In 1929, Edmund Husserl held a series of lectures at Sorbonne. These lectures were later published as a book called Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology (Méditations cartésiennes: Introduction à la phénoménologie). This book has engaged philosophers, but also psychologists, ethnologists and feminists among others. Still to this day, interpreters disagrees on what Husserl actually says. This is partly because his collected works are still being edited. But it is also because Husserl doesn’t really succeed in illustrating his efforts in a comprehensible way. That is why it’s possible to deduce ambiguities. This essay will focus on one of these ambiguities, namely, the relation of the ego-alter ego or my body and the body of the Other, in Husserls fifth Cartesian Meditation. Using the knowledge of philosophers as Dan Zahavi, Paul Ricoeur and Bernhard Waldenfels, we set out to reflect around this ambiguity in how the body is defined, how the Other body is defined, and in which way the Other is synonymous with the world. Thereafter, I consider whether Zahavi, Ricoeur or Waldenfels concepts of ambiguity exposes what I rather conceive as a mutuality. Consequently, the question at issue is; How can we understand the mutual relation between body and world in Husserls fifth Cartesian Meditation?

Throughout his career, Husserl characterizes the philosophical program he calls “phenomenology” as a “science of essences” (Ideas I, Introduction). But there are two distinct senses in which phenomenology is a science of essences. The first is that phenomenology has the essences of conscious acts for its subject matter. The second is that phenomenology is supposed to constitute a methodology for determining the essence of any natural kind. While the first sense has been a central theme in Husserl scholarship, very little critical analysis has been devoted to the second. My aim in this dissertation is to fill this lacuna by providing a systematic account of how phenomenology can be used to acquire knowledge of the essences of natural kinds. In doing so I hope to show that Husserl’s phenomenology is valuable to the contemporary metaphysics and epistemology of natural kinds. My primary thesis is that the phenomenological method can be used to defend the controversial position that natural kinds have mind-independent essences. In Chapter 1 I develop a general account of natural kinds as universals that impart structure to their instances, i.e., explain their regimentation into their specific parts. In Chapter 2 I attempt to establish the most perspicuous ideology by which to articulate natural kind essentialism, and I draw on Husserl’s realist account of universals to vindicate the intelligibility of the claim that natural kinds themselves, and not their individual instances, can be the subjects of essential truths. In Chapter 3 I raise two fundamental challenges for the account of natural kind essentialism that emerges from the argumentation of the first two chapters, the first concerning the unity of natural kinds and the second concerning the extendibility of their features across possible worlds. In Chapter 4 I base a solution to the first of these challenges on the unity-making role that essence plays in Husserl’s ontology of parts and wholes. In Chapter 5 I defend a novel interpretation of Husserl’s method for acquiring knowledge of essences, and I show how, on my conception, the method enables us to overcome the second challenge to natural kind essentialism. / 2024-03-30T00:00:00Z

The early Husserl wants to know what logic is, or what we should call ‘logic.’ He poses the question in a way that knowingly encompasses both what the 19th century (after Kant but before Frege) and the 20th century (since Frege) call ‘logic.’ But that he asks the question, and with such scope, has yet to be widely recognized. In particular, Husserl scholars still lack an overview of how Husserl’s early, explicitly logical inquiries, driven more by this single question than any worry about doctrinal consistency, does at least two things at once: probe what will later be called ‘pure phenomenology’ or ‘transcendental logic,’ and delimit logic as a positive yet mathematical discipline. With the aim of providing the neglected overview of this project, this dissertation takes the measure of Husserl’s two-volume Logical Investigations (1900-01) in four studies. Chapter I argues that the first volume, the Prolegomena to Pure Logic (1900), intends at once to resolve a 19th-century conflict and to establish logic’s possibility as its own discipline, all by means of demonstrating the confusion of psychologism (the view that empirical psychology could set the terms for logic as a discipline). Chapter II then contends that most of the Prolegomena’s first chapter falls outside this intention, departing from the book’s Bolzano-inspired argumentative framework yet thereby anticipating Husserl’s later ‘transcendental logic.’ Chapter III presents Frege and Husserl as two images of indecision as to how it falls to logic to know truth’s laws. Chapter IV concludes by expounding Husserl’s conception of logic as noetics, the self-clarification of knowing, thus completing the picture of Husserl’s indecision, while also laying groundwork to track the development of his thinking after the Logical Investigations.

Chronic pain disorders are estimated to affect a significant proportion of the global population. These disorders are often debilitating and pose a substantial challenge to the everyday life of those affected. Modern medicine has made great strides in understanding the physiological processes involved in chronic pain. However, chronic pain is more than merely a physiological process. Chronic pain is an embodied mode of being-in-the-world that manifests in multiple aspects of lived experience, from the ability to perform day-to-day tasks to the relationship between body and self. Consequently, it is essential to cultivate a rich appreciation of chronic pain as a lived experience. To rely solely on physiological knowledge in conceptualizing chronic pain precludes the development of such an appreciation. This work examines the ways that phenomenology can be leveraged to broaden the current medical understanding of chronic pain to better incorporate subjective experience. As a rigorous methodology for studying embodied consciousness, phenomenology provides the theoretical and conceptual tools to form a rich description of chronic pain's lived experience. First, a brief history of theories of pain is presented to contextualize the development of modern medical understandings of chronic pain. Following this, the writings of three classical phenomenologists—Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty—are presented, and key phenomenological concepts are introduced. Phenomenology is then used to examine the lived experience of chronic pain. Finally, means of integrating phenomenology into the current medical framework are explored.

Mémoire numérisé par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.

Mémoire numérisé par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.

This thesis analyzes case studies of attached housing design according to principles derived from the philosophy of phenomenology; principles referred to as themes of the lifeworld. The lifeworld is the term given by phenomenologists to a person's personal, everyday perceptions of the world in which he or she lives. The lifeworld encompasses a person's relationship with him or herself, other people and the physical world in which he or she lives. It includes the moods, feelings and impressions that are associated with these relationships. Though each person's lifeworld is a personal and subjective affair, phenomenologists have discovered themes that are common to the lifeworlds of almost all people regardless of region or culture. This study concentrates on the themes that are common to people's perceptions of the physical world. It employs these themes in the analysis of examples of attached housing design in order to demonstrate that design principles developed through the philosophy of phenomenology can indeed be discovered in the real world. Such a demonstration is important because if the claims are true that phenomenology seeks out and establishes itself on an accurate understanding of how people experience the world, then a design approach informed by this understanding is more likely to result in thriving, livable environments than those approaches that exclusively emphasize visual imagery, the satisfaction of functional objectives or the fulfillment of pre-conceived design paradigms. / Master of Landscape Architecture

Thesis advisor: John Sallis / Martin Heidegger’s work centers on the task of retrieving the traditional problem of ontology, metaphysics, and first philosophy: the problem of Being. There has been a tendency in the scholarship to take Heidegger’s formulation and solution to the problem together as a whole. In contrast, I propose to differentiate between the two, and to engage Heidegger’s formulation of the problem as such, which takes shape as phenomenological ontology in the second half of the 1920s. I claim that the subject matter of phenomenological ontology, the problem of Being, is in fact the unitary articulation of four problems: the ontological difference, the basic articulation of Being, the possible modifications of Being, and the truth-character of Being. My analysis shows that these four problems are Heidegger’s problematization (following Brentano) of the four main senses of Being, traditionally associated with Aristotle and Aristotelianism: the difference between the incidental and the in itself; the articulation of being-at-work, potency, and being-at-work-staying-itself; Being in the sense of the categories; and Being in the sense of truth. Concerning its method, I claim that phenomenological ontology reformulates the problem of Being in three moments: reduction, construction, and destruction. My analysis shows that, with these three moments, Heidegger problematizes (following Husserl) the movement of ascent and descent traditionally associated with Plato and Platonism. Although Heidegger never makes it fully explicit, the problem of the phenomenologically reductive, constructive, and destructive unitary whole of the four basic problems of Being is in fact his problematization of a (the) perennial locus philosophiae—the unity of the four senses of Being in an ascent and a descent. Moreover, I claim that phenomenological ontology has a transcendental-architectonic character, in a Kantian sense. The problem of Being is formulated in three differentiated moments: the reductive fundamental ontology asks and answers the question of the sense of Dasein’s Being; the constructive transcendental science of Being asks and answers the question of the sense of Being as such; and the destructive groundwork of metaphysics asks and answers the question of the (historical) whole [καθ'ὅλου] of the Being of entities. Heidegger considers that his own architectonic is the historical outcome of the ontotheological orientation of the problem since Antiquity (Aristotle’s Metaphysics), during the Middle Ages (Suárez’s Disputationes), and throughout Modernity (Kant’s Critiques.) Because my interest lies in the problem itself, my aim is to problematize Heidegger’s ontotheological interpretation of the locus philosophiae. The first task in this direction is to clarify Heidegger’s incomplete construction of a unitary phenomenological ontology during the mid-late 1920s. The present text begins this clarification by outlining the reconstruction of fundamental ontology as projected upon the science of Being, and on the basis of the indicated locus. The reconstruction is a clarification in that it exhibits the simplest moments of the inner structure of phenomenological ontology. The dissertation is divided into two main parts. In the first part, I analyze the basic concepts of phenomenological ontology. I exhibit first the basic concepts of fundamental ontology (Chapter 1), and then the basic concepts of the science of Being (Chapter 2.) Through these first two chapters I show the correspondence between the concepts of fundamental ontology and the science of Being based on the projection of the former onto the latter. It is here that I argue that fundamental ontology and the science of Being are two stages in Heidegger’s architectonic reformulation of the problem of Being. I also argue that each of these stages reflects the whole problem from its own standpoint. In the second part, I begin the reconstruction of fundamental ontology as projected upon the science of Being. I claim that the analytic of Dasein is to be understood as the reduction of Dasein. The reduction of Dasein is articulated in two distinct moments that I call ‘ontological’ and ‘existential.’ I first characterize the reduction of Dasein as a whole (Chapter 3) and then its first moment—the ontological reduction (Chapter 4.) The text ends with an Appendix where I clarify Heidegger’s lexicon of Being. Here, I anticipate fundamental aspects of the existential reduction, and point toward the connection between Heidegger’s and Husserl’s accounts of the reduction. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2021. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Philosophy.

A causa del nuovamente crescente interesse per un approccio computazionalista alla filosofia della mente, dovuto in parte significativa alla possibilità di applicare nuovi e più raffinati strumenti computazionali – teorici e pratici – allo studio delle neuroscienze, lo scritto si propone di esaminare la fondatezza della spiegazione offerta dal modello di mentale e di operazione mentale sottesoall’approccio suddetto. Per sviluppare tale esame, si segue il duplice filo conduttore della domanda sulla legittimità di parlare di “rappresentazioni computazionali” e sulla legittimità esplicativa di tali costrutti teorici, sulla scorta delle riflessioni di William Ramsey. Lo scritto si articola come segue. Il primo capitolo si propone di chiarire il concetto di “rappresentazione computazionale” esaminando la sua genesi storica in seno al contrasto tra Comportamentismo e Cognitivismo, allo stesso tempo sforzandosi di reperire i principi-cardine che hanno guidato la costruzione del modello di mente in esame. Il secondo e il terzo capitolo proseguono il chiarimento storico-teoretico prendendo in esame il funzionamento concreto dei modelli paradigmatici di computazione, ideali e concreti. Al termine dei tre capitoli, si argomenta che la stretta connessione con il Comportamentismo, nonché con l'idea di scienza come metodo sperimentale incentrato sulla riproducibilità a esso sotteso, conduce a porre un modello che pare impossibilitato in linea di principio a produrre rappresentazioni. Secondo il parere dell'autore, a causa delle specifiche ragioni di suddetta impossibilità, il modello di mente computazionale soffre gli stessi limiti che Cassirer aveva a suo tempo obbiettato alla pretesa compiutezza degli approcci Hilbertiani di stampo finitista all'artimetica; il suo carattere riduzionistico, inoltre, lo rende vulnerabile alla questione già Husserliana di confondere il problema della causa naturale del pensare con il problema della fondazione della conoscenza da parte del pensiero razionale. Un'argomentazione autonoma in difesa di queste ultime conclusioni viene proposta nel capitolo conclusivo.

Cette thèse est un exposé des caractéristiques générales de la phénoménologie husserlienne. Le chapitre I est consacré à des développements généraux concernant l'intuition sensible et l'intuition des essences, et les types de sciences qui leur sont corrélatifs. Une série de distinctions, effectuées sur le plan d'une généralité purement logique, mène à la clarification du concept de région lequel joue un rôle fondamental dans la classification des sciences et partant dans l'établissement du statut de la phénoménologie pure en tant que science éidétique de la région conscience. La phénoménologie est présentée par Husserl comme une méthode descriptive comportant deux volets: la psychologie phénoménologique et la phénoménologie transcendantale. Les chapitres II et III traitent respectivement de ces disciplines parallèles, de leur champ d'expérience propre, de leur méthode, des tâches qui leur incombent, des réductions phénoménologique et transcendantale dont elles sont tributaires, de la réduction éidétique qui les établit comme sciences véritables, des antécédents historiques qui expliquent leur existence et des relations réciproques qu'elles entretiennent. Le chapitre IV définit le caractère spécifique du vécu intentionnel, met en évidence les structures noético-noématiques dans les différentes sphères du vécu et analyse succinctement quelques types de modifications susceptibles d'affecter le noyau noématique. L'intentionnalité effectuante à l'œuvre est abordée au chapitre V. La réduction transcendantale a permis de découvrir l'origine intentionnelle du sens du monde. Il est maintenant possible de retracer la genèse de ce sens, de reconnaître les conditions d'apparition du monde comme réellement existant et la fonction ultime de l'évidence dans ce processus de constitution; l'auto-constitution de l'ego dans le flux incessant du temps apparaît également avec netteté. Ainsi loin d'isoler la conscience en elle-même, la réduction transcendantale l'a engagée dans une nouvelle relation au monde en lui révélant son propre pouvoir constituant.