JBSP: Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology

Finitude: History & Politics

ANTONIO CALCAGNO: Michel Henry’s Non-Intentionality Thesis and Husserlian Phenomenology

FABIO PRESUTTI: Giorgio Agamben, Gilles Deleuze and the ‘Idea of Language’ in the Synthesis of ‘Being’

BETH LORD: The Virtual and the Ether: Transcendental Empiricism in Kant’s Opus Postumum

JAMES N. McGUIRK: Aletheia and Heidegger’s Transitional Readings of Plato’s Cave Allegory

TRACY COLONY: The Wholly Other: Being and the Last God in Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy

FARHANG ERFANI: Fixing Marx with Machiavelli: Claude Lefort’s Democratic Turn

Description of Rethinking Facticity, eds, Francois Raffoul and Eric Sean Nelson

The concept of facticity has undergone crucial transformations over the last century in hermeneutics and phenomenology, but it has not yet received the attention that it warrants. Following a suggestion by Merleau-Ponty that philosophy is not about essences but rather the facticity of existence, prominent philosophers examine the significance of facticity in its historical context and reflect on its contemporary relevance. Focusing on the works of Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Lacan, and Fanon, among others, they trace its significance from life-philosophy to contemporary European thought and explore its philosophical implications. The following questions are addressed: What thoughts of experience, of subjectivity, of finitude, of nature, of the body, of racial and sexual difference does facticity provoke? What thinking of language, of history, of birth and death, of our ethical being-in-the-world does it mobilize? Exploring these questions, the contributors offer new interpretations of facticity.

See the publisher’s site for more details, such as the table of contents and the pdf of the introduction.

TOC 

Distributive Justice and Welfarism in Utilitarianism — Jörg Schroth

Gödel, Kant, and the Path of a Science — Srecko Kovac

Hegel's Account of Rule-Following — David Landy

Husserl, Phenomenology, and Foundationalism — Walter Hopp

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Both books One and Two. And Crisis.

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A review of Husserl’s Phenomenology: Knowledge, Objectivity And Others

Recent reappraisals of transcendental phenomenology have increasingly underscored and explored the central role of inter-subjectivity for Husserl’s brand of transcendental idealism. Though little of Husserl’s interest in inter-subjectivity surfaced in his published writings (with the exception of the Cartesian Meditations), this interest is apparent in Husserl’s unusually impressive quantity of manuscripts, many of which are available in three hefty Husserliana (XIII-XV) volumes published in 1973. This re-discovery of transcendental inter-subjectivity forcefully challenges a misconstrued Cartesian image of phenomenology that inexplicably still plagues the reception of Husserl’s seminal thinking. For Husserl, inter-subjectivity is both a constituted phenomenon in need of clarification and a constituting monadic multiplicity that contributes decisively to the objective world’s transcendence, open to all and any possible experiencing subject.

Against this backdrop, Kevin Hermberg’s Husserl’s Phenomenology: Knowledge, Objectivity and Others considers the role of inter-subjectivity in Husserl’s transcendental thinking in Ideas I, Cartesian Meditations and The Crisis of the European Sciences. Hermberg offers a “new reading” focusing on the relation between inter-subjectivity and knowledge in the progression of Husserl’s thinking. Rather than approach transcendental inter-subjectivity from the Fifth Cartesian Meditation’s refutation of solipsism or argue for the necessary expansion of transcendental subjectivity to inter-subjectivity, Hermberg seeks to correct what he considers a neglected facet of Husserl’s many-faceted inter-subjectivity: the constitutive role of empathy for the objectivity of knowledge. On this reading, “empathy is related to knowledge” (xi) in two ways: it contributes to the solidification of acquired knowledge and it gives an individual subject access to knowledge gained by other subjects, thus extending an individual’s knowledge. In following Hermberg’s reading, we are invited to recognize Husserl’s “social epistemology.” And yet, even though Husserl opened the field of social epistemology, his dedication to a transcendental idea of philosophy prevented him, as is often said of Husserl’s numerous other discoveries, from recognizing what others recognize in his own thinking.

Rest of review

A review of Husserl (The Routledge Philosophers)

On a number of occasions in his new book, David Woodruff Smith illustrates his analysis with reference to a toy proposition: “Aristotle is synoptic.” If being a synoptic philosopher means having not only a large corpus but also systematic and fundamental engagement across the full range of philosophical inquiry, then it is fair to say that Husserl too is synoptic, and that Smith has managed to obtain an impressively synoptic view. The Husserl presented here is not narrowly a phenomenologist, but in equal parts a philosopher of language and logic, a contributor to set-theory, an ontologist, epistemologist, mereologist, and even — in a tantalizing final chapter - a value theorist of sorts. The accounting Smith gives of all this goes a long way toward showing the fundamental unity in all these projects; moreover it systematically resists the old picture of Husserl lurching through a series of conversions — from psychologism to anti-psychologism, from realism to idealism, and so on. Smith’s Husserl lays down a fundamental position on a range of fundamental issues in his Logical Investigations, including a meta-theory of the unity of his various bodies of doctrine; in large measure he remains true to those commitments through the remainder of his career. Obviously this is a lot to cover even in a large book (nearly 500 pages), and at places one feels the lack of closer scrutiny, supporting evidence, or critical assessment. But the book fulfills its aims admirably, providing an advanced introductory survey of the whole of Husserl’s vast empire, together with provocative and illuminating interventions on a number of important particular points and disputes. But in the end the very clarity of the vision presented here also serves to bring some of the vulnerabilities of Husserl’s position into sharp relief.

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From Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews: Julia Jansen reviews Brian Elliott's Phenomenology and Imagination in Husserl and Heidegger:

With Phenomenology and Imagination in Husserl and Heidegger Elliott puts forward a compact and accessible book that helps us understand the important relation between the two most central thinkers of the phenomenological tradition. Without getting entangled in either terminology and without demanding extensive familiarity with either paradigm, Elliott presents the main tenets of both philosophies and the respective views on imagination. His comparison is led by an important philosophical hypothesis, namely that the issue of imagination, more specifically Kant's theory of imagination, is an especially well-suited tertium comparationis. This hypothesis is confirmed by the insightful and lucid account that ensues from it. Even for those who might not agree with Elliott's interpretations in general or in detail, this book provides a highly interesting view on both Husserl and Heidegger. Above all, it demonstrates the vital relevance of imagination for philosophy.

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Nigel Pleasants — Nonsense on Stilts? Wittgenstein, Ethics, and the Lives of Animals

Steve Vanderheiden — Conservation, Foresight, and the Future Generations Problem

Martin Schwab — The Fate of Phenomenology in Deconstruction: Derrida and Husserl

Theodore Schatzki — On Studying the Past Scientifically

University of Kentucky Fourth Annual Prize Essay Competition in European Philosophy from Kant to the Present