The History of Why

Thinker

7 readings

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Edmund Husserl

Thinker · 7 readings

Husserl studies experience as directed toward things that exceed any single view. Bracketing changes how a belief is used in inquiry without denying an external world.

All readings

7 readings · Title A–Z

  • Guided course · Module 11 · Lesson 64

    Describe experience before explaining it away

    Husserl and Merleau-Ponty describe experience through three ideas: intentionality, bracketing and embodiment. How does a whole object appear through changing bodily perspectives?

  • Husserl and Merleau-Ponty: experience, embodiment and a shared world · Lesson 3 of 9

    How can a passing moment belong to a whole?

    Husserl distinguishes retention of what has just passed from protention of what is coming, and both from recollection, which is another event. The lesson assesses what his description can establish about the unity of temporal experience.

  • Husserl and Merleau-Ponty: experience, embodiment and a shared world · Lesson 4 of 9

    How can another person be given to me?

    Husserl explains how another person is given through the lived body, pairing and appresentation. The lesson follows his account without treating another person’s experience as something one possesses or copies.

  • Husserl and Merleau-Ponty: experience, embodiment and a shared world · Lesson 1 of 9

    One thing, more than one appearance

    Husserl distinguishes an object from its changing appearances, and an act of experience from its intentional correlate. Intentionality, the lesson shows, needs neither an inner picture nor an infallible report, and leaves room for error and correction.

  • Husserl and Merleau-Ponty: experience, embodiment and a shared world · Lesson 8 of 9

    Sharing a world without sharing one perspective

    Merleau-Ponty describes meeting others in a shared bodily and cultural world, and the lesson compares his account with Husserl’s. Sharing an object or an exchange, it shows, is not the same as sharing access, agreement or justified belief.

  • Husserl and Merleau-Ponty: experience, embodiment and a shared world · Lesson 9 of 9

    What can a description establish?

    The final lesson of the study separates description, constitutive argument, causal explanation and ethical judgment, and weighs Husserl and Merleau-Ponty against their critics. Its checkpoint asks what an exhibition committee should do next.

  • Husserl and Merleau-Ponty: experience, embodiment and a shared world · Lesson 2 of 9

    What changes when we bracket the world?

    Husserl brackets the ordinary acceptance of the world and varies examples in imagination to find what cannot change. What could warrant the move from an apparent invariant to a necessity?

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