Upcoming Journals (Guest Editor) by Julia Jansen
Husserl Studies Special Issue, 2020
This volume seeks to explore three important topics in Husserlian phenomenology: the imagination ... more This volume seeks to explore three important topics in Husserlian phenomenology: the imagination (as act, mode of consciousness, and modification), modalities (possibility, conceivability, and necessity), and method (especially in its eidetic and historical aspects). While self-standing treatments of these topics are available, much remains to be said regarding the intricate ways in which they are interconnected. In particular, lingering tensions between the eidetic and historical dimensions of Husserl’s mature thought threaten the very coherence of phenomenology as a philosophical program and, as a result, its future as a field. The contributions to this volume address these tensions and face critical methodological questions, such as those posed by Merleau-Ponty and others regarding the feasibility of performing the reductions and of securing the theoretical disinterested freedom Husserl deemed necessary for phenomenological reflection. These methodological considerations cannot bypass the role played by the issue of modality. Examining modalities, in turn, necessarily entails closely analyzing imagining consciousness both in its natural/non-theoretical and artificial/theoretical forms. In taking this approach, the volume sees the relationship between everyday abilities (such as engaging different kinds of possibilities) and scientific and philosophical methodologies (such as hypothetical and experimental thought or eidetic variation) as being worthy of investigation.
A discrepancy in Husserl’s writings on the imagination demands our attention here, namely, the discrepancy between Husserl’s claim – made in various programmatic texts – regarding the essential role played by the imagination in processes such as eidetic variation on the one hand, and the lack of methodological potency of an imagination viewed solely in presentational terms (e.g., as quasi-perception) on the other. By going beyond (and building on) Husserl’s analyses, the volume will propose new ways of understanding the systematic role of the imagination for phenomenology. The aim is to bring into play new tools for critically examining the structure and conditions for the possibility of Husserl’s transcendental methods. Through careful systematic investigations of the imagination and of related issues of modality and method in light of today’s inter-disciplinary climate, the articles collected in this volume make substantial contributions to the contemporary transcendental-phenomenological program.
Papers by Julia Jansen
Phänomenologische Forschungen
Oxford Handbooks Online, 2018
Many of the common assumptions regarding the role imagination plays in phenomenology reflect misu... more Many of the common assumptions regarding the role imagination plays in phenomenology reflect misunderstandings regarding the nature of phenomenological research. This chapter starts by clarifying some of these misunderstandings. It then presents Husserl’s groundbreaking investigations and considers the most important contribution he made to phenomenological research on the imagination: his “de-naturalization” of the imagination. The chapter then details some of the ways in which Sartre and Merleau-Ponty depart from Husserl’s approach. It gives an account of how both build upon Husserl’s earlier work and also reject some of its tenets. Able here to present only a few facets of the rich history of phenomenological treatments of the imagination, the chapter singles out Sartre and Merleau-Ponty as the two most well-known contributors after Husserl. Both significantly advanced phenomenological research on the imagination and widened its role. Their new impulses changed the trajectory of ...
Rediscovering Aesthetics, 2008
Metodo. International Studies in Phenomenology and Philosophy, 2017
<jats:p>When phenomenologists investigate the imagination, they approach it by examining ho... more <jats:p>When phenomenologists investigate the imagination, they approach it by examining how objects are experienced when they are imagined (rather than, for example, perceived) and what the experience of imagining is like (as opposed to, for example, the experience of perceiving). Their inquiries into the imagination are thus part of the greater phenomenological project of clarifying the different modes in which we can experience, or be conscious of, the world (or some objects in the world) and the correlating modes in which the world (or some objects in it) can appear to us. Mostly, phenomenologists consider what is often called 'sensory' imagination, that is, the experience in some sensory mode (such as the visual or the aural) of something not actually present. In order to emphasize its sensory and embodied dimension, they typically distinguish imagining something from entertaining its possibility merely in thought, which in other discourses is often referred to as 'propositional imagination', or 'imagining that'.</jats:p> <jats:p>Of central importance, especially in post-Husserlian phenomenology, is the creativity of imagination. Moreover, the imagination is also seen to have an important cognitive and justificatory role insofar as it enables us to generate and consider hypothetical and alternative situations to those that we actually find ourselves in. Imagining is understood as an act (though not always voluntary or self-aware) of experiencing something as possible (rather than actual or necessary), which makes it central to questions of human freedom and to the phenomenological method itself.</jats:p> <jats:p>Although we often imagine things that are absent or nonexistent, most phenomenologists still consider imagining intentional. They call our attention to the many different ways in which we commonly relate imaginatively to absent, nonexisting or merely possible objects, events, situations or states of affairs. It might seem that phenomenological approaches, since they allegedly consider (only) how things appear, cannot distinguish between what is real and what is (merely) imagined. However, this is not the case. Phenomenologists may, for example, investigate how our beliefs in the reality or unreality, or in the presence or absence, of things are themselves founded in different modes of experience (such as perception or imagination) and motivated by different ways in which things appear to us (that is, as perceived, as imagined, and so on).</jats:p>
Husserl Studies, 2020
We would like to thank the general editors of Husserl Studies, Sonja Rinofner and Steven Crowell,... more We would like to thank the general editors of Husserl Studies, Sonja Rinofner and Steven Crowell, for giving us the opportunity to guest edit this special issue and especially Steven for his generous support.
Metodo. International Studies in Phenomenology and Philosophy, 2015
In this article I draw out a fundamental difference between Kant's and Husserl's take on the prob... more In this article I draw out a fundamental difference between Kant's and Husserl's take on the problem of necessity in a contingent world. I do so by investigating in detail a well-known common feature of both philosophies, namely a basic understanding of necessary laws of objectivity and cognition in terms of necessary unities of synthesized manifolds. The fundamental difference between Kant and Husserl that I trace here concerns the radically different ways in which the two philosophers understand the origin of unity. While Kant maintains that all necessary unity, also of the contingently given, has its origin in the "synthetic unity of the understanding", Husserl describes how it emerges in and from the given itself in "syntheses of coinciding". As a result, the Kantian account leaves us with the famous conclusion that reason only finds in the contingent world those necessities that it has itself put into it, while, according to Husserl, rigorous science identifies and describes necessities, i.e., necessary unities of synthesized manifolds, in a systematic course of genuine discovery.
Comparative and Continental Philosophy, 2018
Akten des X. Internationalen Kant-Kongresses, 2008
In this paper I argue that Kant's account of aesthetic experience provides an invaluable ins... more In this paper I argue that Kant's account of aesthetic experience provides an invaluable insight into the role that aesthetic experience plays in self-awareness. Kant never used the term Erlebnis. And yet, in this paper I argue that his accounts of aesthetic common sense and ...
Contributions to Phenomenology, 2013
During the long reign of behaviourism, imagination almost seemed to disappear into "the outer dar... more During the long reign of behaviourism, imagination almost seemed to disappear into "the outer darkness of intellectual irrelevance" (Morley 2005: 117). Now, after cognitive science's early 'iconophobia' (Thomas 2007), imagination research has grown into what has been described as a 'flourishing' (Chalmers and Bourget 2007) field of investigation. This relatively recent phenomenon happens to coincide, more or less, with the arrival of "a new way of thinking about the mind and things mental that has started to seep out of the ivory tower and set up residence in popular consciousness" (Rowlands 2010: 1)-a way of thinking that is said to be "sweeping the planet" (Adams 2010: 619). What is meant is a new model of the mind, the model of 'situated cognition', which I take to comprise 'embedded', 'enactive', 'embodied' and/or 'extended' theories of cognition. 1 While these 4e's significantly diverge, and even conflict in some respects (more about this in Sect. 4), they share the view that cognition does not, or not exclusively, depend on mental representations understood as well-individuated 'internal' symbols. Instead, cognition may also depend on the cognitive system's embeddedness in the surrounding environment (
Phaenomenologica, 2014
'representation', the most basic term in Kant's transcendental philosophy, was, under the name 'i... more 'representation', the most basic term in Kant's transcendental philosophy, was, under the name 'idea', one of the most central notions of seventieth and eightieth century philosophical discourse. by the time Kant was developing his own account, the notion that the mind related to the world indirectly, through a 'veil of ideas' (if at all), and the particular conception of ideas as images held considerable ground in both rationalist and empiricist quarters-not only in britain but also in germany. Kant's redefinition of an 'idea' as a concept "surpassing the possibility of experience" (KrV, a 320/b 377), and thus as being nothing like an image, must therefore be understood as part of Kant's break with the standard view of his time. Kant preserves the generic sense of the term 'idea' in the equally generic term 'representation', but denies that sensible representations are, or are like, images (Bilder). Instead, Kant describes them as 'intuitions (Anschauungen)'. Far from being a terminological quibble, Kant's rejection of any 'image theory' and his introduction of a theory of intuitions again marks his departure from both german and british 'ways of ideas' in at least two important respects. First, the equation of sensible representations with images strongly encourages the view that they are passively received, so to speak 'ready-made'. Kant, however, maintains that intuitions are generated in complex syntheses, and hence require an active mind. Second, it strongly encourages the view that they replace external objects as direct objects of
Interdisziplinäre perspektiven der phänomenologie
Zusammenfassung: Die jüngsten Erklärungsversuche ästhetischer Erfahrung in den Neurowissenschafte... more Zusammenfassung: Die jüngsten Erklärungsversuche ästhetischer Erfahrung in den Neurowissenschaften machen unbegründet von einer Gleichsetzung ästhetischer Erfahrung mit Kunsterfahrung Gebrauch, die ich für offensicht-lich unzulässig halte. In diesem Artikel spreche ich mich ...
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Upcoming Journals (Guest Editor) by Julia Jansen
A discrepancy in Husserl’s writings on the imagination demands our attention here, namely, the discrepancy between Husserl’s claim – made in various programmatic texts – regarding the essential role played by the imagination in processes such as eidetic variation on the one hand, and the lack of methodological potency of an imagination viewed solely in presentational terms (e.g., as quasi-perception) on the other. By going beyond (and building on) Husserl’s analyses, the volume will propose new ways of understanding the systematic role of the imagination for phenomenology. The aim is to bring into play new tools for critically examining the structure and conditions for the possibility of Husserl’s transcendental methods. Through careful systematic investigations of the imagination and of related issues of modality and method in light of today’s inter-disciplinary climate, the articles collected in this volume make substantial contributions to the contemporary transcendental-phenomenological program.
Papers by Julia Jansen
A discrepancy in Husserl’s writings on the imagination demands our attention here, namely, the discrepancy between Husserl’s claim – made in various programmatic texts – regarding the essential role played by the imagination in processes such as eidetic variation on the one hand, and the lack of methodological potency of an imagination viewed solely in presentational terms (e.g., as quasi-perception) on the other. By going beyond (and building on) Husserl’s analyses, the volume will propose new ways of understanding the systematic role of the imagination for phenomenology. The aim is to bring into play new tools for critically examining the structure and conditions for the possibility of Husserl’s transcendental methods. Through careful systematic investigations of the imagination and of related issues of modality and method in light of today’s inter-disciplinary climate, the articles collected in this volume make substantial contributions to the contemporary transcendental-phenomenological program.
Two conclusions emerge: The first is that one’s relationships with others will always be central in determining the social, political, and artistic forms that philosophical self-reflection will take. The second is that our practices of aesthetic judgment are bound up with our efforts as philosophers to adapt ourselves and our objects of interest to the inescapably historical and indeterminate conditions of experience.
The papers collected here address the issue that critical communities and aesthetic practices are never politically neutral and can never be abstracted from their particular contexts. It is for this reason that the contributors investigate the politics, not of laws, parties or state constitutions, but of open, indefinably critical communities such as audiences, peers and friends.
Critical Communities and Aesthetic Practices is distinctive in providing a current selection of prominent positions, written for this volume. Together, these comprise a pluralist, un-homogenized collection that brings into focus contemporary debates on critical and aesthetic practices.