STEVEN CROWELL

IS THERE A PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH PROGRAM?

1. PHENOMENOLOGY BETWEEN ANALYTIC AND CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY

Writing in 1945 Maurice Merleau-Ponty asked, “What is phenomenology?” and observed that it “may seem strange that this question has still to be asked half a century after the first works of Husserl” (Merleau-Ponty 1962, vii). One hundred years after the publication of Husserl’s Logische Untersuchungen the question has a different ring to it. In 1945, in Paris, to ask what phenomenology is was to ask about the undisputed fons et origo of the leading philosophical currents of the time, and thus the question had much the same anxious undertone that Michael Dummett’s question about analytic philosophy had, some fifty years later, in the philosophical milieu of Oxford (Dummett 1993). Today, though, the question is likely to be asked only by an undergraduate seeking a definition that will obviate the need to read, or by a non-philosopher making the phenomenologist uncomfortable at a social gathering. Among those who profess Continental philosophy, some answer to the question will generally be taken for granted as obvious, while among professors of analytic philosophy there reigns a widespread indifference to the answer. Either way, the question does not get asked. This situation is regrettable, but the interesting circumstance that two books bearing the title Introduction to Phenomenology were published in 2000 suggests that it may be changing. Perhaps the complacency that has lately surrounded the topic of phenomenology in both Continental and analytic circles may be giving way to an interest in taking a fresh look at a philosophical approach that has connections to both. These two Introductions could not be more different. Dermot Moran presents detailed accounts of major phenomenological thinkers on a scale that has not been attempted since Herbert Spiegelberg’s The Phenomenological Movement, while Robert Sokolowski’s far shorter work consigns reference to individual philosophers to an appendix and proceeds topically. Moran offers a developmental account of phenomenology as “the story Synthese 131: 419–444, 2002. © 2002 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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of deviations from Husserl”, expertly laying out the biographical and historical relationships, as well as the philosophical conflicts. Sokolowski, in contrast, makes no reference to biography and history, concisely amalgamating founding ideas and defensible “deviations” into a unified picture of what phenomenology is. Thus where Moran for the most part adopts the stance of impartial historian, writing about disputes in phenomenology without taking sides in them, Sokolowski’s writing exemplifies phenomenology by defending a distinctive position within it. Both books are beautifully written, both are crafted to be accessible to those trained in analytic philosophy, both are deeply philosophically informed. And because their different excellences complement one another, when taken together they provide the sort of introduction to phenomenology that the times demand. And yet, their appearance brings out an ambiguity that was already present in Merleau-Ponty’s own answer to the question and that continues to grumble in many of today’s philosophical discontents. For on the one hand, confronting the diversity of what passed under the heading “phenomenology” in 1945, and looking to historical precursors, Merleau-Ponty was moved to suggest that “phenomenology can be practiced and identified as a manner or style of thinking . . . before arriving at complete awareness of itself as a philosophy”; yet, on the other hand, this very phenomenology is said to be “accessible only through a phenomenological method” (Merleau-Ponty 1962, viii). The first observation suggests a loose tradition, a set of practices with family resemblances to one another, a cluster of relatively independent voices, while the latter suggests something different: an orientation toward a common set of issues defined by commitment to a relatively explicit protocol; a mentality willing to limit itself to what can be pursued methodologically and to leave alone all that cannot be; in short, something like a research program. There is little doubt that phenomenology is a “manner or style of thinking”, but is there a phenomenological research program? This is the question I shall pose to our two Introductions, since it seems to me that the answer is of some consequence for understanding the options facing philosophy in the twenty-first century. Why does this question matter? One reason concerns the relation between phenomenology and analytic philosophy. Though few would agree with his account in all details, it seems that Michael Dummett’s view of this relation is widely shared: because it was able to make the “linguistic turn”, analytic philosophy could establish itself as a viable program of research into meaning; because it was unable to make the linguistic turn, phenomenology could not. By adhering to its “twin axioms” – “the belief, first, that a philosophical account of thought can be attained through a

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philosophical account of language, and, secondly, that a comprehensive account can only be so attained” (Dummett 1993, 4) – analytic philosophy could get a grip on the non-psychological domain of “thought”, otherwise unavailable for reasoned inquiry. Phenomenology, by contrast, followed Husserl in the generalization of the notion of Sinn from linguistic acts to all intentional acts – for instance, perception – and could not, therefore, take the linguistic turn, since “language can play no special part in the study and description of these non-linguistic animators of non-linguistic mental acts” (Dummett 1993, 27). Though Dummett does not quite say so, his criticisms of Gareth Evans suggest that failure to take the linguistic turn condemns phenomenology to being a mere “tradition” – whose practitioners “[adopt] a certain philosophical style and [appeal] to certain writers rather than to certain others” – and not a research program (Dummett 1993, 4–5).1 It is clear that Husserl would not have been pleased by such an assessment. But if, on the contrary, it were possible to identify something like a phenomenological research program, might it not have implications for all those “excommunicated” analytic philosophers (such as Evans, John McDowell, or Christopher Peacocke) for whom reflection on thought, or even perception, independent of “linguistic expression”, has a central role in their theories? The question matters for another reason as well, this one arising within Continental philosophy. Of late there has been a flurry of writing devoted to telling the story of this hybrid genre, the narrative impulse here, as in the case of analytic philosophy, responding to anxieties about identity.2 Despite their many differences, these stories largely turn on how phenomenology is understood and how its impact on twentieth-century European thought is assessed. Though extensive review of this literature would take us too far afield, a glance at some of the issues will show what is at stake in our question. One issue over which the narratives differ concerns the historical scope of the term “Continental” philosophy. Some writers – for instance, McNeill and Feldman, Critchley, Kearney, and West – stress a nineteenth-century genealogy. In West’s terms, Continental philosophy is “the outcome of a series of critical responses to dominant currents of modern western and Enlightenment philosophy” (West 1996, vii) – and to Kant in particular – such that the names of Schelling, Hegel, Marx, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche loom large. In these narratives the question of whether phenomenology is a viable research program is rather incidental to the identity of Continental philosophy. Some may acknowledge that “the phenomenological movement . . . would radically transform and revitalize Continental philosophy” (Kearney and Rainwater 1996, 3), but it is no more central to its identity

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than is structuralism, for example. This approach can produce queer anachronisms, however – for instance, the claim that “Kant’s philosophy may be said to be the point at which so-called ‘Continental’ thought begins to diverge from Anglo-American analytic philosophy” (McNeill and Feldman 1998, 1), or that “it is with and after Hegel that it begins to make sense to speak of Continental and analytic” (West 1996, 3). Hence, a second set of writers – including Embree et al., Ihde, and May – locates the core of Continental philosophy’s identity in the twentieth-century. The term itself emerged in the United States in the 1970s as a way to identify the growing number of practitioners of a diverse cluster of contemporary philosophical styles generally arising in Europe – phenomenology, existentialism, hermeneutics, critical theory, deconstruction, and so on.3 And for this second group of writers, what holds Continental philosophy together lies in the relation, however critical, of all these various movements to Husserl’s phenomenology. Hence the question of whether phenomenology can be taken to be a research program, as Husserl proposed – and if not, why not – is central to the identity of Continental philosophy. A second issue concerns whether the narrative is constructed as “development and progress” or as “decay and decline”. In the former (not surprisingly, more common) sort, Husserl’s phenomenology generally plays the role of a terminus a quo whose liberatory potential must be freed from its scientistic prison. Todd May (1997, 18–20) judges Husserl’s project to be “essentially the same” as Descartes’, and his story emphasizes the departures from this project, culminating in the structuralist inversion of it – the “primacy of structure over consciousness” – that “characterizes Continental philosophy today”. Brogan and Risser (2000, 2–3) speak of a “turn from pure phenomenology in the direction of hermeneutic phenomenology”, and finally of “a shift from phenomenology to poststructuralism”. Kearney (1994, 1–3) holds that “many concerns of Continental thought culminate in a radical anti-foundationalism”, though some, “like Husserl”, find this renunciation of “the metaphysical quest for absolute grounds” regrettable. A corollary of this narrative is a rejection of the very notion of a philosophical research program as “scientistic”. Continental philosophy is “more an art than a science” (Kearney 1994, 2). It is a “style of philosophizing” that proceeds “historically” and works “beyond the perspective or objective of obtaining eternal truths” (McNeill and Feldman 1998, 2). In its critique of Enlightenment rationality, it is “the distant relation of those metaphysicians, moralists, and believers so caustically dismissed by Hume, . . . unwilling to abandon the concerns and insights animated by these modes of experience” (West 1996, 4). Critchley and Schroeder (1998, 12–13) get to the heart of the matter here: Continental

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philosophy recognizes “the complicity between scientific culture . . . and nihilism” and thus seeks to preserve philosophy’s indigenous concern with meaning.4 The very idea of a philosophical research program – of “normal science” – is antithetical to philosophy since the latter is essentially critical: “the responsibility of the philosopher . . . is the production of crisis” (Critchley and Schroeder 1998, 12). The philosopher should rather, in Kearney’s words, take risks to “say the unsayable” with an “inimitable voice” (Kearney 1994, 4). Nevertheless, before moving on to the second sort of narrative it should be noted that even within a field that is largely given over to poststructuralist concerns and issues, the term “phenomenology” can still serve as a marker of legitimation. Why, for instance, has there been such heat generated around the question of a “theological turn” in French phenomenology – with Dominique Janicaud arguing that philosophizing about the “unapparent”, the “radically other”, and so on, transgresses the boundaries of phenomenology, while Michel Henry, Jean-Luc Marion, or Emmanuel Levinas insist that such inquiries remain “phenomenological”?5 Here it would seem that a certain authority inheres in phenomenological investigation that elevates the “inimitable voice” beyond a mere “style or manner of inquiry” to something like rigor. No doubt this clinging to the term “phenomenology” signifies, in part, the uneasiness that someone who defines philosophy as revelation or transgression must feel in the confines of an academic career. But there is more to it than that, as can be seen by considering an example of the second sort of narrative, in which the story is one of decay and decline. Acknowledging that there are “large and contentious debates about its core ideas”, Robert D’Amico nevertheless believes that analytic philosophy has “remained . . . a philosophical movement, whereas the continental tradition has largely ceased to be one” (p. 253). His reasons for this judgment are several, but central is the claim that phenomenology was not able to constitute itself into a genuine philosophical research program – what D’Amico calls a “philosophical tradition”. What distinguishes a philosophical tradition from traditions in general and makes talk of a “research program” plausible here are the normative features D’Amico attributes to it: First, as a kind of inquiry a philosophical tradition “requires constraints. Others must be able to arrive . . . at the same conclusions on these topics in such a way that those conclusions follow, in some fashion . . . from either defended or broadly uncontroversial assumptions”. Otherwise one has merely “a single thinker’s personal vision”. Second, a philosophical tradition “requires an open horizon of issues, problems, and possible clarifications. It cannot consist of only the ‘founding’ texts”.

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Third, it “must also be clear how to go on and do what the ‘founding’ texts did”. On all counts the promising beginning made by Husserl has been abandoned, replaced by a Continental “philosophy” whose “intent is to be against the possibility of philosophy” – that is, to be free “from the constraints of necessity, generality, and universality, which, once discredited, allow a thousand flowers to bloom” (p. 254). In D’Amico’s narrative of decay and decline, then, phenomenology once more serves as the terminus a quo, this time for movements that have abandoned what was distinctively philosophical about it. But for our question it is important to note that the developmental perspective – whether of progress or decline – can be empirically and historically accurate enough without thereby demonstrating that the development reflects a necessary consequence of the phenomenological beginning. That (some) post-phenomenological Continental philosophers reject the idea of a philosophical research program does not mean that phenomenology must fail to be one. On the contrary, the fact that serious phenomenological work is being done around the world strongly suggests that D’Amico’s pessimistic judgment on phenomenology (leaving aside the question of Continental philosophy) may be an artefact of his narrative perspective.6 It will be useful, then, to examine where D’Amico thinks phenomenology went wrong – namely, in the transition from Husserl to Heidegger. This will give us a set of benchmarks for assessing the answers that the Introductions give to our question. On D’Amico’s account, Husserl’s phenomenology aimed to be a research program that would contribute to the “inextinguishable task” of philosophy, whose “core” lies in certain metaphysical and epistemological questions (pp. 254, 2–3). Above all, Husserl held that philosophy was an autonomous form of inquiry that could not be superceded by results in other sciences. This is expressed philosophically as a sharp distinction “between what is empirical and what is a matter of a priori necessity”, and phenomenology stands as a counter-current to all movements that blur or reject this distinction – that is, as a counter-current to what Husserl called “naturalism”. Husserl was not content merely to offer arguments against “epistemological naturalism” – a “theory of knowledge masquerading as empirical science” (p. 7). Rather, he sought “a methodology of philosophical research” that, employed in the spirit of communal investigation and mutual criticism, might succeed in clarifying the terrain that epistemological naturalism approached so obscurely – namely, “intentionality”. Once Husserl saw through the impasses of Brentano’s approach and recognized the importance of meaning (Sinn; later the “noema”), he designed the phenomenological method specifically for its anti-naturalistic exploration.

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According to D’Amico that method consists of three central elements. There is, first, an epoche or reduction in which all “theoretical claims, hypothetical explanations, or philosophical special pleading” are to be bracketed in favor of what Husserl calls Evidenz. The grasp of Evidenz, the “seeing” of phenomena as they give themselves from a first-person stance, is the second element in the method (p. 17). Husserl held that an epoche of theories, together with a commitment to unprejudiced evidential description – the principle of phenomenological neutrality or “presuppositionlessness” – could lead to agreement and so adjudicate disputes “in much the way that strictly empirical evidence resolves scientific disputes”. Because of its neutrality regarding explanatory hypotheses and its reflective first-person stance, D’Amico labels Husserl’s strategy an “epistemological internalism”, yet he is aware that it is no psychological internalism since the Evidenz of phenomenology does not consist exclusively in matters of fact but includes “essences”, or a priori necessities. The third central element in phenomenological method is thus the procedure for grasping these essences. D’Amico objects to Husserl’s designating this procedure “eidetic intuition”, or seeing, since it appears to be “pure conceptual analysis”, that is, nothing more than grasping “abstract matters of conceptual and logical necessity” (pp. 15, 17). Be that as it may, on this basis phenomenology can have an indirect impact on the philosophical disputes about which it otherwise remains neutral, since the necessities involved are constraints on possibility and thus can demonstrate that “some philosophical positions [such as naturalism] are epistemologically idle” (pp. 17, 23). Before moving on to see what becomes of the method in Heidegger’s hands, we should note that D’Amico judges that already Husserl’s version fails to be a distinctive research program. For while Husserl’s claims about essential structures of experience may indeed be correct, they do not seem to “require, let alone actually emerge from”, his method; phenomenological intuition “neither establishes nor defends such conclusions any more securely than does ordinary, pedestrian conceptual analysis”. Further, to speak of “intuition” here is highly misleading, since “to ‘see’ a conclusion as inconsistent or a claim as incoherent is to grasp the reasoning involved”. To invoke intuition has the unsalutary effect of implying that once the essences are exhibited in this way “one is thereby absolved from any further defense or argument” (p. 250). Clearly, then, if we are to address this rejection of phenomenology’s claim to being a viable research program – an assessment that echoes Dummett’s – we will have to consult our Introductions on the question of phenomenology’s account of the relation between argument and intuition and ask whether phenomenology’s eidetic method

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is indeed indistinguishable from conceptual analysis.7 First, however, we must see how Heidegger fits into the story. As do many commentators, D’Amico construes Heidegger’s embrace of ontology as a betrayal of central elements of Husserl’s research program. Though he recognizes that Heidegger shared many of Husserl’s convictions – for instance, that philosophy is nothing psychological or subjective; that it has to do with the a priori; that it is anti-naturalistic – his way of establishing these points was not phenomenological, according to D’Amico, but “metaphysical”. When Heidegger introduced “Dasein” in place of Husserl’s transcendental ego he broke with the central methodological tenet of phenomenological neutrality and opted for “simply another version of presuppositional philosophical debate”. According to D’Amico, the feature that Heidegger finds distinctive of Dasein – that it is essentially characterized by “understanding of Being” – is not the result of phenomenological analysis but a philosophical postulate (pp. 83, 59). Thus, while he sees virtue in Heidegger’s distinction between “ontic” (empirical) and “ontological” (a priori metaphysical) matters, he insists that it is “vastly underargued” in Being and Time and is, furthermore, “incompatible with its supposed phenomenological derivation” (pp. 252, 85). For later Continental philosophy, Heidegger’s break with phenomenological neutrality meant that “what Husserl attacked as the ‘bewitching routine of resurrected metaphysics’ would not only replace his dream of philosophy as rigorous science, but do so under his name” (p. 43). Ironically, the very same ontological move to Dasein had the effect of opening the door to “epistemological naturalism” as well. This is because Dasein is characterized as “factic” – historical being-in-the-world – rather than as a “transcenental” ego. Though for Heidegger this was not a rejection of the a priori, it had the effect of blurring Husserl’s distinction between fact and essence, a blurring that, according to D’Amico, later poststructuralists, textualists, historicists, and hermeneuticists would exploit into Continental philosophy’s own version of epistemological naturalism. The result was the now-familiar rejection of anything like an “autonomous” form of philosophical inquiry (p. 254). Finally, Heidegger’s style further exacerbated the rift between the purported method of descriptive seeing and the results obtained. D’Amico finds no discernable connection between Heidegger’s substantive claims in Being and Time and the analyses that supposedly yield them (p. 67).8 After Being and Time, therefore, Heidegger supposedly drops this methodological pretense altogether and ushers in the current period in which “thought” becomes altogether a matter of “inimitable voice”.

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This brief review of D’Amico’s narrative has yielded a framework, and a set of desiderata, for approaching what our two Introductions have to say about phenomenology’s claim to being a philosophical research program. How do they frame what has proved to be the crucial transition “from” Husserl “to” Heidegger, from “transcendental” philosophy to “ontology”? Can it be understood as belonging to phenomenology without sacrificing the elements of phenomenological method (epoche, reflective Evidenz, eidetic intuition) that support its claim to be a research program? Can a different story – in which phenomenology is not subordinated to a narrative about Continental philosophy – be told in which it continues to live up to D’Amico’s desiderata for a research program: that there be genuine constraints on what can be said, rather than just “personal visions”; that there be a common set of problems, not just “founding texts”; and that there be a clear method or sense of “how to go on”, normal science and not merely the “production of crisis”? In Dermot Moran’s Introduction these questions are addressed specifically in narrative terms. It thus provides a convenient place to begin. 2. DERMOT MORAN ’ S HISTORICIST PHENOMENOLOGY

At the outset of his ambitious book, Moran describes several features that he takes to be characteristic of Husserl’s phenomenology. His account lines up pretty closely with D’Amico’s:9 First, phenomenology is neutral or presuppositionless, that is, it practices an epoche. “In genuine phenomenological viewing, we are not permitted any scientific or philosophical hypotheses” (pp. 5, 9, 11). Second, this epoche is in the service of a “return to concrete lived human experience in all its richness” – a return carried out descriptively in reflective, first-person grasp of Evidenz or “originary presentative intuition”: givenness as “the dative element in experience” (pp. 5, 10–11). Third, it seeks the a priori, or “essences”, through eidetic intuition – a “kind of conceptual clarification” that does not examine “the role of concepts in a language” but relies on “self-evident givenness of insights in intuition” (p. 9). This implies a field of research – variously identified as “intentionality”, “consciousness”, or “meaning” – that Moran sums up this way: “The manner in which the world comes to appearance in and through human beings. Phenomenology’s conception of objectivity-for-subjectivity is arguably its major contribution to contemporary philosophy” (p. 15). For this reason phenomenology remains the most “profound critique of naturalism as a philosophical program”, a “challenge to all third-person attempts to explain consciousness in terms of natural science” (pp. 21, xiv).

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However, if we ask whether these features of Husserl’s phenomenology are features of phenomenology tout court, the answer we get from Moran is nuanced and highly qualified. Indeed, the very structure of his book – an introduction to “phenomenology as a way of doing philosophy and . . . an introduction to the philosophies of some of its most able practitioners” (p. 3) – systematically obscures our view of the question. On the one hand, Moran insists that even if phenomenology is a distinctive “way of doing philosophy”, it is “important not to exaggerate . . . the extent to which phenomenology coheres into an agreed method”. Husserl’s “claims to be founding a new science have not been borne out by subsequent developments in philosophy”. Phenomenology “never came to be a movement in the sense that Husserl intended” (pp. 3, 189, 21). Hence Moran apparently believes that phenomenology is not a philosophical research program – “Phenomenology cannot be understood simply as a method, a project, a set of tasks; in its historical form it is primarily a set of people” – and for this reason he structures his book around what this set of people “took to be the phenomenological programme for the future of philosophy” (pp. xiv, 3). And yet, what is implied in saying that phenomenology cannot simply be understood as a method, and that in its historical form it is what phenomenologists made of it? This seems to entail something like a normative core that constitutes phenomenology as a “disciplined practice” and not just a list of names (p. 14). Indeed, though Moran most often writes as an objective historian (thus making it hard to tell when he is narrating an element of empirical history or asserting a normatively necessary transformation in his own voice), there is a strong normative component in his conception of phenomenology. This is clear in his selection of figures to treat – for instance, his brilliant inclusion of Hannah Arendt demonstrates that one need not actually have identified oneself as a phenomenologist in order to be an “able practitioner” – and it is clearer still in his treatment of some of these figures. There are definite ahistorical constraints on what people can “take” the phenomenological program to be, as is evident in Moran’s chapters on Sartre and Levinas. Sartre is judged “guilty of emptying out the phenomenological method until it is no more than a form of creative intuition or artistic insight into the world”, while his ontology is said to be a “speculative metaphysics of a very traditional kind, the very kind repudiated by Husserl and Heidegger, and the phenomenological tradition generally” (pp. 363, 385). Thus a certain sort of methodological seeing, as well as metaphysical neutrality, seem to be normative for any phenomenology. About Levinas Moran is even more blunt. While Levinas certainly had a role to play in the history of phenomenology, “it is un-

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clear how [his] phenomenology of alterity can be a phenomenology at all” (p. 352). As did Janicaud, Moran bases this judgment on the paradoxical nature of a phenomenology of what cannot “show itself”; it therefore implies commitment to some version of the principle of Evidenz and intuitive self-givenness. How are the normative and historical aspects of Moran’s approach to be brought coherently together? There seems to be a kind of phenomenological historicism at work that might be summed up as: “Phenomenology transformed is still phenomenology”. Phenomenology does seem to be a research program, but one whose essential features emerge historically and were not present all at once with Husserl. Indeed, Moran defines phenomenology as “an enterprise begun and elaborated by Husserl and then radically transformed by Heidegger”, appropriately devoting half the book to these two thinkers (p. 4). We are thus brought back to the relation between Husserl and Heidegger, and our question becomes: in Heidegger’s radical transformation of phenomenology, according to Moran, can we identify (as D’Amico could not) the elements of a continuing philosophical research program – a program to whose normative features Moran himself occasionally makes appeal? According to Moran, when Heidegger takes up the phenomenological program he rejects “three central facets of Husserl’s phenomenology”: First, against Husserl’s suspicion of world-view philosophy Heidegger argues that “phenomenology must be attentive to historicity or the facticity of human living”. Second, against Husserl’s emphasis on description Heidegger argues that “all description involves interpretation”. And third, against Husserl’s “transcendental idealism” Heidegger identifies phenomenology with ontology. The consequence is that after Husserl, Heidegger “immediately reintroduced the historical and relative into phenomenology” (pp. 20–22). But everything depends on how and in what form the “historical and relative” are reintroduced. For it was precisely here, according to D’Amico, that Heidegger opened the door to epistemological naturalism by undermining the sharp phenomenological distinction between fact and essence, the empirical and the a priori. In such a case it would not be Husserl, as Moran asserts, who “never satisfactorily resolved” the way in which “fact and essence are entwined in my own self-relation” (p. 179), but rather Heidegger, since his move from transcendental idealism to the “hermeneutics of facticity” would amount to abandoning the only basis upon which the distinction could be maintained. Does Moran provide a view of Heidegger’s turn to the historicity and facticity of human being that is compatible with his apparently normative view of the anti-naturalism of phenomenology?

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Like D’Amico, Moran considers Husserl’s transcendental idealism to be an epistemological “internalism”. In contrast, he takes Heidegger’s transformation to be a move toward “externalism” (p. 193). One way of understanding this is to say that, for Heidegger, it is impossible to clarify meaning and intentionality without taking the “world” into account. This cannot be meant in the sense of a “causal” theory of reference, however, for this would import “ontic” or empirical explanatory hypotheses into philosophy – a move that Heidegger rejects. On Moran’s account, Heidegger’s sort of externalism remains phenomenological because, rather than appealing to anything outside the phenomenological space of appearing (itself no longer seen as belonging to “consciousness”), it invokes the “fundamental . . . relation between Dasein and Being” (p. 194). The trick, however, is to say how this notion of “Being” can be given phenomenological sense; otherwise its claim to be other than a metaphysical postulate, on the one hand, or a naturalistic explanans, on the other, will evaporate. Unlike D’Amico, Moran is clear why Heidegger’s “Being” is not a metaphysical postulate. Where the tradition conceived being ultimately as an entity, Heidegger sees phenomenology as making inquiry possible “into the manner in which the structures of Being are revealed through the structures of human existence” (p. 197). Being “belongs” to the phenomenon qua phenomenon; phenomenology is ontology. However, if one asks about the method of this inquiry, Moran’s historicist thesis about Heidegger’s transformation of phenomenology makes it difficult to decide whether the “relation between Dasein and Being” does not collapse into a non-philosophical empiricism after all. On the one hand, Moran recognizes that Heidegger wants to “map out the transcendental conditions that make human existence (Dasein) possible”, and that he does so on the basis of “the appearing or disclosure of things” (pp. 197, 194). Heidegger thus embraces phenomenology’s principle of Evidenz or givenness, as well as its orientation toward the eidetic or a priori. On the other hand, Moran argues that on Heidegger’s “interpretive” transformation of phenomenology there is no “presuppositionless” description; rather, the descriptive project is “impossible unless it is situated inside a radically historicized hermeneutics” (pp. 278, 20). But are these conceptions compatible? Won’t the latter end by rendering the former otiose in the manner of epistemological naturalism or historicism – showing how all putative a priori structures are nothing but (temporary) historical products? Moran notes that Heidegger ultimately gave up on the transcendental project – abandoning it as a “residue” of both his and the tradition’s theistic past (pp. 208, 260). But it is not clear whether Moran thinks that Heidegger

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also gave up on a phenomenological research program. It seems that he might hold that view, since he argues that “Husserl’s attempt to achieve essential insight eventually became distorted into Heidegger’s gnomic way of letting meanings appear” (p. 188). But if that is so, what is the difference, in Heidegger, between transforming phenomenology and abandoning it? It is finally hard to say what is implied for phenomenology as a research program when Moran correctly describes the historical situation as one in which, after Being and Time, Heidegger “rejected the straitjacket of transcendental philosophy”, or when he reports that Heidegger “turned [phenomenology] into anthropology” (pp. 198, 90). If this is not to amount to epistemological naturalism, must we not assume that a path to the “intuitive” grasp of the a priori is still available after the turn to “interpretation”? And must we not affirm the possibility of a kind of neutrality – an epoche of explanatory theories at least – even if the idea of abandoning all one’s Vor-urteile is chimerical?10 That Moran believes that at least a quasi-transcendental claim remains possible for phenomenology – perhaps essential to its program – is suggested by his treatment of Gadamer. Here too Moran emphasizes Gadamer’s break with Husserl, his desire to get at the “event of understanding” without reducing it “to a subjective or epistemological framework”. Nevertheless, “as” a phenomenologist Gadamer “is also producing a kind of transcendental description of the conditions which make understanding possible, and he is not as far removed from his neo-Kantian and Husserlian heritage as he often claims” (pp. 250, 283). Is this a good thing? Well, if transcendental philosophy is a straitjacket, then probably not. But Moran is wary of an “excessive” historicism, judging that Gadamer’s “embrace of historical relativism may also be a significant weakness in his philosophy” (p. 286). We are returned to the central question: how did Heidegger reintroduce “the historical and relative” into phenomenology without running afoul of this judgment? If Heidegger did radically transform phenomenology, must it nevertheless not retain the core elements that we have seen constitute it as a research program, elements that tie it to a transcendental rather than a naturalistic philosophical outlook? The delicacy of this issue is evident, finally, in Moran’s discussion of Merleau-Ponty, who has provided the “most original and enduring contribution to post-Husserlian phenomenology in France” (p. 391). The key to Merleau-Ponty’s contribution is that his access to Husserl’s unpublished research manuscripts allowed him to see that “Husserl’s researches into transcendental phenomenology . . . developed side by side with his interest in intersubjectivity and the embodied subject” and that “for Husserl, these were complementary modes of access to the one domain of transcendental

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subjectivity and intersubjectivity” (pp. 67, 80). In Merleau-Ponty’s hands this becomes the quest for what Moran calls the “living bond” between consciousness and world, the unity that precedes their conceptual dissociation. But doesn’t this very quest, insisting on the “irreducibility of the real world”, break with the above-noted complementarity of Husserl’s project? In fact, in confronting Merleau-Ponty Moran must give up his claim that phenomenology is anti-naturalistic: Merleau-Ponty’s outlook “may be characterized as a kind of dialectical naturalism”; it is “naturalistic in that it sees human beings as integrated into the natural order” (p. 403). But does it then remain phenomenological (especially if it is also dialectical)? Rather than untie this knot, Moran shifts terms: phenomenology does not object to naturalism per se but to “reductive scientism” (p. 433). This may be so, but then, when we are told that “Merleau-Ponty significantly expanded the scope of phenomenological method and removed it entirely from the domain of introspection” by reinterpreting “the Husserlian reduction as leading back to the pre-predicative and incarnate wellsprings of our experience back to the Lebenswelt” (p. 419), we can only wonder how this phenomenology manages to fulfill the desiderata that keep it a philosophical method. Merleau-Ponty’s late work might well seem, to some, to be far along the road to an “artistic intuition” or “personal vision”. How, then, does Moran’s picture of phenomenology fare against D’Amico’s charge that it does not constitute a research program? On the objection that Heidegger fatally opens the door to metaphysics with his claim about Dasein’s ontic-ontological distinctiveness, Moran helps us see that Heidegger’s transformation of phenomenology need not have this consequence. Heidegger’s ontology can be metaphysically neutral since the question of Being is not distinct from the phenomenological question of the “appearing” of things; its “externalism” does not exceed the phenomenological correlation of objectivity-for-subjectivity. With the charge that Heidegger opens the door to epistemological naturalism, however, Moran has more difficulty. On the one hand, he holds that Heidegger remains anti-naturalistic, as does phenomenology after him. On the other hand, he allows that the program is transformed in anthropological and historicist directions – going so far, with Merleau-Ponty, as to embrace a kind of naturalism for phenomenology. In the end it becomes questionable whether Moran is entitled to this view of phenomenology’s essential anti-naturalism, given his critique of transcendental philosophy. Without a clearer account of how the naturalistic version of phenomenology can retain apriority it will be hard for Moran to argue, against D’Amico, that phenomenology does not necessarily devolve into the sort of epistemological naturalism characteristic of post-structuralism.

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Finally, it does seem that in spite of his caveats Moran wants to present phenomenology as a kind of research program. Levinas, Derrida et al., are held up to standards imposed by a normative conception of the phenomenological method. Some, but not all, of their concerns are deemed phenomenological; hence phenomenology must have a perhaps evolving “set of common problems” and not just “founding texts”. And there is apparently a distinctive and communicable sense of “how to go on” rather than merely “personal visions”. Nevertheless, Moran’s historical mode of introducing phenomenology – particularly the crucial Heideggerian transformation – systematically obscures the question of what, specifically, remains essential to this research program. Because the question of the relation between transcendental and ontological phenomenology is treated narratively, we cannot really understand how, if at all, post-Husserlian phenomenology could be a research program – a distinct and normative framework for philosophical inquiry – though Moran implies that it is. To get a clearer answer to that question we turn to our second Introduction. 3. ROBERT SOKOLOWSKI ’ S ARISTOTELIAN PHENOMENOLOGY

For Moran, the phenomenological movement is “a thoroughly modernist outlook”: Husserl attempted to overcome “crude” Cartesianism by “a radical rethinking of the Cartesian project itself” (pp. 3, 16). For Robert Sokolowski, in contrast, phenomenology is something that “restores the possibilities of Ancient philosophy, even while accounting for new dimensions such as modern science” (pp. 62, 202–203). This difference in estimating the character of phenomenology as a mode of thinking accounts for the major difference in the way the two Introductions view the Husserl/Heidegger relation. Moran, like D’Amico, identifies Husserl with “internalism” and emphasizes Heidegger’s embrace of a kind of “externalism” – namely, the idea that intentionality cannot be understood on the basis of what is immanent to consciousness but must take the world into account. If overcoming Cartesianism by more Cartesianism fails, then a radical transformation of phenomenology is required to get the job done: the lesson to be learned from Husserl’s reduction is, as Merleau-Ponty (1962, xiv) put it, “the impossibility of a complete reduction”. For Sokolowski, however, Husserl’s basic insight is that intentionality is already beyond any internalism: “everything is outside”. Phenomenology “recognizes the reality and truth of phenomena” – “being perceived” is nothing mental, but a “way in which things can be. The way things appear is part of the being of things. . . . Things do not just exist, they manifest themselves as what they are” (pp. 12, 14). This conception of “phenomena”

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leads Sokolowski to suggest – paradoxically, given the way this relation is usually understood, but nevertheless correctly, in my view – that what most impressed Heidegger was “the fact that in Husserl the Cartesian or modern epistemological problem had been dissolved and overcome” (p. 216). For the same reason, the Heideggerian move to ontology does not appear as a radical transformation of the phenomenological project but as an elaboration of something implicit in Husserl’s breakthrough.11 If for Moran the move from transcendental phenomenology to ontology represents a decisive swerve in phenomenology, Sokolowski sees transcendental phenomenology as ontology. Thus Sokolowski incorporates Heideggerian ontology into the horizon of Husserl’s transcendental program. Does he thereby also succeed in avoiding D’Amico’s twin objections: that Heidegger’s ontological motif opens phenomenology both to dogmatic metaphysics and to epistemological naturalism? We shall approach this question by looking first at what Sokolowski holds to be essential to the transcendental program. It shall appear that while Moran was able to deal adequately with the charge of metaphysical dogmatism but had difficulty with the re-emergence of epistemological naturalism, Sokolowski’s firm commitment to transcendentalism decisively blocks the latter but with its Aristotelian inspiration does not fare so well with the former. That Sokolowski holds phenomenology to be a consistent, viable research program is clear. The very structure of the book – not a comment on Husserl, but an introduction on the model of Husserl’s own, showing how “phenomenology can continue to make an important contribution to current philosophy”, its “intellectual capital . . . far from spent” – testifies to that, as does his view that “phenomenology’s great strength as a movement” is that “it presents to us not only obvious major figures but also a wide range of minor writers, those who fill out the possibilities in the niches and corners of the phenomenological style of philosophy” (pp. 2, 225). But does Sokolowski endorse the elements of this research program that we have seen to characterize it? It would appear so. For though the terms he uses are Husserlian in origin, the program they delineate is taken normatively and is not understood as tied to those terms themselves or to the “philosophy of Husserl” or any other single thinker.12 What, then, is it? First, phenomenology is defined as “the study of human experience and of the way things present themselves to us in and through such experience” (p. 2), acknowledging its focus on intentionality, or what Moran called objectivity-for-subjectivity. Second, phenomenological analysis is “description” of the “manifold that is proper to a given kind of object”, in contrast to “causal” explanation (p. 31, 115). Third, this description seeks

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necessary truths, or “essences”, and proceeds by “eidetic intuition” (p. 183). Fourth, intuitive Evidenz or self-givenness is epistemically primary: Evidenz “is the successful presentation of an intelligible object, . . . of something whose truth becomes manifest in the evidencing itself. . . . It is the moment when something enters into the space of reasons” (p. 161). Fifth, phenomenology employs an epoche of all scientific and metaphysical theories, since in the phenomenological attitude we “suspend all the intentionalities that we are examining. We neutralize them” (p. 48). And finally, the phenomenological attitude is reflective, since in it “we make the appearances thematic” and study the “relation between a thing and its appearances” (p. 50). Sokolowski identifies this relation with what Heidegger called the “ontological difference” – thereby signalling how Heidegger’s talk of “Being” will be given phenomenological sense, in contrast to earlier metaphysical senses. Given this outline of a research program, can Sokolowski convincingly address the objections that we have seen raised against phenomenology by D’Amico and others? On the question of whether phenomenology is concerned with a set of common problems rather than simply being a matter of “founding texts”, the answer is clear. For Sokolowski phenomenology deals with the classical problems of philosophy. Its great aim is to “reactivate the philosophical life in our present circumstances”. It is able to reinvigorate Ancient insights and offer a distinctive approach to issues in philosophy of science, language, and mind because “it deals so well with the problem of appearances”. Sokolowski extensively examines three “central contributions” of phenomenological analysis: part/whole, identity-in-manifolds, and presence-and-absence. With the exception of the last, which Sokolowski argues is “original in phenomenology,” these have long pedigrees and wide philosophical implications. Finally, Sokolowski holds that phenomenology’s greatest contribution is to the most traditional philosophical problem of all: the nature and scope of “reason” (pp. 2–5). On the question of whether there is a clear sense of “how to go on” Sokolowski provides a nuanced answer. If by “method” is understood anything like an algorithm for producing results or a test-procedure that could compel agreement, then phenomenology is not a method. The very idea of method is said to be a “modern prejudice”, arising not from the desire for truth but for the mastery of truth. In contrast, a philosophical research program like phenomenology “must depend on the habituated mind more than on method” (pp. 164–165). Nevertheless, this habituation is not arbitrary, and its development presupposes another sense of “method” – the

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skillful or expert exercise of a distinct way of “going on” – as in Aristotle’s account of virtue. This is the basis of Sokolowski’s response to the third question. Is phenomenological practice subject to constraints on what can be asserted, or is it essentially a matter of “personal visions” with no reasonable expectation that others should come to the same results? For Sokolowski, phenomenological analyses are beholden throughout to the constraint of Evidenz; phenomenology is nothing but the critical and receptive response to the way things “show up for us”. Though such a constraint appears to be “unpredictable and unmasterable” – thus being a disappointment to rationalists like D’Amico – it is for Sokolowski that without which the subsequent concept of proof makes no sense. The rationalist claim that “the only source of truth is proof” – that “the presentation is not enough to establish truth” (p. 164) – contravenes the essence of reason in which the truth of propositions (the correctness that is to be preserved in valid arguments) derives from the self-manifestation, or “disclosure”, of things themselves.13 Seeing provides constraints on saying, and others can be brought, though not compelled, to see. Philosophy is a kind of research that can employ, but cannot wholly restrict itself to, argument. This is further supported by Sokolowski’s account of how phenomenological analysis is governed by the constraint of essential insight or eidetic intuition. Essences are achieved by imaginatively varying examples until impossible variations are seen, thereby revealing necessary connections as a priori limits on the example (p. 184). This is not just a matter of conceptual analysis – that is, of “linguistic rules that govern our vocabulary” – but rather derives “from our experience of objects” (p. 173). Is such imaginative variation subject to criticism and correction, then, or does phenomenology reduce to a series of obiter dicta? Here Sokolowski points out that we “correct mistakes in eidetic intuition” by “talking with others about them” (p. 183). As with experiments in empirical science, phenomenological thought experiments must be reproducible. Hence the need for phenomenological publications. And just because my communication with others about these insights is not limited proffering proofs, but includes any way in which I can “lead them to see” what I have seen, this does not mean that no constraints are acknowledged. The familiar practice of offering counter-examples, crucial to conceptual analysis, feeds on the more original capacity for eidetic intuition; thus if we can get straight about what this practice involves, we should also be able to address the objection that there is no compelling connection between phenomenological method and the a priori truths it claims to grasp.

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First, however, we must return to the question of whether Sokolowski’s conception of the phenomenological research program – in which Heidegger’s ontology is taken to be a consistent elaboration of Husserl’s impulse rather than its radical transformation – can avoid dogmatic metaphysics and epistemological naturalism. Because Sokolowski does not see the contrast Moran found between Husserl’s transcendental ego and Heidegger’s factic and historical Dasein (insisting, rather, that the “transcendentality” of the “human being” is part of its phenomenological constitution), the door to epistemological naturalism remains pretty tightly shut. Though his view is controversial, I shall not stop to examine it here because the question of whether Sokolowski has kept dogmatic metaphysics at bay is rather more instructive. Let me try to get at the problem in terms of a distinction between reflective and first-order claims. The metaphysical postulates that the epoche is designed to neutralize are essentially first-order claims about what things “are”; in this sense, they are equivalent to the sort of scientific claim upon which epistemological naturalism depends. Phenomenology, in contrast, is a reflective enterprise in which, as Sokolowski states, “we suspend all the intentionalities we are examining” (p. 48). Its neutrality means, first, that it refuses to use any first-order claims as premises (presuppositions), and, second, that it does not subsequently leave the terrain of reflection on how things show up (“appearances”, modes of givenness) to make any first-order claims. Were it to do so it would immediately stand in competition with first-order sciences. If, therefore, phenomenology is ontological, the concept of “being” at issue must gain its sense on the level of reflection itself, be tied to the kind of evidence available there.14 Now Sokolowski’s claim that phenomenological reflection suspends “all” firstorder intentionalities acknowledges the first part of the neutrality thesis: phenomenology makes no use of naturalistic or metaphysical postulates. But what about the second part of the neutrality thesis: can phenomenology move beyond reflection to make first-order metaphysical claims? Without pretending to do justice to the subtlety of Sokolowski’s presentation here, it appears that he does want to move beyond phenomenological neutrality. On the one hand, Sokolowski works with what I would call a purely phenomenological (hence neutral) concept of being – as when he claims that “the way things appear is part of the being of things” (p. 14). Manifestation belongs to being; what it means to be X is constituted in and through the evidence in which it gives itself. To do ontology in this sense it is not necessary to abandon the level of reflection, and no first-order claims are made. On the other hand, Sokolowski does seem to make such claims, as though phenomenological neutrality were merely

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the first step in a broader onto-theological agenda. For instance, from the phenomenological truth about us – that we are “datives of manifestation” – Sokolowski feels entitled to say, apparently thanks to a perfectionist assumption, that “we exercise our humanity most fully . . . when we use words”, and that “this is what our minds are supposed to do” (pp. 89, 93, 181). It is hard to know what phenomenological evidence could support this perfectionist premise, but even if one could make the case by construing “essences” not just as eidetic necessities but as normative excellences (that is, as Platonic Ideas), Sokolowski makes other claims that seem to transcend phenomenological evidence altogether. For instance, he asserts that “the transcendental ego, the dative of manifestation, is already there” in the fetus, and that this “early self is already something of a player in the game of truth” (p. 121). Arguments based on phenomenological evidence can perhaps be made for these claims, but they appear to me to go beyond the resources of the phenomenological research program itself. If Sokolowski’s Aristotelian grasp of the phenomenological project leads him to advocate a form of first-order metaphysics,15 this nevertheless does not seem to be a necessary consequence of the phenomenological stance itself. Sokolowski is eloquent about the “imperialism” of modern philosophy’s attempt to “try to correct everything” – radically throw over the truths of common sense – from its own methodological resources (p. 191). But it may well be that the price one pays for the neutrality that corrects this modern prejudice includes renouncing metaphysics in the Aristotelian mode – a first-order discourse about the ultimate principles of things. With this, however, I have moved beyond an inquiry into whether a phenomenological research program is possible and have begun to argue about what this possibility, once established, entails. Further movement in this direction must be resisted. Instead let us conclude by posing a final question to our Introductions, one that returns us to Dummett: given the possibility of a phenomenological research program, what is it good for? Can its method be seen to generate philosophical insights that can be had in no other way? 4. PHENOMENOLOGY, MEANING , AND CONCEPTUAL ANALYSIS

Both phenomenology and analytic philosophy are distinguished from traditional philosophy by a focus on meaning. Dummett, we recall, locates the split between the two approaches at that point where Frege limits the concept of meaning to linguistic meaning, while Husserl generalizes it to all intentionality, whether linguistic or not. The result is the concept of the “noema”, the intentional object that is the topic of phenomen-

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ological reflection. Subsequent controversy over the phenomenological approach to meaning (and connected issues in philosophy of mind, language, and knowledge) has often turned on the interpretation of what Husserl understood the noema to be. A widespread view – the one adopted by Dummett – was initially proposed by Dagfinn Føllesdal (1966). On this account the noema is an abstract entity that mediates reference to the object intended in any given act in much the way that Frege’s Sinn determines linguistic reference. This view has some basis in Husserl’s text, but as Moran does a good job of showing, there is basis for several other interpretations (pp. 158–160). If the purposes of his Introduction do not permit Moran to take sides in this debate, this is not at all the case for Sokolowski. For him, to treat the noema as a Fregean Sinn, an entity distinct from the thing itself, is to miss the point of the phenomenological approach to intentionality altogether. On Sokolowski’s view, the noema “is any object of intentionality, any objective correlate, but considered from the phenomenological attitude”; it is “not a sense that refers us to the object, but the object itself” (pp. 60–61, 194). The noema is just the object considered as it gives itself in its specific modes of givenness; to speak categorically, it is the object considered as a structure of part/whole, identity-in-manifolds, and presence-and-absence. The question, then, is what this view of the noema contributes to the phenomenological account of meaning. Sokolowski argues that there are two kinds of reflection – “propositional reflection”, which grasps meanings, and “noematic reflection”, which grasps noemata – and that the latter reaches deeper than the former: to stop with a “clarification of meaning” is not yet to get to “truth” (p. 196). These claims are supported by an eidetic phenomenological analysis of how, pace Dummett, language depends on “thinking”: the “reason we can use language is that we are capable of the kind of intending that constitutes categorical objects” (p. 91), a kind of intending that grasps the articulations of perception. Language arises when I take a specific sort of stance to what is thus constituted – being pulled up short, I take a distance from the categorially formed object and transform it, via the emergent attitude of propositional reflection, into a “state-of-affairs”, something merely deemed (“judged”) to be X. I have transformed it into a meaning: the “meaning, the sense, arises in response to this new attitude” and it was “not there beforehand doing its epistemological work of relating us to the world” (p. 100). Analytic philosophy stops at a reflection on this meaning but cannot get at the level of categoriality that underlies it, a level that is available only to phenomenology, that is, to noematic reflection made possible by the phenomenological reduction (p. 92).

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On Sokolowski’s reading of the noema, then, phenomenology embraces the world directly and can provide what analytic philosophy cannot, namely, an account of language itself within the broader horizon of nonlinguistic modes of experience. It should be noted, however, that from the standpoint of a theory of meaning, Sokolowski purchases phenomenology’s advantage over analytic philosophy at the price of agreeing with Dummett’s anti-Husserlian thesis that all meaning is linguistic meaning: “The phenomenological reduction turns objects into noemas. Propositional reflection, in contrast, turns objects into senses” (p. 192). This may well be too high a price to pay. Philologically, it overlooks the fact (one that Moran appropriately highlights) that for Husserl the concept of meaning serves essentially at both levels: central to the noema is what Husserl calls noematischer Sinn – noematic meaning – and this sort of meaning is not at all a function of “propositional” reflection. More substantively, to elide this duality of meaning by contrasting noema and meaning as absolutely as Sokolowski does is to lose the phenomenological resource that allows us to understand what happens when, as Sokolowski says, in “categorial intentions” the “things we perceive become elevated into the space of reasons” (p. 94). It is not merely that the categorically intended object is there for us in its structure of part/whole, identity-in-manifold, and presence-absence, but that these structures constitute the thing as something, as meaningful though not yet propositional. While it is correct to say that the noema is not an abstract entity, it is nevertheless the structure of noematic meaning that constitutes the reflective topic of the phenomenological research program, not the unadorned “thing-itself” of Aristotelian realism, as Sokolowsi’s bifurcation of the two reflections seems to entail. To show why this sort of “critical” stance neither rules out an ontological idiom in phenomenology nor returns us to some form of psychological or Cartesian/Kantian idealism is itself one of the crucial problems that belong within the scope of the phenomenological research program. But, finally, can phenomenology’s reversal of Dummett’s thesis about the relation between thought and language – based on the claim that there is a necessary and asymmetrical relation of dependency between the two – really be said to follow from the phenomenological method, that is, from eidetic intuition or seeing of essences, rather than (as D’Amico charged) merely being a case of “ordinary, pedestrian conceptual analysis”? At this point the phenomenologist is entitled to ask: but what is ordinary, pedestrian conceptual analysis? D’Amico himself is rather vague here, claiming that to grasp “conceptual necessities” – say, the incoherence of the claim that there can be a presentation of color that is not extended – is simply “to grasp the reasoning involved” (p. 250), and not any sort of “intuition of

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essences”. But what sort of reasoning is that? It does not seem to be a matter of reasoning about linguistic rules. As Sokolowski puts it, philosophy deals with “coherence” – the “rules” of “what concepts can be blended with others” – but coherence is not merely a matter of “linguistic rules that govern our vocabulary” but a matter of “our experience of objects” (p. 173). Conceptual analysis may indeed consult what we tend to say about what it means to be a friend or how we use terms like “belief” or “desire”. But it will typically also proceed by appeal to counter-examples in which some situation in the world, and not just linguistic usage, is invoked. When one encounters “incoherence” in this way, thereby establishing a necessary condition for some concept, can this be understood without acknowledging the role that a kind of direct insight, based not on ratiocination but on imaginative variation, plays here? Though this activity would not be a matter of explicit proof, it would nevertheless seem to be essential for creative work in philosophy, whether analytic or phenomenological. And one may call it “conceptual analysis” if one wishes, but then conceptual analysis contains an ineradicable moment of eidetic “intuition”. It appears that only ignorance informs the view that phenomenology’s results are nothing but conceptual analysis. One might more justly say that there is conceptual analysis only because there is phenomenology, even though its practitioners don’t recognize themselves as phenomenologists. Of course, Dummett has a far more specific suggestion for what is required here. The very obscurity of the notion of “concept” (Fregean “thought”) calls forth the twin axioms of analytic philosophy: If “it is his theory of meaning which determines what a philosopher counts as an elucidation or analysis of a concept” (Dummett 1960, 435), analytic philosophy stakes its claim on the view that a theory of meaning is at bottom a theory of linguistic meaning. To this the phenomenologist might reasonably respond with a question: Is it really so obvious that a theory of even linguistic meaning can be developed in abstraction from the wider terrain of phenomenological reflection? J. E. Malpas (1992), for instance, has shown how Donald Davidson’s theory of meaning requires augmentation by phenomenological analyses, and Dummett’s optimistic claim that “we have now reached a position where the search for such a theory of meaning can take on a genuinely scientific character” (Dummett 1975, 454) appears, thirty years later, at best premature. The point is not that analytic philosophy is a bankrupt research project – after all, “time will tell” (Dummett 1975, 458) – but the claims that phenomenological results are really disguised language-analysis, or that the “theory of meaning” that best supports actual creative work in philosophy is a theory of linguistic meaning, have by no means been established. Phenomenology

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would seem to be a coherent research program, and whether it continues to prove productive will depend, above all, on the talent of those who take it up.

NOTES 1 See especially Dummett (1993, 137–143) for the critical discussion of Evans. 2 A partial list would include Kearney (1994), Kearney and Rainwater (1996), West

(1996), May (1997), Critchley and Schroeder (1998), McNeill and Feldman (1998), Glendinning (1999), Brogan and Risser (2000), and Critchley (2001). 3 See especially Ihde (1986, 1–26) and Embree (ms). Critchley and Schroeder (1998, 4) gets the history of the term right: it is not used as a “professional self-description” before “the 1970s”, and it happened “in the USA before Britain”. In the “postwar period, Continental philosophy was broadly synonymous with phenomenology” in American universities. As an undergraduate at the University of California at Santa Cruz 1970–74, I recall that Maurice Natanson would teach Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre and others under the rubric “Recent European Philosophy”. The term “Continental philosophy” was not yet in general use. Embree (ms, 2) claims that “I personally originated the current use of ‘Continental’ in 1978 when I became the first editor of the book series that the Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology, Inc., sponsors at Ohio University Press” – dubbing it “Series in Continental Thought”. 4 See also Critchley (2001), where this view is thoughtfully elaborated in terms of the “two cultures” and the idea that philosophy strives not for knowledge but for “wisdom”. 5 See Janicaud’s ground-breaking essay, “The Theological Turn in French Phenomenology”, and other texts collected in Prusak (2000). 6 Embree et al. (1997) provides ample evidence for its claim that “given its spread into other disciplines as well as across the planet, phenomenology is arguably the major philosophical movement of the 20th Century”. 7 See below, Section 4. 8 However, D’Amico’s almost unbelievably ill-informed interpretation of what these claims and analyses are is evidence enough that this part of his thesis is unsupportable. See his discussion of Heidegger’s distinction between Befindlichkeit and Verstehen (pp. 70–72), for a particularly glaring example. 9 It also corresponds well to what Embree et al. (1997, 1–2) identifies as “accepted by most phenomenologists, regardless of discipline, tendency, or period” – namely, justification of cognition “with reference to evidence”; the belief that “not only objects in the natural and cultural world but also ideal objects . . . can be made evident”; focusing inquiry on the correlational structure of intentionality (here called “encountering”) in a “reflective approach”; the priority of “description in universal, a priori, or ‘eidetic’ terms” over “explanation by means of causes, purposes, or grounds”; and “debate” over the possibility or usefulness of “the transcendental phenomenological epoche and reduction”. 10 Indeed, it might be argued that this is not far at all from Husserl’s own view of the matter. As for Heidegger, he understood that to speak of “pre-suppositions” was strictly speaking to speak of theoretical postulates, and he interpreted Husserl’s epoche this way. See Heidegger (1987, 93–95), and the discussion in Crowell (2001, 133–36).

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11 Though Sokolowski does not go into details in such matters, he suggests that Heideg-

ger’s ontological elaboration may have been enabled by his deep interest in Aristotle and his ability, superior to Husserl’s own, to see Husserl’s achievement in the broader context of the history of philosophy. Husserl’s breakthrough was something radically new and cannot be seen as “continuing a tradition that had taken shape before him”’ (p. 211), but some of its philosophical implications could better be appreciated by Heidegger, who was a far more sophisticated reader of the history of philosophy (pp. 217–218). 12 Sokolowski “does not comment on these terms as though they were alien to [his] own. [He] uses them” (p. 2). Nevertheless, he judges that “phenomenology’s established terminology is a handicap for the phenomenological movement”. Its terms “tend to become fossilized and provoke artificial problems. They substantialize what should be an aspect of being and of the activity of philosophy. The very name ‘phenomenology’ is misleading and clumsy” (p. 226). 13 Borrowing a theme that is more distinct in Heidegger than in Husserl, Sokolowski argues that there are two kinds of truth, “the truth of correctness and the truth of disclosure”. The former begins “with a statement being made or a proposition being held”, which we “then go on to verify”. The latter is “simply the display of a state of affairs”, that is, “the simple presencing to us of an intelligible object”, something as something. Given the phenomenological relations between signitive intentions and intuitive fulfillments, therefore, “the truth of correctness depends on the truth of disclosure” (pp. 158–159). 14 I would argue that this is a purely formal requirement deriving from the claim of neutrality itself. How this is related to traditional versions of realism and idealism is an important question that lies beyond the scope of this essay. Some discussion can be found in Crowell (2001), but the issues are far from settled. 15 Moran noted this sort of move in Sartre, but one can cite texts from Heidegger, Eugen Fink, Merleau-Ponty, Michel Henry, and others, in which the limits of the phenomenological research program are sprung in the direction of uncritical metaphysics.

REFERENCES

Brogan, W. and J. Risser (eds): 2000, American Continental Philosophy, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN. Critchley, S.: 2001, Continental Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Critchley, S. and W. Schroeder (eds): 1998, A Companion to Continental Philosophy, Blackwell, Oxford. Crowell, S.: 2001, Husserl, Heidegger, and the Space of Meaning: Paths Toward Transcendental Phenomenology, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, IL. D’Amico, R.: 1999, Contemporary Continental Philosophy, Westview Press, Boulder, CO. Dummett, M.: 1975, ‘Can Analytical Philosophy be Systematic, and Ought it to Be?’, in Truth and Other Enigmas, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1978. Dummett, M.: 1993, Origins of Analytical Philosophy, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Dummett, M.: 1960, ‘Oxford Philosophy’, in Truth and Other Enigmas, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1978. Embree, L.: ms., ‘Husserl as Trunk of the American Continental Tree’. Embree, L. et al. (eds): 1997, Encyclopedia of Phenomenology, Kluwer, Dordrecht.

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