Husserl's Transcendental Phenomenology: Nature, Spirit, and Life

Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) is regarded as the founder of transcendental phenomenology, one of the major traditions to emerge in twentieth-century philosophy. In this book Andrea Staiti unearths and examines the deep theoretical links between Husserl's phenomenology and the philosophical debates of his time, showing how his thought developed in response to the conflicting demands of Neo-Kantianism and life-philosophy. Drawing on the work of thinkers including Heinrich Rickert, Wilhelm Dilthey and Georg Simmel, as well as Husserl's writings on the natural and human sciences that are not available in English translation, Staiti illuminates a crucial chapter in the history of twentieth-century philosophy and enriches our understanding of Husserl's thought. His book will interest scholars and students of Husserl, phenomenology, and twentieth-century philosophy more generally

Tolerancia. Un enforque fenomenològico.

In this article I present and criticize the dominant Two-Component View (TCV) of tolerance and propose to replace it with a One-Component View (OCV) based on Husserlian phenomenology. In the first part of the chapter I present the TCV as the view that tolerance consist of the conjunction of a positive and a negative component, and I discuss four specification of the TCV by Preston Kind, Rainer Forst, Achim Lohmar, and Lester Embree. I argue that the paradox involved in the conjunction of two opposite components is not plausibly solved by any of these views. In the second part I proceed to outline a Husserlian OCV, according to which tolerance is a moral attitude that neutralizes a positing of value in the context of empathy in order to avoid a value-conflict with another subject. When we tolerate another person we refrain from rebuking or otherwise sanctioning them because we care about their autonomous moral progress more than we care about being axiologically right about our value-positing

Husserl on Specifically Normative Concepts

In this chapter, I explore Husserl’s theory of specifically normative concepts (or “thin normative concepts,” in contemporary idiom) as presented in his lectures on ethics (1920/1924). In the first section, I examine Husserl’s account of normative judgment in the Prolegomena. I argue that it is insufficient because it does not appreciate the irreducibility of normative to non-normative concepts. In the second section, I turn to Husserl’s later account of normative concepts in his lectures on ethics and explicate the meaning and significance of his claim that such concepts refer to posita (Sätze) rather than ordinary objects. I also explain how, on Husserl’s account, the normative stance that makes specifically normative concepts possible can be extended to ordinary objects and acts of consciousness. I conclude with some remarks about the significance of Husserl’s analysis for metanormative theory

Husserlian Phenomenology and Liberal Naturalism

This chapter argues that Husserlian phenomenology is compatible with liberal naturalism. By ‘compatible’ I mean that they share a common philosophical agenda, that is, the critique of scientific (bald) naturalism and the articulation of a better alternative to replace it; however, I also argue that Husserlian phenomenology and liberal naturalism pursue different philosophical strategies to articulate an alternative to scientific naturalism. Liberal naturalism typically advocates an expansion of the concept of nature beyond the physical, including the normative, the cultural, etc. This strategy is potentially problematic because it invites reconsideration of natural teleology. Husserlian phenomenology, by contrast, relies on an austere concept of nature, but it aims to show that mere nature is an abstract layer of the human life-world. Therefore, nature cannot be taken to be the ‘real world’ and our human reality must be taken seriously: it is the arena in which all that matters to us occurs