature,” is an extended review of the ways in which the natural sciences have [...]

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R. Gotesky: ‘Aloneness, Loneliness, Isolation, Solitude’

In this essay, Rubin Gotesky studies the condition of aloneness that acts as the foundation for alienation. Aloneness is an innate condition defined by the fact that each person is singular, residing in one conscience. However, we are social creatures with an innate capability and desire to connect to the others in which [...]

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E. Tehennepe: ‘The Life-World and the World of Ordinary Language’

This essay discusses the arguments regarding the relationships between ordinary language philosophy and phenomenology. Tehennepe prefaces this discussion by contrasting two opposing views. John Wild affirms that ordinary language is present in the phenomena of everyday life, and that phenomenology and language analysis seek the same existential explanations of “concrete experience” (133) from [...]

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S. Heinämaa : ‘Simone de Beauvoir’s Phenomenology of Sexual Difference’

This essay by Sara Heinämaa offers a phenomenological (re)reading of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. I doubt anyone is writing on Beauvoir in this class, but that doesn’t mean Heinämaa is useless to you! If you are writing on the phenomenological movement in general or the “aim” of philosophy in general, you [...]

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G. McGee: Dewey and Husserl on Natural Science and Values: Learning from the Sokal Debate

Glenn McGee frames his comparison between Husserl and Dewey’s views of ethics and science with the hoax that NYU physicist Alan Sokal pulled in 1996 to prove that “postmodern peer review lacked rigor” (286). Sokal ultimately argues that postmodern schools of thought are too different from those which apply the scientific method, thereby making postmodern [...]

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Immanence(s), Transcendencies, and Absolute Being

*What I have written here is an attempt to make sense of our discussion and Husserl’s thought. While I would love to imagine that I was capable of getting Husserl in the first month, I hereby pragmatically stress that I am not in fact capable of such feats. What follows is therefore a particular interpretation, [...]

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Transcendent Vacillations

I’d like to clarify what I meant in class by the image of “vacillation” I put forth in our discussion of immanence, transcendence, and the pure ego. What I understand of the experience that people call “ego death” or “the phantasm of the eternal return” could be called an undulation between experience of ego and [...]

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Terms of Art

So, in the Ideas Husserl uses some overlapping words – mental process, pure consciousness, and cogitationes – as phenomenological terms of art. I’ve been having a little trouble understanding the distinctions between these, but it’s clear Husserl deploys them in very particular ways. What distinguishes the cogitationes from erlebnis and either of them from pure [...]

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