Abstract
Whether Husserl is a conceptualist has been heatedly debated among contemporary Husserl scholars. The present article intends to join the debate by asking the question of how, in the Husserlian context, intuitive acts fulfill signitive ones. On the one hand, those who take Husserl to be a conceptualist hold the content-identity theory, arguing that intuitive act and signitive act have the same content, so that the former can fulfill the latter. On the other hand, the non-conceptualists defend the object-identity theory and claim that it is the identity of object of intuitive and signitive act that makes fulfillment possible. On the basis of a careful reading of the sixth investigation of Husserl’s Logical Investigations, the article proposes a dynamic content-identity theory, in which the identity of content does not mean that intuitive act and signitive act have the identical content accidentally, but rather, in the dynamic fulfillment process, the intuitive act obtains the content that overflows into it from the signitive act, so that the two acts have the identical content. And this article shows how the dynamic content-identity theory places Husserl in the conceptualist camp while avoiding certain difficulties of either plain content-identity theory or object-identity theory.
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Notes
This debate starts explicitly with McDowell’s Kant interpretation and his criticism of non-conceptualism in Mind and World (1994). Nevertheless, this does not mean that there had been no discussion of similar issues before. In fact, the famous and lasting debate on Husserl’s notion of “noema” is closely related to the controversy over “conceptualism/non-conceptualism,” although the terms are not explicitly mentioned. See Mulligan (1995), Cobb-Stevens (1990), Dreyfus (1982), Smith and McIntyre (1982).
Barber (2008, p. 95) believes that Husserl’s genetic phenomenology can provide horizons as “surplus contents” to supplement McDowell’s conceptualist holism, while Hopp presents “a modified version of Husserl’s theory of fulfillment” as “the best available account of how perceptual and other intuitive experiences relate to thoughts,” including “how nonconceptual contents can stand in reason-giving relations with conceptual states like belief and judgment” (Hopp 2011, p. 189–90).
For instance, Mooney tries to “show that this working downwards runs with a much clearer commitment to conceptualism” (2010, p. 20). By contrast, Hopp claims that “there is some evidence that Husserl, in his later writings, moved toward an account along these lines and away from the conceptualism characteristic of his earlier work” (2008, p. 241, fn. 64).
McDowell might agree to Sellars’ “ex post facto justifications” (in Brandom’s words 1998, p. 376) when he insists that “Jones now knows, thus remembers, that these particular facts did obtain. It does not require that it be correct to say that at the time these facts did obtain he then knew them to obtain” (Sellars 1997, p. 77).
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Acknowledgements
I am particularly grateful to Wenjing Cai for her insightful comments and careful proofreading. I also want to thank Steven Crowell and an anonymous referee for their helpful suggestions.
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Zheng, P. Is Husserl a Conceptualist? Re-reading Husserl’s Sixth Logical Investigation. Husserl Stud 35, 249–263 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10743-019-09247-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10743-019-09247-5