Abstract
One of the great contributions of Lester Embree has been his recognition that the works of great phenomenologists such as Edmund Husserl, Alfred Schutz, and Aron Gurwitsch aim at providing a Wissenschaftslehre, that is, a philosophical framework within which the various sciences (in Schutz’s case, particularly the cultural sciences) and modes of knowing can be appropriately situated with regard to philosophy and each other.
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Notes
- 1.
See for instance Embree, “Continuing Husserlian Phenomenology” in an online set of papers on the future of phenomenology sponsored by the New School for Social Research at website: http://www.newschool.edu/nssr/Husserl/Future/Part%20One/Embree/html. There Embree comments:
“The three teachers of the New School were also exemplary with respect to Husserl’s own research focus. Under the influence of Martin Heidegger, Eugen Fink, and Ludwig Landgrebe, most phenomenology in Europe after World War II has a metaphysical emphasis, while the focus in what Husserl published in his lifetime was on Wissenschaftslehre, especially in the theory of logic and mathematics, but also in the theories of the naturalistic sciences and even to some extent in the theory of the Geisteswissenschaften. Along with the distinctive interests of Realistic, Existential, and Hermeneutical Phenomenology, the many volumes of Husserliana now available may obscure the conscious focus of Husserl’s considered opinions for some scholars.
“But Cairns’s reflections on psychology will be published soon, Gurwitsch’s Phenomenology and the Theory of Science is widely known, and Schutz reflected on and/or taught about economics and political science and even linguistics, as well as sociology, in a phenomenological perspective during his twenty some years at the New School. Provided one come to know something about other disciplines, the “Phenomenology and the Theory of Science” can be continued further.”
- 2.
Edmund Husserl, Einleitung in die Philosophie: Vorlesungen 1922/23, ed. Berndt Goossens, Husserliana (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002), 31, 293–307.
- 3.
Robert Brandom, “Knowledge and the Social Articulation of the Space of Reasons,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 55 (1995): 905.
- 4.
Ibid., 903; John McDowell, “Knowledge and the Internal Revisited,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 64 (2002): 98–99.
- 5.
McDowell, “Knowledge and the Internal Revisited,” 101.
- 6.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, eds. G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H. von Wright, trans. Denis Paul and G.E.M. Anscombe (New York and Evanston: J. & J. Harper Editions, 1969), 16e.
- 7.
Alfred Schutz, “On Multiple Realities,” The Problem of Social Reality, Vol. 1 of Collected Papers, ed. Maurice Natanson (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962), 229.
- 8.
Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960), 13.
- 9.
Edmund Husserl, “The Vienna Lecture,” in The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. David Car (Evanston: Northwester University Press, 1970), 286.
- 10.
Alfred Schutz, The Phenomenology of the Social World, trans. George Walsh and Frederick Lehnert (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1967), 43–44. One might argue that Brandom too could affirm that his scorekeeper perspective is only involved in recognizing a knowing that is already there, as seems to occur in the case of chicken-sexers or shard-recognizers (who can tell whether a Meso-American shard is Aztec or not. These chick-sexers or shard-recognizers may deny that they really know or feel that they are unjustified, but the scorekeeper sees that they really are already knowing. In this sense, Brandom might object to the characterization that perceivers are waiting around for a scorekeeper to attribute knowledge to them. Scorekeeper endorsement is a matter of recognizing a knowing already there, not a matter of constituting it. See Robert Brandom, “Insights and Blindspots of Reliabilism,” in Articulating Reasons: An Introduction to Inferentialism (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2000), 97–106.
- 11.
Karl-Otto Apel, Transformation der Philosophie, Band 1: Sprachanalytik, Semiotik, Hermeneutik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973), 347, 356–357, 371; Karl-Otto Apel, Selected Essays: Toward a Transcendental Semiotics, ed. Eduardo Mendieta (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1994), 245.
- 12.
McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1996), xxii–xxiii; John McDowell, “Reply to Commentators: to Richard Rorty,”Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 58 (1998): 421. Bald naturalism, for McDowell, simply refuses to feel the problems, then, that Davidson and Evans feel insofar as they seek to hang on to a notion of rationality that is appropriately conceived in Kantian terms but that is difficult to reconcile with the scientific naturalism that bald naturalists think explains the space of reasons. Just as bald naturalists opt out of this whole area with which Davidson and Evans grapple, so Richard Rorty opts out insofar as he regards the whole question regarding how minds contrive to be in touch with reality as illusory. Like the bald naturalists, Rorty too grants no force to the distinctive intuition that the idea of objective purport belongs in the sui generis space of reasons. Consequently, he believes that Tarskian equivalences, such as “Snow is white” if and only if snow is white, function merely descriptively and that they have nothing to do with the normative links that require that what we say ought to conform with the way the world is and that are constitutive of any idea of objective purport. Because he “plugs his ears” when it comes to the such problems as how mind relates to world, it remains impossible for him to appreciate how McDowell upholds the sui generis space of reasons (the insight) but bypasses the problem of how this space of reasons relates to nature as bald naturalism conceives it. Furthermore, equipped with an understanding of the role of second nature concepts actualized in receptivity, one can defend the idea of intelligible empirical content that becomes impossible under all the other ways of conceiving mind’s relationship to nature. Although McDowell comes to the same conclusion as Rorty and bald naturalism concerning the illusoriness of the problems, he also recognizes the insight that the space of reasons is sui generis, as they fail to do. See McDowell, Mind and World, 67, 72, 85, 108, 147, 151, 154; McDowell, “Reply to Commentators: to Richard Rorty,” 420–421.
- 13.
McDowell, Mind and World, xxiv, see also xiii, xxi, xxiii, 77–78. In an interview with Jakob Lindgaard, McDowell claims that disagreement over whether philosophy ought to be constructive or not basically differentiates him from Brandom: I do not think that the chief difference between us consists in the fact that Brandom is a pragmatist. It consists much more in the fact that Brandom does not agree with the Wittgensteinian thought that the work of the philosopher lies in speaking out what is obvious, in calling humanity back from a kind of spiritual sickness in which they take seriously certain merely illusory problems and calling them to a kind of spiritual health. Brandom’s attitude is, on the contrary, that the problems are good problems, and that the work of the philosopher consists in resolving well-placed kinds of puzzles, instead of trying to unmask this kind of puzzle or mystery as grounding itself in a previous mistake. See John McDowell, “Erfahrung und Natur,” An Interview of John McDowell by Jakob Lindgaard, Deutsche Zeitscrift fur Philosophie 53 (2005): 803. My translation.
- 14.
McDowell, Meaning, Knowledge, and Reality, 384.
- 15.
Ibid., 384.
- 16.
Ibid., 370–373, 383, 384, 393.
- 17.
Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to Phenomenological Philosophy, Book One: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology, trans. F. Kersten (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1980), 35.
- 18.
McDowell, “Knowledge and the Internal Revisited,” 98.
- 19.
Husserl, Ideas I, 38–39; Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 48–50, 54, 56, 116, 214, 229; Husserl, “The Vienna Lecture,” 295; Alfred Schutz, “Concept and Theory-Formation in the Social Sciences,” The Problem of Social Reality, Vol. 1: Collected Papers (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962), 55–56.
- 20.
McDowell, Mind and World, 95.
- 21.
Ibid., xxiv.
- 22.
Ibid., 178.
- 23.
Here McDowell, the traditionalist, shows himself wary of “letting one’s thinking be shaped by an uncritically inherited tradition” – something, paradoxically, required by the tradition of philosophy itself, namely that it be critical even of its own traditions. See John McDowell, “Self-Determining Subjectivity and External Constraint,” Internationales Jahrbuch des deutschen Idealismus/International Journal of German Idealism 3 (2005): 33, see also 35–36.
- 24.
Maurice Natanson, “Existential Categories in Contemporary Literature,” Literature, Philosophy, and the Social Sciences, 120; for more on common sense see Maurice Natanson, “Phenomenology and the Theory of Literature,” Literature, Philosophy, and the Social Sciences, 94, 96; Maurice Natanson, “Existentialism and the Theory of Literature,” Literature, Philosophy, and the Social Sciences, 104. On causation, see Maurice Natanson, “Causation as a Structure of the Lebenswelt,” Literature, Philosophy, and the Social Sciences, 198–200, 207, 210; also Natanson, The Erotic Bird, 128–129.
- 25.
Max Scheler, Man’s Place in Nature, trans. Hans Meyerhoff (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), 7.
- 26.
Ibid.
- 27.
McDowell rightly refuses to answer the skeptic’s question as to how one knows that one is really seeing the world since the question hooks one into the mistaken premises of the argument from illusion. That argument claims that all that we reach is a “highest common factor,” shared by authentic perception and illusion, and thereby denies our openness to the world. By contrast McDowell insists that the sheer intelligibility of openness to the world allows one to ignore (rather than answer) the skeptic’s questions. But it would still be possible to give a philosophical account of such openness. Indeed, Husserlian accounts of intentionality have done just that and discussed the kind of evidence one has in experiencing one’s own intentionality. See McDowell, Mind and World, 82,84, 85, 112–113, 115–119; see for example Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 33, 34, 57, on how we reflectively experience our experiencing of the world and how such intentional acts’s being self-exhibited or self-giving constitutes the evidential having of them, which each philosopher must affirm for him- or herself whether there are such evidential havings. See also Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, rev. trans. by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald Marschall (New York: Crossroad, 1992), 443–445; Scheler, Man’s Place in Nature, 35–40, 51–55.
- 28.
McDowell, Mind and World, 69, see also 70–72.
- 29.
Hilary Putnam, Mind, Language, and Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 227; John McDowell, Meaning, Knowledge, and Reality (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1998), 276.
- 30.
McDowell, Meaning, Knowledge, and Reality, 287.
- 31.
Ibid.
- 32.
Ibid., 285, 287, 290. A similar example of an apriori scientific-theoretic ruling out of experiential data that contradicts what theory tells us has to do with Simon Blackburn’s projectivist view that the world itself is devoid of value and that any one who claims to find objectively comic situations is involved in projecting subjective feeling onto it. McDowell writes: “But how good are the credentials of a ‘metaphysical understanding’ that blankly excludes values and instances of the comic from the world in advance of any philosophical enquiry into truth? Surely if the history of philosophical reflection on the correspondence theory of truth has taught us anything, it is that there is ground for suspicion of the idea that we have some way of telling what can count as a fact, prior to and independent of asking what forms of words might count as expressing truths, so that a conception of facts could exert some leverage in the investigation of truth.” Ibid., 164.
- 33.
John McDowell, Mind, Value, and Reality (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1998), 123.
- 34.
Ibid., 136.
- 35.
Ibid., 123–124, 133, 135-136, 140–142, 146.
- 36.
McDowell, Mind and World, 71, 109; McDowell, Mind, Value, and Reality, 181–182.
- 37.
McDowell, Mind, Value, and Reality, 129, see also 119, 122–128.
- 38.
Husserl, Ideas 1: 39.
- 39.
McDowell, Mind, Value, and Reality, 163.
- 40.
Ibid., 51, 65, 70–71, 163; McDowell, Mind and World, 80-82; Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 62–64.
- 41.
Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, 175.
- 42.
McDowell, Mind and World, 70.
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Barber, M.D. (2010). Phenomenological Wissenschaftslehre and John McDowell’s Quietism. In: Nenon, T., Blosser, P. (eds) Advancing Phenomenology. Contributions To Phenomenology, vol 62. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9286-1_26
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