This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Notes
He also considers my own arguments against this doctrine in Yoshimi (2015), where I consider the possibility that there are forms of reality that could not be experienced. Hopp confronts this view with a dilemma: the more authentically such a reality is considered, the more it seems to be experiencable in principle; the less authentically it is considered, the less we even understand what we are talking about. I’m not convinced that the second horn of the dilemma is a threat. Whole religions have been organized around the possibility of a non-spatio-temporal divine being with few or none of the characteristics of our human world. My only burden was to show that it is possible that unexperiencable realities exist, and this seems at least as viable a possibility (and at least as “understandable”) as a divine being that transcends space and time, however inauthentic our understanding of such possibilities is.
There are other routes to this conclusion, including Husserl’s maelstrom argument (we could imagine that the entire field of consciousness fragments into a chaos or maelstrom of sensory data, which implies that in normal life those data are structured in such a way as to cohere into experienced-objects). Hopp mentions but does not rebut this argument, on p. 259. An additional route is via Hopp’s own account of veridicality, since the possibility of originary but non-veridical acts, e.g., a hallucination of a heron, suggests that in such cases there is still something there for us. The heron is there in consciousness (in a broadened sense), even if it does not exist in the world.
References
Hopp, W. (2020). Phenomenology: A Contemporary Introduction. New York and London: Routledge.
Yoshimi, J. (2015). The metaphysical neutrality of Husserlian phenomenology. Husserl Studies, 31(1), 1–15.
Yoshimi, J., Tolley, C., & Smith, D. W. (2019). California Phenomenology. In The Reception of Husserlian Phenomenology in North America (pp. 365–387). Switzerland: Springer Nature.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Conflict of interest
The authors the author declare that there is no conflict of interest.
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Yoshimi, J. Two Conceptions of Husserlian Phenomenology: A Review of Walter Hopp’s Phenomenology: A Contemporary Introduction. Husserl Stud 38, 87–95 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10743-021-09290-1
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10743-021-09290-1