Hopkins, Husserl, and Beauty: Towards a Phenomenological Aesthetics (original) (raw)

Some Husserlian Reflections on the Contents of Experience

Philosophical Methodology, 2013

This chapter explores the potential for fruitful interaction between philosophy of mind and work in the phenomenological tradition of philosophy. I focus on the theme of what it is that we experience, my aim being to show how phenomenology can contribute to current debates about the nature and scope of 'phenomenal content', with particular emphasis on 'cognitive phenomenology'. 'Content' is generally understood as a matter of 'representation'. As Crane (2011, 86) remarks, it involves an 'object' being 'represented under an aspect'. However, experiential content need not be tied so closely to representationone could refer in a less committal way to how something 'appears' to us or is 'presented' in experience, and that is how I use the term here. Even then, content need not be exhaustive of experience. There may be an attitudinal phenomenology too, an experience of perceiving, imagining or remembering that accompanies what is perceived, imagined or remembered. It has also been argued that certain so-called 'qualia', such as bare experiences of colour, are wholly distinct from intentionality. 1 Hence there is considerable disagreement over what the 'content of experience' includes and whether or not there is more to experience than content. Recent years have seen growing interest in the more specific question of whether we have a 'cognitive' as well as a 'sensory' phenomenology and, if so, what it consists of. Although many different positions have emerged, most are premised on the assumptions that perceptual experience is largely a matter of something called 'phenomenal content' and that we have a good enough grasp of what that consists of to be able to address (a) how far it extends and (b) whether or not there is a distinct kind of non-sensory content.

Is perception inadequate? Husserl's case for non-sensory objectual phenomenology

One key difference between perceptual experience and thought is the distinctly sensory way perception presents things to us. Some philosophers nevertheless suggest this sensory phenomenal character doesn’t exhaust the way things are made manifest to us in perceptual experience. Edmund Husserl is maintains that there is also a significant non-sensory side to perception’s phenomenal character. We may experience, for instance, an object’s facing surface in a sensory mode and, as part of the same perceptual experience, also that object’s out-of-view surface in a non-sensory mode. To the extent that perceptual experience makes things available to us in a non-sensory mode, Husserl calls it inadequate. Here I reconstruct four arguments for the conclusion that perceptual experience is inadequate found in various of Husserl’s writings and critically evaluate then. My aim is both to showcase the variety and sophistication of Husserl’s reasons for thinking perceptual experience is inadequate and to problematize that idea.

Husserl's Phenomenology - Back to the Things Themselves

Edmund Husserl's "Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology" serves as a pivotal work in the development of phenomenological philosophy, offering a profound and systematic exploration of the structures of consciousness and the foundational principles of phenomenology. This essay delves into Husserl's articulation of the phenomenological method, and the intricate process of phenomenological reduction, all framed within the context of his engagement with the determination of the nature and structure of the human conscious experience. This essay aims to illuminate Husserl's aim to move beyond the everyday, unreflective natural attitude to explore how experiences and meanings are constituted in consciousness. By doing this, Husserl seeks to clarify how we can achieve objective knowledge and shared understanding in a common lifeworld, ultimately providing a deeper, transcendental understanding of the conditions that make all experience and knowledge possible.

From Affectivity to Subjectivity. Husserl’s Phenomenology Revisited, London: Palgrave 2008.

The main argument of Husserl’s Phenomenology Revisited is developed in three steps: [1] In the first part of the book, I present reconsiderations of certain basic terms that Husserl introduces in his philosophy. I first show that phenomenological activity can be re-interpreted in anthropological terms. What Husserl calls his “phenomenological method,” which includes reflection, eidetic variation, and the performance of the epoche, is, I claim, an abstract development of concrete life-world experiences such as imagining, playing and wondering. By discovering the concrete anthropological horizon of central Husserlian methodological terms (which have confused readers from the beginning on), their foundation in certain experiences, and the way in which they can be regarded as abstractions from those experiences, is shown. [2] In the second part of the book, I show how subjectivity, in the phenomenological sense according to which it is an area of investigation, evolves out of the sensual sphere, and that as such, subjectivity should not be analyzed apart from the lived body or apart from world experience, as some commentators have suggested. As I show, affectivity and the “openness of the subject” towards what is other than itself, is tied to the experience of other subjects, to proto-ethical experiences, as well as to the lived body. [3] In the last part of the book, I turn to the experience of the past and future, in order to establish them as the most important features of the self’s constitution. In sum, by proceeding in these three steps I am able to outline (in a non-abstractive way) three of the most important levels of human experience and its phenomenological investigation, from Husserl’s point of view.

Husserl’s Spatialization of Perceptual Consciousness

2017

In this paper I show that, in Husserl’s phenomenology of perception, the consciousness of any perceiving subject can take up space. What Husserl calls “noema” just is some intentional object. Thus any noema of perception just is the object of some perceptual experience. According to Husserl, since the noema of perception is immanent to the consciousness of the perceiving subject, the object of perception must also be in some sense immanent. In order to avoid confrontation with Husserl’s anti-Brentanian claim that no intentional object can be immanent to any intentional act, I show that there are two different senses of immanence in Husserl: the “genuine”-sense and what Steven Crowell calls the “phenomenological”-sense. On this disambiguation, any perceptual object can be genuinely transcendent while remaining phenomenologically immanent. What is required for the second sense of immanence is a holistic conception of consciousness. However, Husserl is also a realist about the objects ...

The Scope of Aesthetic Consciousness: Working with Husserl

Chapter from The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Consciousness: Working with Husserl. To be published by Routledge , 2022

Part I sets out the most essential features of Husserl’s understanding of aesthetic consciousness, namely, its status as mode of valuing grounded in the realm of sensory and/or phantasy appearance, which involves the disinterested appreciation of such appearances. A number of comparisons and contrasts are made with Kant’s aesthetics (with which Husserl’s has some affinity). We then move on to discussion of the varieties of aesthetic object that Husserl identifies. Part II addresses those arising from ‘external perception’ most notably the aesthetic consciousness of nature, and Part III discusses the aesthetics of phantasy as such, and of the spatial arts, and of the symbolically presented arts of literature and music. In Part IV, we address the interesting general significance that Husserl assigns to the aesthetic and beauty, and in Conclusion, we offer a critical review of his theory overall and a further development of one of its most interesting points.

Is Husserl guilty of Sellars' myth of the sensory given

Synthese, 2021

This paper shows that Husserl is not guilty of Sellars' myth of the sensory given. I firstly show that Husserl's account of 'sensations' or 'sense data' seems to possess some of the attributes Sellars' myth critiques. In response I show that, just as Sellars thinks that our 'conceptual capacities' afford us an awareness of a logical perceptual space that has a propositional structure, Husserl thinks that 'acts of apprehen-sion' (Akt der Auffassung) structure sensations to afford us perception that is similarly propositionally structured. Not only this, but there is much affinity and shared motivation between Husserl and Sellars accounts of the sensory stratum. Reflection on phenomenological considerations prevents Sellars from denying phenomenal non-conceptual content, whilst Husserlian 'sense data' are technical designations; dependant parts of perceptual experience grasped in abstraction, necessary for providing a reflective/philosophical account of empirical knowledge. I show that both Husserl and Sellars assert that the proper description of phenomenal content affords it the function of presenting properties of spatial objects during perception, and reiterate the well-known fact that Husserl thinks that perception is of 'conceptually' apprehended spatiotemporal objects (not sense data).

Toward a Phenomenology of Objects: Husserl and the Life-World

In this paper, I explore Edmund Husserl's account of the life-world for evidence that he posits it as the living flesh of the transcendental ego and thus as our primordial object-relation. In so doing, I attempt to rehabilitate and defend Husserl's notion of transcendental subjectivity, of the a priori, by noting how one's embodiment in many concrete experiences calls for and bears witness to this transcendental foundation of itself. After developing my reading of Husserl's account of the lifeworld, I then turn to the phenomenological psychology of John Russon in his book Human Experience to show how Husserl's life-world as the primordial object-relation opens us onto a very concrete vision of intersubjectivity.