Edmund Husserl

intuition

Jacques Derrida

phenomenology

poses questions about the relation of the knower and the known. Heidegger, in contrast, asks what sort of beings we are and how our being is bound up with the intelligibiility of the world.

is incorrect in his analysis of our consciousness of time. He failed to realize that time is always already something for us before explicit consciousness. It is already ambiguously at work in our environment before we have noticed it at all.

Whereas Husserl might have beautifully analyzed our consciousness of podiums and desks in the lecture hall, Heidegger tried to show what these things are for us before all explicit consciousness. The same is true of time. Heidegger wants to discuss not the consciousness of time, but its facticity the ambiguous way that time is already at work in our environment before we have noticed it at all.

is wrong in believing that the reality of a thing is simply to appear as a phenomenon for human consciousness. In fact, a thing is not simply an object for consciousness. It is an event. If we say ?there is a city called beirut, it is not.

For Husserl, who walled philosophy off from the natural sciences, the reality of a thing is to appear as a phenomenon for human consciousness; any existence of things outside consciousness is secondary. In 1919, Heidegger begins to radicalize phenomenology, turning it into something completely different. For Heidegger as he reaches maturity, unlike for Husserl, if we say ?there is a city called Beirut,? this cannot mean that Beirut exist as a series of appearances in consciousness. In the young Heidegger's terminology, Beirut is neither a physical occurrence nor an appearance in consciousness. Instead, Beirut is an independent event. All things that exist have the character of events.

is a limited thinker whose account of intentionality is restricted to its phenomenal manifestation as the structure of perceptual comportment. A perceptual comportment cannot be a primary field of research because it is itself founded.

Since for Heidegger, Husserl's account of intentionality is restricted to its phenomenal manifestation as the structure of perceptual comportment, which his analysis uncovers as a founded, and therefore unoriginal mode of being-in-the-world, the originality and priority ascribed to this phenomenon by Husserl's understanding is called into question. This questionableness demands, on the basis of the very meaning of the phenomenon as it is characterized in Husserl's understanding, an inquiry, according to Heidegger, into both the mode of being of the entity which manifests this phenomenon and the meaning of Being that is disclosed in this entity's understanding of Being. Hence, the recasting of phenomenology's primary field of research which Heidegger finds to be ontologically necessary.

is wrong when he analyzes our consciousness of podiums and desks, for he failed to realize that these things are always already something for us before all explicit consciousness.

is important, in a reactionary kind of way, as a culmination of the Cartesian tradition which thinks of man's relationship to the world in terms of subjects knowing objects.

Well, it was Husserl's own idea that he was important that helped. And he was important in a reactionary kind of way. That is, he culminated a whole philosophical tradition, the Cartesian tradition, that thinks of man's relationship to the world in terms of subjects knowing objects.

is concerned with the way that the mind is always directed toward objects under some aspect; which is to say it sees something as a particular thing (say a table) and can have beliefs and desires about said thing.

Husserl's basic idea was that the mind is always directed toward objects under some aspect. So, I am perceiving that table, roughly I'm perceiving that as a table, and from the top I can remember it, I have beliefs about it, I could have desires about it. All my mental content is directed.

is responsible for the idea not that when one is seeing a table, one is seeing something ‘as’ a table, and regardless of what the table really is, the very fact that one is seeing something ‘as’ a table is indubitable.

He performed what he called the "phenomenological reduction". He reflected on his own intentional content. And what was special about that according to him was he had an indubitable basis to start from. It wasn't just that he had some kind of evidence that he took that to be a table, as he put it, he had indubitable evidence that he had himself produced taking it to be a table was just taking it to be a table. He couldn't be wrong about that.

Edmund Husserl, n.All

Edmund Husserl