Husserl’s Logical Investigations in the New Century: Western and Chinese Perspectives


Book Description

In this volume, phenomenologists from the West join hands with specialists from mainland China and Hong Kong to discuss the heritage of Husserl’s Logical Investigations. Readers will learn of the early reception of Husserl’s Logical Investigations in China and understand how Husserl’s doctrine of intentionality of consciousness has paved the way to a novel phenomenological explication of religious experience.




The Existential Husserl


Book Description

This book examines Husserl’s approach to the question concerning meaning in life and demonstrates that his philosophy includes a phenomenology of existence. Given his critique of the fashionable “philosophy of existence” of the late 1920s and early 1930s, one might think that Husserl posited an opposition between transcendental phenomenology and existential philosophy, as well as that in this respect he differed from existential phenomenologists after him. But texts composed between 1908 and 1937 and recently published in Husserliana XLII, Grenzprobleme der Phänomenologie (2014), show that the existential Husserl was not opposed but open to the phenomenological investigation of several basic topics of a philosophy of existence. A collection of contributions from a team of internationally recognized scholars drawing on these and other sources, the present volume offers insights into the relationship between phenomenology and philosophy of existence. It does so by (1) delineating the basic outlines of Husserl’s phenomenology of existence, (2) reinterpreting the tension between Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology and Jaspers’s and Heidegger’s philosophy of existence as well as Kierkegaard’s and Sartre’s existentialism, and (3) investigating the existential aspects of Husserl’s phenomenological ethics. Thus focusing on neglected aspects of Husserl’s thought, the volume shows that there is a consensus between classical phenomenology and existential phenomenology on the urgency of addressing the existential questions that in The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (1936) Husserl calls “the questions concerning the meaning or meaninglessness of this entire human existence”. The Existential Husserl represents a major contribution to the clarification of the historical and philosophical developments from transcendental phenomenology to existential phenomenology. The book should appeal to a wide audience of many readers at all levels looking for phenomenological answers to existential questions.




Daoist Encounters with Phenomenology


Book Description

This collection is intercultural philosophy at its best. It contextualizes the global significance of the leading figures of Western phenomenology, including Husserl, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Buber and Levinas, enters them into intercultural dialogue with the Daoism of Laozi and Zhuangzi and in doing so, breaks new ground. By presenting the first sustained analysis of the Daoist worldview by way of phenomenological experience, this book not only furthers our understanding of Daoism and phenomenology, but delves deeper into the roots of human thinking, aesthetic expression, and its impact on the modern social world. The international team of philosophers approach the phenomenological tradition in the broadest sense possible, looking beyond the phenomenological language of Husserl. With chapters on art, ethics, death and the metaphor of dream and hermeneutics, this collection encourages scholars and students in both Asian and Western traditions to rethink their philosophical bearings and engage in meaningful intercultural dialogue.




Truth in Husserl, Heidegger, and the Frankfurt School


Book Description

An innovative, ambitious, tradition-crossing study drawing on the work of Husserl, Heidegger, Horkheimer, Adorno, and Habermas to propose a new and transformative concept of truth. The idea of truth is a guiding theme for German continental philosophers from Husserl through Habermas. In this book, Lambert Zuidervaart examines debates surrounding the idea of truth in twentieth-century German continental philosophy. He argues that the Heideggerian and critical theory traditions have much in common—despite the miscommunication, opposition, and even outright hostility that have prevailed between them—including significant roots in the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. Zuidervaart sees the tensions between Heideggerian thought and critical theory as potentially generative sources for a new approach to the idea of truth. He argues further that the “critical retrieval” of insights from German continental philosophy can shed light on current debates in analytic truth theory. Zuidervaart structures his account around three issues: the distinction between propositional truth and truth that is more than propositional (which he calls existential truth); the relationship between propositional truth and the discursive justification of propositional truth claims, framed in analytic philosophy by debates between epistemic and nonepistemic conceptions of truth; and the relationship between propositional truth and the objectivity of knowledge, often presented in analytic philosophy as a conflict between realists and antirealists over the relation between “truth bearers” and “truth makers.” In an innovative and ambitious argument, drawing on the work of Husserl, Heidegger, Horkheimer, Adorno, and Habermas, Zuidervaart proposes a new and transformative conception of truth.




Historical Dictionary of Husserl's Philosophy


Book Description

Edmund Husserl is generally regarded as the founding figure of the philosophical movement of “phenomenology,” by which he understands a descriptive science of the essential structures of experiences and of their objects precisely as these are experienced. Phenomenology has had a decisive influence on philosophy in the 20th century, especially in Europe. The movement known as “continental philosophy,” whether practiced in Europe or elsewhere, has its roots in phenomenology and in the post-Hegelian philosophies of Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Karl Marx. Historical Dictionary of Husserl's Philosophy, Second Edition contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has more than 600 cross-referenced entries on his key concepts and major writings as well as entries on his most important predecessors, contemporaries, and successors. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Edmund Husserl.




Stretching the Limits of Productive Imagination


Book Description

This innovative collection traces the heretical development of productive imagination in post-Kantian philosophy. The book offers an original study that comprises unprecedented investigations into the kinaesthetic, pre-linguistic, poetic, historical, artistic, social and political dimensions of the productive power of imagination.




Extraterritorialities in Occupied Worlds


Book Description

"The concept of extraterritoriality designates certain relationships between space, law, and representation. This collection of essays explores contemporary manifestations of extraterritoriality and the diverse ways in which the concept has been put to use in various disciplines. Some of the essays were written especially for this volume; others are brought here together for the first time. The inquiry into extraterritoriality found in these essays is not confined to the established boundaries of political, conceptual, and representational territories or fields of knowledge; rather, it is an invitation to navigate the margins of the legal-juridical and the political, but also the edges of forms of representation and poetics.Within its accepted legal and political contexts, the concept of extraterritoriality has traditionally been applied to people and to spaces. In the first case, extraterritorial arrangements could either exclude or exempt an individual or a group of people from the territorial jurisdiction in which they were physically located; in the second, such arrangements could exempt or exclude a space from the territorial jurisdiction by which it was surrounded. The special status accorded to people and spaces had political, economic, and juridical implications, ranging from immunity and various privileges to extreme disadvantages. In both cases, a person or a space physically included within a certain territory was removed from the usual system of laws and subjected to another. In other words, the extraterritorial person or space was held at what could be described as a legal distance. (In this respect, the concept of extraterritoriality presupposes the existence of several competing or overlapping legal systems.) It is this notion of being held at a legal distance around which the concept of extraterritoriality may be understood as revolving.




The Reception of Husserlian Phenomenology in North America


Book Description

This book presents a historiographical and theorical analysis of how Husserlian Phenomenology arrived and developed in North America. The chapters analyze the different phases of the reception of Edmund Husserl’s thought in the USA and Canada. The volume discusses the authors and universities that played a fundamental role in promoting Husserlian Phenomenology and clarifies their connection with American Philosophy, Pragmatism, and with Analytic Philosophy. Starting from the analysis of how the first American Scholars of Edmund Husserl's thought opened the door to the reception of his texts, the book explores the first encounters between Pragmatism and Husserlian Phenomenology in American Universities. The study focuses, then, on those Scholars who fled from Europe to America, from 1933 onwards, to escape Nazism - Felix Kaufmann, Alfred Schutz, Aron Gurwitsch, Herbert Spiegelberg, Fritz Kaufmann, among the most notable - and illustrates how their teaching provided the very basis for the spreading of Husserlian Phenomenology in North America. The volume examines, then, the action of the 20th Century North-American Husserl Scholars, together with those places, societies, centers, and journals, specifically created to represent the development of the studies devoted to Husserlian Phenomenology in the U.S., with a focus of the Regional Phenomenological Schools.




Identity and Alterity


Book Description