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The Analytic Reception of Husserlian Phenomenology in the United States: History, Problems, and Prospects

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The Reception of Husserlian Phenomenology in North America

Part of the book series: Contributions to Phenomenology ((CTPH,volume 100))

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Abstract

This paper considers the historical and current reception of Husserl’s phenomenological project within the tradition of analytic philosophy, especially in the United States. Despite the fact that both Husserlian phenomenology and the analytic tradition have centrally undertaken systematic analysis and clarification of structures of meaning or sense, the project of phenomenological analysis and reflection has never been centrally or comprehensively integrated into the most characteristic projects of the analytic tradition. This resistance owes in part to the strong elements of naturalism, conventionalism, reductionism, and realism characteristic of the projects of the analytic tradition. I argue that there remains little hope for a comprehensive rapprochement between Husserlian phenomenology and analytic philosophy that retains without significant distortion the most characteristic methods of both. Nevertheless, it is possible to envision a contemporary development of a phenomenologically informed “post-analytic” philosophy that would integrate phenomenological methods and ideas (such as the ideas of world, reflective awareness, consciousness, givenness, presence, and the “first person” perspective) to supplement the analytic project just where some of its constitutive limitations are, today, becoming most evident.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For some discussion of this connection, see, e.g., Smith (2013a, b) and Follesdal (1990).

  2. 2.

    Husserl (1891).

  3. 3.

    Frege (1894).

  4. 4.

    Husserl (1900–1901).

  5. 5.

    Husserl 1913a [1970], pp. 218–220, 223–224, 234–236.

  6. 6.

    Husserl 1913a [1970], pp. 237–238.

  7. 7.

    Husserl 1913a [1970], p. 774.

  8. 8.

    Husserl (1913b).

  9. 9.

    Smith (2013a, b), pp. 395–396.

  10. 10.

    Føllesdal (1969, p. 681).

  11. 11.

    Føllesdal (1969, p. 682). On Follesdal’s reading, another component of the noema is the noematic correlate of the “Gegebenheitsweise” (the mode of givenness) of the object. This component itself includes as a main part the “thetic character” or “Setzungcharacter”, which is variable for different types of positional act, e.g. “perception, remembering, imagining, etc”.

  12. 12.

    Føllesdal (1969, pp. 685–86).

  13. 13.

    Føllesdal (1969, p. 687).

  14. 14.

    Russell (1914).

  15. 15.

    Russell (1924, p. 72).

  16. 16.

    Carnap (1928, p. 5). For an extended consideration of historical and thematic connections between Carnap and Husserl, see also Ryckman (2007).

  17. 17.

    Carnap (1928, pp. 107–109). It is important to note that (unlike Russell) Carnap does not think of experience, as it is immediately given, in terms of atomistic sense-data; rather, the “elementary experiences” which form the basis for the constructional analysis are themselves abstractions from total experiences, which are conceived as unitary and holistic.

  18. 18.

    Carnap (1928, p. 101). His reference is to Husserl’s exposition of the epoché in Ideas 1.

  19. 19.

    Carnap (1928, pp. 102–104).

  20. 20.

    Carnap (1928, p. 9); Ideas 1 p. 141.

  21. 21.

    Dummett (1993, p. 5).

  22. 22.

    Dummett (1993, pp. 22–25).

  23. 23.

    Dummett acknowledges that Husserl shares with Frege (as well as Bolzano and Meinong) a “denial of the mental character of thoughts”. But he takes Husserl to task (pp. 48–51) for holding that the meaning of linguistic expressions is to be traced to a private “meaning-conferring” intentional act rather than to “the social practice of using language.”

  24. 24.

    See, in particular, Schlick (1913) and Schlick (1930). For discussion, see Livingston (2002).

  25. 25.

    Hook (1930).

  26. 26.

    Hook (1930, p. 141).

  27. 27.

    Hook (1930, pp. 151–152).

  28. 28.

    Hook (1930, p. 152).

  29. 29.

    Hook (1930, p. 151).

  30. 30.

    The episode of Cairns’ reaction to Hook is illuminatingly discussed in a recent blog post by Jeffrey Bell (Bell 2011), who emphasizes Cairn’s consideration of Husserl as a realist.

  31. 31.

    Cairns (1969).

  32. 32.

    Cairns (1930, p. 395).

  33. 33.

    Cairns (1930, p. 395).

  34. 34.

    De Laguna (1951).

  35. 35.

    De Laguna (1951, pp. 11–12).

  36. 36.

    Another recurrent feature of analytic “reports” on Husserl’s methods after 1927 that bears mentioning is that they are very often shaded, or even at times overshadowed, by bemused, skeptical, or critical responses to Heidegger. At times, as in Hook’s report, Heidegger’s philosophy (as espoused in Being and Time) is presented as a simple continuation or deepening of Husserl’s; other reports, while acknowledging the gulf that had already opened up between the two philosophers and would soon deepen, see Husserl’s phenomenology as already harboring certain dangerous tendencies which leave it at least open to the kind of corruption that Heidegger’s philosophical (and sometimes political) views represent (Farber’s 1959Naturalism and Subjectivism, which concludes with a highly critical discussion of the views of Heidegger, Becker, Jaspers, Marcel and Sartre under the joint heading of “The New Irrationalism”, is perhaps typical in this respect). This phenomenon of reception, in order to be properly treated, would have to be situated in relation to the midcentury formation of what came (in the United States) to be called “continental” philosophy, which in many ways acted as a kind of catch-all category for everything in recent European philosophy that did not fit within the bounds of analytic methodologies and practices. A decisive early moment in this construction was Carnap’s own 1932 critique of Heidegger in “The Elimination of Metaphysics Through the Logical Analysis of Language”. But other, later episodes bearing on the reception of Husserl’s phenomenology in the United States, such as for instance Dreyfus’ 1982 critique of Husserlian phenomenology, from a Heideggerian perspective, as embodying a problematic rule-based representational cognitivism, would also have to be understood in terms of the complex and still vexed question of Heidegger’s reception in the United States. (Of course, an adequate treatment of this question would go beyond the scope of this paper).

  37. 37.

    Quine (1951, p. 20).

  38. 38.

    Quine (1951, p. 39).

  39. 39.

    Quine (1960, p. 221).

  40. 40.

    Sellars (1956).

  41. 41.

    Sellars (1956, pp. 20–21).

  42. 42.

    Sellars (1956, p. 14).

  43. 43.

    Sellars (1956, p. 14).

  44. 44.

    Sellars (1948, p. 608).

  45. 45.

    Sellars (1948, p. 608).

  46. 46.

    See, e.g., Soffers (2003), Thompson and Zahavi (2007), and Sachs (2012).

  47. 47.

    Sellars (1975).

  48. 48.

    Farber (1940, p. 19).

  49. 49.

    Farber (1967, p. vii).

  50. 50.

    Husserl (1911, p. 258).

  51. 51.

    This is not to deny the deep and decisive use made of Husserlian ideas and methods, at this time at this time and into the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, by several prominent analytic philosophers (including, e.g., Charles Parsons, Jaakko Hintikka, J. N. Mohanty, and D. W. Smith) in their own philosophical projects.

  52. 52.

    See Livingston (2005), however, for some parallels between functionalism and phenomenology as projects of logical or conceptual analysis.

  53. 53.

    Dennett (1991), chapter 4.

  54. 54.

    Chalmers (1996).

  55. 55.

    See Livingston (2004), especially chapters 1 and 6.

  56. 56.

    See, e.g., many of the essays collected in Petitot et al. (1999), and in Smith and Thomasson (2005).

  57. 57.

    See, e.g., Bell et al. (2015).

  58. 58.

    For one development of this theme, see Livingston (2012), especially chapters 1 and 9.

  59. 59.

    D. W. Smith has argued (e.g. in Smith 2012, pp. 234–240) that phenomenological reflection on intentional content in the epoché can be likened to a kind of “noematic quotation” whereby contents are abstracted from their usual referential significance to be articulated as such, and that the epoché itself may thus be likened to the Quinean device of “semantic ascent”. Along somewhat similar lines, Thomasson (2005) argues for a “cognitive transformation” view of phenomenological first-person content as a “quoted” form of initially outward-directed content that (as she argues) is in fact partly suggested by Sellars himself. Although both proposals do bring Husserl’s idea of content closer to themes that would evidently be acceptable to Quine and/or Sellars, neither one appears to resolve the underlying problem of intensionality which is really at the basis of Quine’s animadversions about intentionality in Word and Object (and, at least on some readings, Sellars’ critique in “Empricism and the Philosophy of Mind” as well).

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  1. University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM, USA

    Paul M. Livingston

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  1. Holy Apostles College and Seminary, Cromwell, CT, USA

    Michela Beatrice Ferri

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Livingston, P.M. (2019). The Analytic Reception of Husserlian Phenomenology in the United States: History, Problems, and Prospects. In: Ferri, M.B. (eds) The Reception of Husserlian Phenomenology in North America. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 100. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99185-6_26

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