It is broadly established among scholars that, in Husserl’s system of sciences, the attitude of the human sciences—i.e., the personalistic attitude—is identical to the natural attitude of everyday life. In contrast to the natural scientist, the human scientist does not need to accomplish any kind of abstraction to obtain the region of the world as the field of her investigation. However, this identification poses a problem of the scientificity of the human sciences: if there is no difference between the human-scientific and everyday attitudes, then why is it justified to call them sciences? A possible solution to this problem is a systematic examination of other potential candidates for the attitude of the human sciences. In Husserl’s works, we can distinguish three such candidates: the personalistic, the psychological, and the personal attitudes. The task of the first part of the paper is to describe and compare them. In the course of the examination, it will be shown that the personal attitude, which transforms the one common world into a plurality of personal worlds, could serve as a demarcation criterion between the human sciences and everyday life. Nonetheless, since Husserl did not address the personal attitude extensively, the meaning of this pluralization of the world remains unclear. The task of the second part of the paper is to clarify the operation of pluralization in the personal attitude through, firstly, Husserl’s monadological phenomenology and, secondly, Seebohm’s theory of the two canons of interpretation.
I argue against the influential view that Husserl’s account of the shared world is compatible with an open or indefinite intersubjectivity that is constitutionally prior to concrete empathy. First, I address the exegetical question of whether Husserl’s manuscripts indicate that he is amenable to this a priori understanding of open intersubjectivity. I argue that when the textual evidence advanced by proponents of this view is read in proper context, it shows that Husserl regards open intersubjectivity as dependent upon an anthropological self-apperception that itself presupposes concrete empathy. Second, I argue that Husserl has good reason to reject a priori open intersubjectivity. His account of concrete empathy requires that each monad achieve a primordial self-perception in which its embodied encounter with the world is given as unique. I show that understanding open intersubjectivity as a priori obscures this phenomenological evidence by rendering egoic embodiment essentially typical. Third, I argue that the primary motive for adopting an a priori understanding of open intersubjectivity lacks a sufficient basis. Husserl’s descriptions of egoic holding sway point to a freedom for counterfactual perspectives that accounts for primordial horizonality. It is therefore unnecessary to appeal to indefinite others to explain the actuality of concealed perceptual aspects.
This work offers a new interpretation of the intellectual dialogue between Edmund Husserl and Bernhard Riemann’s theory of manifolds, arguing that this relationship extends beyond mere influence to constitute a central structural inspiration of the project Husserl would later outline as pure logic in the Prolegomena to Pure Logic. The original contribution of this analysis is to demonstrate how Husserl’s engagement evolved from an initial critical opposition, centered on the accusation of a “vicious circle” in deriving Euclidean geometry, to the adoption of Riemann’s work as a crucial paradigmatic model for his own Doctrine of Manifolds (Mannigfaltigkeitslehre). The paper documents the overcoming of this critique, a turning point evidenced by Husserl’s distinction between the “pure categorial form” of the manifold and its “concretization” in phenomenal space. In doing so, Husserl found in the Riemannian separation between a manifold’s abstract topological structure and its metric the perfect model for his own distinction between the ideal form of a theory and its empirical content. Ultimately, we demonstrate how Husserl assimilated the structural potentials of Riemann’s mathematics to prefigure the three fundamental tasks of pure logic, therefore transforming a revolutionary mathematical structure into a primary paradigm for his transcendental theory of science.
Der Begriff der Abschattung gehört zu Husserls zentralen Wahrnehmungsbegriffen. Der vorliegende Beitrag vertritt zwei Hauptthesen. Erstens wird anhand einschlägiger Texte gezeigt, dass die primäre, terminologisch maßgebliche Bedeutung des Abschattungsbegriffs nicht in der jeweils wahrgenommenen realen Dingseite, sondern in den reell-immanenten Empfindungsdaten liegt, die das transzendente Ding darstellen. Zweitens wird in der Auseinandersetzung mit zwei gegen Husserls Konzeption gerichteten Gedankenexperimenten zwischen zwei Bedeutungsebenen des Begriffs unterschieden: einer Grundebene (Darstellungsmedium) und einer Funktionsebene (Darstellungsweise). Die Grundebene erweist sich als innerster konstitutiver Kern und bleibt von solchen Gedankenexperimenten unberührt. Darüber hinaus werden zentrale systematische Schwierigkeiten der husserlschen Abschattungstheorie herausgearbeitet. Abschließend werden zwei Nebenbedeutungen des Ausdrucks „Abschattung“ bei Husserl aufgezeigt.
