Husserl, phenomenology, and foundationalism

Inquiry

Volumn 51, Issue 2, 2008, Pages 194-216

  Hopp, Walter ^a,b  

^a BOSTON UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^b USA   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 42549118156     PISSN: 0020174X     EISSN: 15023923     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/00201740801956937     Document Type: Article

References (45)

1. Mohanty, J.N. (1988) "Husserlian Transcendental Phenomenology", in: Robert Sokolowski (Ed.), Edmund Husserl and the Phenomenological Tradition, p. 177 (Washington: The Catholic University of America Press).
2. Woodruff Smith, D. & McIntyre R. (1982) Husserl and Intentionality (Boston: D. Reidel Publishing Company), p. 93.
3. Husserl, E. [1900, 1913] (2000) Logical Investigations, two volumes, trans. J.N. Findlay (Amherst, New York: Humanity Books), Prolegomena, section 5 and Introduction to Volume Two, section 1. Henceforth referred to as 'LT.
4. Husserl, E. [1913] (1983) Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book, trans. F. Kersten (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers), section 62, p. 141. Henceforth referred to as Ideas I.
5. Husserl, E. [1929] (1977) Cartesian Meditations, trans. D. Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff), section 3. Also see section 12, 27. Henceforth referred to as 'CM'.
6. Husserl, E. [1929] (1969) Formal and Transcendental Logic, trans. D. Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff), pp. 6-7. Henceforth referred to as 'FTL'.
7. Such a justificatory conception of foundationalism remains prevalent in the recent epistemological literature, by both its advocates and opponents: Fumerton: "Foundationalism is a view about the structure of justification or knowledge. The foundationalist's thesis in short is that all knowledge and justified belief rest ultimately on a foundation of noninferential knowledge or justified belief." (Richard Fumerton, "Foundationalist Theories of Epistemic Justification", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2006 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (Ed.). Available from: http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2006/entries/justep-foundational Alston: The "most sober and most neutral epistemological sense" of the term 'foundationalism.' "consists of viewing the overall epistemic structure of a particular subject's beliefs in the following way. Some of the beliefs enjoy a PES [positive epistemic status] without being based on other beliefs, and hence without owing that status to their relation to other beliefs."
8. (Alston, W.P. (2005) Beyond "Justification": Dimensions of Epistemic Evaluation (Cornell: Cornell University Press), pp. 230-1) Steup: "According to foundationalists, knowledge is structured like a building. They hold that, without foundational knowledge on which non-foundational knowledge rests, there couldn't be any knowledge at all."
9. (Steup, M. (2005) "Foundational Knowledge," in: M. Steup & E. Sosa, (Eds), Contemporary Debates in Epistemology, p. 123 (Malden: Blackwell Publishing).) Klein: "...[A]ll foundationalists think of warrant as arising autonomously in so-called basic propositions and being transferred to other propositions through permissible forms of inference."
10. (Klein, P. (2005) "Is Infinitism the Solution to the Regress Problem?", in: M. Steup & E. Sosa, (Eds), Contemporary Debates in Epistemology, p. 132 (Malden: Blackwell Publishing).) Audi: Epistemological Foundationalism is the view that "if... one has any justified beliefs at all, then one has at least one non-inferentially justified beliefs; any other justified belief one has is adequately justified by, and would not be justified apart from its (positive) dependence on, at least one non-inferentially justified belief."
11. (Audi, R. (2001) The Architecture of Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 30) Howard-Snyder: "A particular belief of a person is basic just in case it is epistemically justified and it owes its justification to something other than her other justified beliefs or their interrelations; a person's belief is nonbasic just in case it is epistemically justified but not basic. Foundationalists agree that if one has a nonbasic belief, then - at rock bottom -it owes its justification to at least one basic belief."
12. (Howard-Snyder, D. (2005) "Foundationalism and arbitrariness," Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 86, pp. 18-24, p. 18)
13. Audi defines psychological foundationalism as "the view that the structure of a person's body of beliefs is foundational in the strong sense that some of his beliefs are not based on others, and any other beliefs he has are based on the former." (Audi, R. (1993) The Structure of Justification (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 49)
14. For more on the relation between epistemological and psychological foundationalism, see Audi, 1993, chapter 1.
15. Including Føllesdal, D. (1988) "Husserl on Evidence and Justification", in: Robert Sokolowski (Ed.), Edmund Husserl and the Phenomenological Tradition (Washington: The Catholic University of America Press). I don't discuss his arguments here because he defines foundationalism as the view that "one can reach absolute certainty, at least concerning some matters, and also that... it [is] a main task of philosophy to attain such certainty." (p. 107) Though Føllesdal presents a strong case that Husserl did not endorse such a position, infallibilism of this sort is not necessary for foundationalism.
16. Zahavi, D. (2003) Husserl's Phenomenology (Stanford: Stanford University Press), p. 67.
17. To "reduce evidence to an insight that is apodictic," Husserl says, "is to bar oneself from an understanding of any scientific production." (FTL sec. 60, p. 161.)
18. "It is naturally a ludicrous, though unfortunately common misunderstanding, to seek to attack transcendental phenomenology as "Cartesianism," as if its ego cogito were a premise or set of premises from which the rest of knowledge... was to be deduced, absolutely "secured." The point is not to secure objectivity but to understand it." (Husserl, E. [1936] (1970) The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. Carr, D. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press), section 55, p. 189. Henceforth referred to as 'Cr'.)
19. See Drummond, J.J. (1990) Husserlian Intentionality and Non-Foundational Realism (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers), esp. Chapter 9,
20. and (1991) "Phenomenology and the foundationalism debate," Reason Papers, 16 (Fall), pp. 45-71.
21. Drummond, 1991, p. 52. This corresponds exactly to my conception of Epistemological Foundationalism, and remains prominent in the contemporary literature (see n. 7). He also defines a view that he calls "transcendental foundationalism" as follows: "Philosophical knowledge... is the knowledge of (a) those criteria in terms of which we determine the legitimacy of various experiences or candidates for knowledge and (b) those principles in terms of which we specify the proper relations between different kinds of experiences and different kinds of knowledge. For this sort of foundationalism I shall use the expression 'transcendental foundationalism'."
22. (Drummond, 1991, p. 48). This position, as interesting as it is, is not recognizably foundationalist at all.
23. Bonjour, L. (1985) The Structure of Empirical Knowledge (Cambridge: Harvard University Press), p. 32.
24. See also Drummond, 1991, pp. 57-8.
25. Bonjour has, of course, since abandoned his coherentist ways. See his (1999) "Foundationalism and the external world", Philosophical Perspectives 13, pp. 229-249.
26. For two of the best of Husserl's discussions of fulfillment, see LI, Investigation VI and (2001) Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis, trans. A.J. Steinbock (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers), esp. Division 2.
27. Also check out Willard, D. (1995) "Knowledge," in The Cambridge Companion to Husserl, Barry Smith & David Woodruff Smith (Eds) (Cambridge University Press), pp. 138-167
28. and Bernet, R. (2003) "Desiring to know through intuition", Husserl Studies, 19, pp. 153-166.
29. "However the fullness of a presentation may vary within its possible gradients of fulfilment, its intentional object, intended as it is intended, remains the same: its 'matter', in other words, stays the same." (LI VI, sec. 25, p. 738) What Husserl calls the "epistemic essence" of an act includes its intentional matter or sense, its quality, and its intuitive fullness.
30. See LI VI, sec. 28, p. 745.
31. The ontological founding relation is a formal one. See LI III, sec. 21, p. 475: "A content of the species A is founded upon a content of the species B, if an A can by its essence... not exist, unless a B also exists." The ontological founding relation may be either one-sided or reciprocal.
32. See, for instance, Alston, W. (1989) "What's Wrong with Immediate Knowledge", in: Epistemic Justification: Essays in the Theory of Knowledge (Ithaca: Cornell University Press).
33. Bonjour's coherentist picture presented in The Structure of Empirical Knowledge pertains to empirical knowledge only. A priori knowledge, according to him, consists in "the intuitive grasp or apprehension of necessity," (207), a view he develops at greater length in (1998) In Defense of Pure Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). The following argument, nevertheless, is worth considering, since it undermines the idea that facts about oneself must always figure among one's justifying reasons for believing something.
34. Goldman, A. (2001) "Internalism Exposed", in: Epistemology: Internalism and Externalism, Kornblith, H. (Ed.) (Maiden: Blackwell Publishers), p. 221.
35. Bonjour,L. (1992) "Externalism/Intemalism", in: J. Dancy & E. Sosa, (Eds), A Companion to Epistemology, pp. 132-36 (Oxford: Blackwell).
36. See his (1979) "Foundationalism., epistemic principles, and the cartesian circle," The Philosophical Review, 88, pp. 55-91.
37. Though perhaps she can help believing it. I would argue that this suggests that belief is not essential for knowledge. One cannot, it seems to me, cease to know that, say, consciousness exists just by believing that it does not.
38. Willard, D. (1984) Logic and the Objectivity of Knowledge (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press), p. 135.
39. Ströker, E. (1988) "Phenomenology as First Philosophy: Reflections on Husserl", in: Robert Sokolowski (Ed.), Edmund Husserl and the Phenomenological Tradition (Washington: The Catholic University of America Press), p. 255.
40. LI Prolegomena 4, 58.
41. See, for instance, FTL, section 8, p. 34, where Husserl claims that an intentionality that makes something thematic is "for that very reason and as a matter of essential necessity, non-thematic."
42. As Jocelyn Benoist puts it, "...to the extent that these types of acts [meaning-conferring acts] are defined as a kind of intending of objects, they nevertheless have an essential relation to the second type of act [meaning-fulfilling acts]... In this way, one can say that acts of the first kind (meaning acts) presuppose and anticipate the possibility of acts of the second kind (fulfillment acts) - even in the case where the latter prove eventually to be impossible or even absurd." (2003) "Husserl's Theory of Meaning in the First Logical Investigation", in: Dahlstrom, D.O. (Ed.), Husserl's Logical Investigations, (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers), p. 22.
43. For a view that is similar in this respect see Williamson, T. (2002) Knowledge and Its Limits (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
44. Husserl, E. [1907] (1999) The Idea of Phenomenology, trans. Hardy, L. (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers,), p. 25. Henceforth referred to as 'IdPh'.
45. See Willard, 1984, pp. 138-140.