Husserl Workshop

Schedule:

9.55

Welcome

10.00–11.00

Husserl’s Phenomenology of Value Experience: the Problem of ‘Objectivating’ and ‘Non-objectivating’ Acts

Andrew Krema (Loyola University Chicago)

11.00–12.00

Husserl’s Besinnung Revisited: the Critical Performativity of Phenomenological Work

Andreea Smaranda Aldea (DePaul University)

12.00–13.30

Lunch at Damen Student Centre

13.30–14.30

Thinking Being Flesh: Retrieving Cartesian Meditation V

Zachary Joachim (Denison University)

14.30–15.30

Husserl’s Phenomenology of Wishing: Feelings and Drives

Thomas Byrne (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)

Talk Abstracts

Husserl’s Phenomenology of Value Experience: the Problem of ‘Objectivating’ and ‘Non-objectivating’ Acts

Andrew Krema

In his attempts at a phenomenological account of value experience, Husserl employs a distinction between objectifying and non-objectifying acts, which is a distinction between presentational and evaluative acts. In presentational acts, an independent relation to an object is established, whereas evaluative acts are dependent upon such acts for their intentionality. But Husserl in Ideas I claims that all acts, including evaluative, are 'objectivating'. In my talk, I attempt to clarify how Husserl avoids a contradiction here, and how working through this difficult distinction sheds important light on the nature of evaluative experience and values themselves.

Husserl’s Besinnung Revisited: the Critical Performativity of Phenomenological Work

Andreea Smaranda Aldea

Through an analysis of Husserl’s method of Besinnung (reflection) this paper’s aims are threefold. First, to carefully unpack this method with respect to its domain of inquiry, namely, the historicity, sedimentation, passivity, institutionality, normativity, and communality of experiential life. What will transpire here is that this method of historical reflection, which took center stage in Husserl’s work in the 1920s and 30s and which did not signify a radical departure from his transcendental eidetic program, is itself marked by these dynamic and intertwined dimensions of Sinngebung and Sinnstiftung. Second, and considering this methodological insight, the paper examines the higher order self-reflection (Selbstbesinnung) at work in phenomenological reflection; to do so, the paper delves into the all-important matters of Ichspaltung, Wiedererfahrung, and Implikation – all structures of consciousness and all necessary conditions for the possibility of Besinnung itself. Third, and finally, the paper seeks to showcase, through a concrete analysis of gendered flânerie, the critical performativity at the core of phenomenological work, paying close attention to its self- and lifeworld-transformative potential.

Thinking Being Flesh: Retrieving Cartesian Meditation V

Zachary Joachim

Nothing by Husserl has been more controversial than the Fifth Cartesian Meditation. An attempt to describe how you and I ‘transcendentally’ relate, it allegedly fails (Heidegger, Schutz, Fink, Levinas, Sartre, Ricoeur, Patocka, Habermas), demonstrating Husserlian phenomenology’s limits or failure tout court. Contemporary Husserlians often excuse the Fifth Meditation by indicating the unpublished writings as the locus of his true account. Here, I defend the Fifth Meditation, expounding its basic thought that (a) you and I are each ourselves only by being aisthetically entwined, and (b) this, the self-standing reality of thinking, “contains” being, and so is the totality of philosophy’s topic. I thus situate Husserl in agreement with Sartre’s Hegelian view, affirm Derrida’s and above all Merleau-Ponty’s reading of the Fifth Meditation, expose Husserl’s completely ironic relation to ‘Cartesianism,’ and propose (reviving a move by A.D. Smith) that we read his anti-Kantian idealism rather as a weird form of absolute idealism.

Husserl’s Phenomenology of Wishing: Feelings and Drives

Thomas Byrne

This essay demonstrates, contra accepted interpretations, that the early Husserl executed valuable and extensive investigations of wishes – specifically in manuscripts from Studies concerning the Structures of Consciousness. In these manuscripts, Husserl examines two ‘kinds’ of wishes. He describes wish drives as feelings of lack. He also dissects wish intentions to uncover previously obscured partial acts, including nullifying consciousness, an existentially oriented act, and a preferring.