http://hdl.handle.net/10197/2856 Sun, 19 May 2013 07:40:21 GMT 2013-05-19T07:40:21Z http://hdl.handle.net/10197/4318 'Let's Look at it Objectively': Why Phenomenology Cannot Be Naturalized Moran, Dermot In recent years there have been attempts to integrate first-person phenomenology into naturalistic science. Traditionally, however, Husserlian phenomenology has been resolutely anti-naturalist. Husserl identified naturalism as the dominant tendency of twentieth-century science and philosophy and he regarded it as an essentially self-refuting doctrine. Naturalism is a point of view or attitude (a reification of the natural attitude into the naturalistic attitude) that does not know that it is an attitude. For phenomenology, naturalism is objectivism. But phenomenology maintains that objectivity is constituted through the intentional activity of cooperating subjects. Understanding the role of cooperating subjects in producing the experience of the one, shared, objective world keeps phenomenology committed to a resolutely anti-naturalist (or ‘transcendental’) philosophy. Mon, 01 Jul 2013 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/10197/4318 2013-07-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10197/4290 Introduction: intersubjectivity and empathy Jensen, Rasmus Thybo; Moran, Dermot Editors Introduction to the Special Issue, Intersubjectivity and Empathy, of Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences Fri, 01 Jun 2012 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/10197/4290 2012-06-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10197/4165 Even the Papuan is a Man and Not a Beast: Husserl on Universalism and the Relativity of Cultures Moran, Dermot Edmund Husserl’s account, especially in his Crisis of European Sciences (1936) and Vienna Lecture (1935), of the Greek philosophical breakthrough to universal rationality has been criticized as Eurocentric. Husserl speaks of the universality inherent in ‘European’ philosophical culture of the logos and contrasts it with other communal life-worlds, which are, in his view, merely ‘empirical-anthropological’ types, with their own peculiar ‘historicities’ and ‘relativities’. In this paper, I propose to defend Husserl’s appeal to critical universal reason by situating it within the political context, especially the National Socialist inspired philosophy and anthropology of Germany in the 1930s. Husserl’s stance in favour of universal rationality as an enduring telos for humanity is an explicit rejection of National Socialist race-based ideologies that made reason relative to race. Husserl’s assertion in the Vienna Lecture that ‘there is, for essential reasons, no zoology of peoples’ must surely be read as a clear repudiation of race-based doctrines. Moreover, philosophy, for Husserl, is essentially international and every culture contains within it an implicit openness to the universal, although, as a matter of contingent history, it was the ‘a few Greek eccentrics’ who made the actual breakthrough to the concept of rationality open to infinite tasks. Sat, 01 Oct 2011 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/10197/4165 2011-10-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10197/3849 Immanence, self-experience, and transcendence in Edmund Husserl, Edith Stein, and Karl Jaspers Moran, Dermot Phenomenology, understood as a philosophy of immanence, has had an ambiguous, uneasy relationship with transcendence, with the wholly other, with the numinous. If phenomenology restricts its evidence to givenness and to what has phenomenality, what becomes of that which is withheld or cannot in principle come to givenness? In this paper I examine attempts to acknowledge the transcendent in the writings of two phenomenologists, Edmund Husserl and Edith Stein (who attempted to fuse phenomenology with Neo-Thomism), and also consider the influence of the existentialist Karl Jaspers, who made transcendence an explicit theme of his writing. I argue that Husserl does recognize the essential experience of transcendence within immanence; even the idea of a physical thing has "dimensions of infinity" included within it. Similarly, he asserts profoundly that every "outside" is what it is only as understood from the inside. Jaspers too makes the experience of transcendence central to human existence; it is the very measure of my own depth. For Edith Stein, everything temporal points toward the timeless structural ground which makes it what it is. Transcendence is an intrinsic part of being itself Furthermore, the very lack of self-sufficiency of my own self shows that the self requires a ground outside itself, in the transcendent. There is strong convergence between the three thinkers studied on the concept of transcendence, which is indeed a central, if largely unacknowledged, concept in phenomenology both in Husserl and his followers (Stein), but also, through Jaspers, in Heidegger. Fri, 01 Aug 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/10197/3849 2008-08-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10197/3848 Edmund Husserl's Phenomenology of Habituality and Habitus Moran, Dermot Habit is a key concept in Husserl’s genetic phenomenology. In this paper, I want to flesh out Husserl’s conception of habit (for which he employs a wide variety of terms including: Habitus, Habitualität, Gewohnheit, das Habituelle, Habe, Besitz, Sitte, Tradition) to illustrate the complexity, range and depth of the phenomenological treatment of habit. I shall show that Husserl was by no means offering a limited Cartesian intellectualist explication of habitual action, rather he attempted to characterize and identify the working of habit across the full range of human individual, embodied, sub-personal, personal experience as well as collective, social and cultural involvement. Habituality is intimately involved at all levels in the constitution of meaningfulness (Sinnhaftigkeit), from the lowest level of passivity, through perceptual experience, to the formation of the ego itself, and outwards to the development of intersubjective society with its history and tradition, to include finally the whole sense of the harmonious course of worldly life. Though it is not always fully acknowledged, Husserl’s account deeply influenced Alfred Schutz, Martin Heidegger, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Finally, I shall show that Husserl’s account is much more complex and differentiated and less ‘subjective’ than Pierre Bourdieu suggests in his own account of habitus. Sat, 01 Jan 2011 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/10197/3848 2011-01-01T00:00:00Z