Concatenations and the Transcendental Ego

Class on October 1st … John began class today with a summary of the concepts we have worked through in Husserl’s Ideas I. He placed these concepts on a sort of map, pairing several of them with those that they resemble and those that constitute their partner concepts. I have tried to reproduce this [...]

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Transcendence and Immanence

Class on September 26th … Today we opened class with a short review of intentionality, the essential feature of consciousness. You can see my post regarding Monday’s class for a closer inspection of this concept, but so as not to paint a picture of Husserlian phenomenology as a set of disparate concepts, we can use [...]

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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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Intentionality and Reflection

Class on 24 September … In the beginning of class we outlined several “moments of insight” regarding Husserlian phenomenology, key concepts that reveal more and more about the philosophy. This served as a sort of review of the previous class sessions. The concept of Fact and Essence and their inseparability, the Natural Attitude and its [...]

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Pure Consciousness

Class on 19 September … Today was our first day describing what “happens” after the epoché is put in place. It is important to note again the central role of the epoché in Husserlian phenomenology. In a way, a lot of Husserl “falls into place” after understanding the epoché. Why?

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