This book is a study of Edmund Husserl's overall system of philosophy, presenting his development of phenomenology in relation to his theories in logic, ontology, epistemology, and ethics. Husserl is of course renowned as the founder of phenomenology, the first-person science of consciousness. In the present interpretation of Husserl's system, however, phenomenology does not stand alone, as the sole foundation of the system; rather, it stands in interdependence with further principles in logic, ontology, etc.
For the second edition of Husserl I have written a new ninth chapter, addressing Husserl in the context of contemporary philosophy. Otherwise, the text of the first edition is unchanged, preserving the focus on Husserl's holistic system of philosophy. The ninth chapter overviews Husserl's historical legacy (incorporating material from the first edition), and then wrestles with how Husserlian theory might handle contemporary problems in the theory of consciousness and its ontology. In this new discussion – a sympathetic critique of Husserl's transcendental phenomenology – we address four interconnected issues that have come into sharp focus especially in the last decade.
First, in the age of neuroscience, where does the phenomenal character of our experience – “what it is like” subjectively – fit into the scientific image of the natural world, where consciousness emerges from neural activities in the brain? This is called the “hard problem” in the science of consciousness. Second, granting phenomenal character, exactly which features of an experience make it conscious, defining awareness per se? Its intentionality (being already a consciousness-of-something)?, or perhaps a higher-order monitoring of its transpiring (implemented by the hippocampus)?, or simply its appearance in the temporal flow of consciousness? Third, what place do nontemporal ideal meanings – what Husserl called “noematic” contents of acts of consciousness – have in the real-time stream of consciousness (grounded in neural activities in space–time)? Fourth, how can ideal concepts and propositions be produced in the temporal flux of history? The status of ideal meanings is further complicated when we consider the historical genesis of most of our everyday concepts in the work of prior artisans, thinkers, authors. Running through these issues is the ontology of dependence. How does my current consciousness depend ontologically on brain activity, on awareness per se, on ideal meanings, on the historical genesis of those meanings currently running through my mind as processed in my brain?
If you will, the ninth chapter develops a case for core parts of the Husserlian system updated for today's world. Thus, with Husserl's philosophical system laid out in the first eight chapters, we close the book with a broadly Husserlian approach to contemporary issues about consciousness and content. Whatever the historical Husserl would say in the spirit of his own times, the details of Husserl's intricate phenomenological ontology, I propose, afford a nuanced contemporary theory addressing the above issues: a theory of phenomenal consciousness with ideal content involving inner awareness, all dependent ontologically on neurobiological process and in still different ways on historical cultural formations. We end with a close reading of Husserl's own theory of the content or “noema” of an act of consciousness, revisiting this tricky theme with new perspective … I see dependencies all around. Dependence itself, prominent throughout Husserl's corpus, is the most forgotten of ontological categories. “Forgotten” in the sense that Heidegger spoke of our “forgetfulness” of being, of the “ground” (Grund) of our own being. And that tool, the concept of dependence, is key to Husserl's system.
The first edition of the present book was the theme of an author-meets-critics symposium in the Montreal journal Philosophiques. The Disputatio format featured commentary from Jean-Michel Roy, John Drummond, and Eduard Marbach, with input from the journal editor, Denis Fisette, and my responses to all (See Fisette 2009). I enjoyed and benefited from the well-observed commentaries they offered, and I have sought to incorporate in the ninth chapter insights gleaned from that discussion. I envision the new chapter as addressing important problems for Husserl's philosophy, while proceeding in the light of these colleagues' critiques of my own interpretations of Husserl (critiques akin to other scholars' concerns).Yet the style of argument in the chapter is one of improving and expanding a philosophical system.
I thank the aforementioned commentators; their observations and their problematizing have guided my further reflections in this second edition. I thank three anonymous reviewers of my proposal for the second edition; their advice on direction I have found most helpful. I thank two anonymous reviewers of the penultimate draft of Chapter 9; their detailed remarks helped me to improve that chapter and to clarify my focus along the way. Further, I thank the many graduate students, past and present, who have joined me in seminars and discussions exploring the relations between Husserl's philosophy and contemporary philosophy of mind and metaphysics; there was the lab work of this a priori study.
In the closing chapter (and in particular the closing section) of this second edition, several lines of theory wove themselves together as I watched their appearance on my computer screen, configuring the place of consciousness and content in the world. Regarding those lines I am indebted to recurrent dialogue over many years. A special thanks to Dagfinn Føllesdal, whose incisive reading of Husserl (including that of Husserl's conception of noema) lies at the origin of much in my own reading of Husserl. Also to Ronald McIntyre, as our joint work on Husserl laid further foundations for much of the present reading of Husserl. My interests in formal ontology – evident throughout this book and certainly in the closing chapter of the present edition – developed in tandem as I read the fine print in Husserl while also working on systematic ontological issues. My focus on formal ontology developed in part within the context of the Ontek project (in computational phenomenological ontology, as I like to call the genre); my thanks for long discussions in that context, with the late Chuck Dement through the 1980s and 90s, with Peter Woodruff in the 1980s, and with Peter Simons through the 1990s. And I thank Martin Schwab for discussion of the significance and resonance of Husserl's German terms adapted for technical purposes.
As always I am most especially grateful for the lebensweltlich wisdom of those nearest: Mary, Wyndham, Doug (and certain kindred souls with their four-feet-on-the-ground phenomenology of life).