Re-examining Husserl’s Non-Conceptualism in the Logical Investigations

A recent trend in Husserl scholarship takes the Logische Untersuchungen (LU) as advancing an inconsistent and confused view of the non-conceptual content of perceptual experience. Against this, I argue that there is no inconsistency about non-conceptualism in LU. Rather, LU presents a hybrid view of the conceptual nature of perceptual experience, which can easily be misread as inconsistent, since it combines a conceptualist view of perceptual content (or matter) with a non-conceptualist view of perceptual acts. I show how this hybrid view is operative in Husserl’s analyses of essentially occasional expressions and categorial intuition. And I argue that it can also be deployed in relation to Husserl’s analysis of the constitution of perceptual fullness, which allows it to avoid a objection raised by Walter Hopp—that the combination of Husserl’s analysis of perceptual fullness with conceptualism about perceptual content generates a vicious regress

Book Review: An Encounter of Peripheries: Santals, Missionaries, and their Changing Worlds, 1867-1900

A review of An Encounter of Peripheries: Santals, Missionaries, and their Changing Worlds, 1867-1900 by Marine Carrin

Ocean by Sue Goyette and Timely Irreverence by Jay MillAr

Review of Ocean by Sue Goyette and Timely Irreverence by Jay MillAr

Book Review: The Crisis of Secularism in India

A review of The Crisis of Secularism in India edited by Anuradha Dingwaney Needham and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan

Heidegger’s Distinction between Scientific and Philosophical Judgments

Some commentators, such as Jürgen Habermas, think Martin Heidegger is guilty of a performative contradiction, because he uses judgments to situate judgments in a non-judicative context. This paper defends Heidegger by distinguishing two senses of judgment in his thought. Temporality enables two different directions of inquiry and hence two kinds of judgment. Scientific judgments arise when we turn from the temporal horizon toward entities alone; phenomenological judgments arise when we return to the temporal horizon in which such entities are accessible. Consequently, using phenomenological judgments to show the condition for the possibility of scientific judgments is not contradictory

A Seismic Inversion Problem for an Anisotropic, Inhomogeneous Medium

In this report, we consider the propagation of seismic waves through a medium that can be subdivided into of two distinct parts. The upper part is assumed to be azimuthally symmetric, linearly nonuniform with increasing depth, and the velocity dependence with direction consistent with elliptical anisotropy. The lower part, which is the layer of interest, is assumed to also be azimuthally symmetric, but uniform and nonelliptically anisotropic. Despite nonellipticity, we assume the angular dependence of the velocity can be described by a convex curve. Our goal is to produce a single source-single receiver model which uses modern seismic measurements to determine the elastic moduli of the lower media. Once known, geoscientists could better describe the angular dependence of the velocity in the layer of interest and also would have some clues at to the actual material composing it