Abstract
Interpretations abound about Husserl’s understanding of the relationship between veridical perceptual experience and hallucination. Some read him as taking the two to share the same distinctive essential nature, like contemporary conjunctivists. Others find in Husserl grounds for taking the two to fall into basically distinct categories of experience, like disjunctivists. There is ground for skepticism, however, about whether Husserl’s view could possibly fall under either of these headings. Husserl, on the one hand, operates under the auspices of the phenomenological reduction, abstaining from use of any epistemic commitments about mind-transcendent reality, whereas conjunctive and disjunctive accounts of perceptual experience, on the other hand, are both premised on some form of metaphysical realism. There seems to be a basic incompatibility between the former approach and the latter. I examine this line of thinking and argue that the incompatibility is only apparent.
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Notes
When citing works of Husserl, the English translation of which includes the pagination of the German source text, I cite the page numbers of the German source text first followed by a forward slash and then the page numbers of the English translation.
See Brogaard (2014).
See Genone (2016) for an overview of the emergence and development of naïve realism in recent years.
For a thorough discussion of disjunctivism considering both its strengths and weaknesses, see Soteriou (2016).
I put “in” in scare quotes to indicate that Berkeley thinks ideas stand in a peculiar relation to the mind that has them, a sui generis relation distinct from the “inherence” of properties in a substance.
See Richmond 2009, 37.
See the bibliography Hanne Jacobs provides in Jacobs (2017) for further references on this matter.
Husserl had developed these ideas already over a decade earlier in his lectures published in First Philosophy (Husserl, 2019, Lectures 46–48 and Supplemental Text 21) and refined them in drafts of his Encyclopedia Britannica article (Husserl, 1997b, Draft B, Part I, Sect. 2 and Part II, Section iii and Draft D, § 9) as well as in his Amsterdam Lectures on Phenomenological Psychology (Husserl, 1997b, § 13). See Moran (2012), 117–128 for discussion of the passages I have just referred to in the Crisis.
That is not to say nothing Husserl held in his pre-transcendental works would exist in the same universe of discourse as that of his transcendentally inclined works. It is enough that his theory of intentionality and perception would be on the far side of a theoretical chasm if we were to apply the logic of the objection consistently.
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Bower, M.E. Phenomenological Reduction and the Nature of Perceptual Experience. Husserl Stud 39, 161–178 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10743-023-09324-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10743-023-09324-w