Robert Sokolowski

The Logic of Parts and Wholes in Husserl’s Investigations

In his preface to the second edition of the Prolegomena Husserl makes the following remark about the Third of his Logical Investigations, which is entitled, “Toward a Theory of Wholes and Parts.” “I have the impression that this Investigation was all too little read. It helped me a great deal, and indeed it is an essential presupposition for full understanding of the Investigations that follow it.”1 Neglect of this Investigation could indeed prove disastrous to understanding Husserl’s thought; although it seems to treat merely questions of logic and method and says nothing about subjectivity, it provides a formal structure that reappears at many strategic places in the Investigations and in Husserl’s later work. It serves as the skeleton for Husserl’s more elaborate philosophical doctrines about subjectivity and its world.

Phenomenology of the Self

Introduction....................................................................................................................1 Phenomenological Method .............................................................................................2 Reflection ....................................................................................................................2 Freedom from Bias ......................................................................................................3 Practice .......................................................................................................................5 Structure and Composition of the Self ...........................................................................7 Elements in Experience...............................................................................................8 Thought.......................................................................................................................9 Feeling.......................................................................................................................13 Self-Concept and Self-Sense .....................................................................................17 Action .......................................................................................................................19 Teleological Orientation of the Self...........................................................................22 References.....................................................................................................................23 Revision History ...........................................................................................................24

The Art and Science of Medicine

Just as a mathematician is most fully himself when he is calculating, so a physician is most fully himself, as physician, when he is engaged in medical activity. Medical activity is the actuality of medicine, and both the art and the science are to be defined and understood in relation to it. The art and the science both are as potential activity. It would be a distortion to regard medicine as, say, essentially a science, essentially an understanding of certain natures and relationships, something to which applications were accidental; or to consider it as an art that could be itself without ever coming out of hiding, without becoming active. Both the science and the art would be out of focus without the activity.

Syntax, Semantics, and the Problem of the Identity of Mathematical Objects

The items of mathematics, such as the real line, the triangle, sets, and the natural numbers, share the property of retaining their identity while receiving axiomatic presentations which may vary radically. Mathematicians have axiomatized the real line as a one-dimensional continuum, as a complete Archimedean ordered field, as a real closed field, or as a system of binary decimals on which arithmetical operations are performed in a certain way. Each of these axiomatizations is tacitly understood by mathematicians as an axiomatization of the same real line. That is, the mathematical item thereby axiomatized is presumed to be the same in each case, and such an identity is not questioned. We wish to analyze the conditions that make it possible to refer to the same mathematical item through a variety of axiomatic presentations.

The theory of phenomenological description

1. The first issue to be decided is why we need a theory of phenomenological description. Why do we not simply carry out our descriptions? I think there are three reasons. First, without a theory the descriptions might seem rather pointless. If we observe, for example, that all perceived material objects have an other side that is not being perceived while one side is being perceived, or if we say that any statement can be repeated by someone else, sometimes with belief and sometimes without belief, the point of making such comments about things may not be easy to see. We appear to be belaboring the obvious. Thus a theory of transcendental description is needed in order to just ify the descriptions we actually carry out. Secondly, a theory of transcendental descriptions helps us understand the status and the stance of ourselves as transcendental describers. This is a more positive reason than the first one, which is somewhat exculpatory. We are able to describe our own being in the world, we are able to describe our most fundamental at t i tude in the world (the world-belief that underlies all our particular convictions), and we are able to take a distance to all the forms of appearing through which things are manifest to us. This means that we are quite extraordinary while we are carrying on such descriptions. What are we like when we do this, and what are things and being like in order to allow such an analysis o f them and of us to take place? A theory of transcendental description thus tells us about ourselves, about being, and about the world. The third reason why we need a theory of phenomenological description is that we must overcome a systematic bias that has been implanted in our philosophy and our culture during the past five or six hundred years.

Acquiring the Philosophical Habit

“The finest outcome of a theological education would be the formation of a preacher or a teacher who spontaneously thinks in this way: someone who appreciates the nuances, contours, definitions, and shapes of important human things and can articulate them clearly; someone who has philosophical understanding, and who can also place these natural things into the light that revelation can bring to them; someone who can bring out the further truth that revelation adds to what we know by reason.”

How Aristotle and Husserl Differ on First Philosophy

Many of Rudolf Bernet’s essays juxtapose Husserl’s thought with that of other contemporary writers. Such juxtaposition enables us to better understand each of the parties, but it also brings us more adequately to the things themselves, to the topic that is at issue in both of them. If we successfully put two such things together, we get a third that is distinct from each but sheds light on both. For my contribution to this volume, I would like to follow Bernet’s example and put Husserl in contact, not with a contemporary thinker, but with Aristotle, and to do so on the topic of first philosophy.

Semiotics in Husserl’s Logical Investigations

Husserl begins the first of his Logical Investigations 1 by examining what he calls “The Essential Distinctions.” The first distinction he makes is between two kinds of sign, indications and expressions, Anzeigen and Ausdrucke Notice how he proceeds here at the start of his phenomenology, at the point where he is analyzing consciousness and defming his terms for the very first time. He does not begin his philosophy by looking inward at consciousness. His access to intentional acts is not by introspection. Rather, his access is through the public, palpable, and worldly phenomena of signs, both indicative and expressive. Signs are public things, they are “outside” the mind: they are sounds, marks, arrangements of objects, a wave of the hand, a pile of stones. It is by examining such public things that Husserl gains access to intentionality and makes distinctions within it.

Husserl on First Philosophy

Husserl’s philosophical influence has gone through high and low periods for over a century, but since his initial engagement with Frege in the 1890s he has continuously been a player on the cultural scene. There were times when he was overshadowed by some other figure or movement – he was somewhat eclipsed by Heidegger in the late 1920s and the 1930s, and by postmodernism in the last part of the 20th century – but each of these periods was followed by a substantial resurgence, and even now interest in his work is showing up in places where it had not been visible in the past.

Displacement and Identity in Hussel’s Phenomenology

One of the most valuable philosophical discussions that Husserl offers us in his writings is his treatment of identity. His analysis of identity can be considered a modern revival of the issue Plato raised in the Sophist when he talked about sameness and otherness as two of the major forms, the megista gene, of being.1 Like Plato, Husserl also discusses identity or sameness not all by itself, but as implicated with difference or otherness, and one of the most striking forms of otherness that he describes is that of the displacement, the Versetzung, of the self.