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A Compressed Genealogy of Phenomenology — Part II
From Aristotle to Husserl

Last time, I got overwhelmed by the size of the thing I had accidentally opened. What started as a manageable history of phenomenology became Aristotle-to-the-present, plus a database, plus a mindmap, plus my attempt to explain why the map was not the map I actually wanted.

This session we will go cleanly and with a clear plan.

We will follow just one thread: Aristotle, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Husserl.

Aristotle makes the appearing world the object of investigation: perception, form, imagination, and ways of intelligibility. Descartes wants existence that has been certainty-vetted, which makes the known retreat into the power of think-acting. The outer known is known by subjective proxies, and this is the crisis of representationalism. How do I know my thought actually [reaches? emulates? is?] the thing? Hume makes sense stuff our only acquaintance. If we limit our having to our actual getting, experience is originally and for-us really a passing plurality of impressions, ideas, associations, habits, and a few kinds of invented relation that provide certainty and necessity. Kant’s solution makes certain ways of unity—space, time, judgment, synthesis—necessary for being a functioning knower. Showing up as knowable means that lots of vetting has already occurred.

This time, we will see how Husserl inherits this history and what he does with it, which is describe, with amazing care, the acts and structures that make the object-experience a presence-experience for the subject—how an object becomes present as meant, known, doubted, remembered, imagined, or judged.

The goal this time is to make the sequence intelligible and usable.

METHOD

  • TBA by this evening!
  • As always, summaries, notes, event chatlogs, episode transcripts, timelines, tables, observations, and downloadable PDFs for all the episodes we cover can be found here: THORR (The High Ontology Reading Room)

ABOUT PROFESSOR TAUBENECK

Professor Taubeneck is professor of German and Philosophy at UBC, first translator of Hegel’s Encyclopedia into English, and SADHO CΦO. Most impressively, he has also been wrestling with the core texts of 20-cent. phenomenology and existentialism for over 30 years, and has worked and collaborated with Gadamer, Derrida, and Rorty.

View all of our coming episodes here.

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