Synthesis and Backward Reference in Husserl's Local Investigations

Lampert Jay

ISBN 10: 0792331052 / ISBN 13: 9780792331056

Published by Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht - Boston - London, 1994

About this Item

IX - 218 pp. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht - Boston - London 1995. First Edition. Hardcover. Phaenomenologica ? 131. Dark blue covers with silver spine and cover lettering. Clean and unmarked inside. Ex. library of the Library of the Ghent University: usual labels, stamps and numbers. Otherwise a good/very good copy.

Seller Inventory # 011683

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Synthesis and Backward Reference in Husserl's Local Investigations
• Publisher: Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht - Boston - London
• Publication Date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0792331052
• ISBN 13: 9780792331056
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: No Jacket
• Weight: 0.7 kilograms
• Seller catalogs:
  • Phenomenology
  • Philosophy

About this title

Synopsis

In the sixth Logical Investigation, Husserl defines meaning, objectivity, and knowledge by appealing to "syntheses of fulfilment": each act of conscious­ ness has a meaning-intention whereby it anticipates a range of fulfilling intuitions, whose ongoing synthesis would identify intended objects in the face of their changing appearances. Synthesis is essential to phenomenological description. But what does it mean to say that one experience is combined with others? This monograph is a speculative-exegetical Husserlian analysis of the ground, the mechanisms, and the results of synthesis. Focusing on Husserl's Logical Investigations, I argue that synthesizing consciousness must be a self-propelling, self-explicating system of interpretative acts driven by ongoing forward and backward references, grounding its structures as it proceeds, and positing its origins as that which must have been given "in advance". To this end, I develop a dialectical reading of Husserl's largely untreated category of "referring backward" (zurückweisen). Treatments of Husserl's concept of synthesis have tended to focus on Husserl's later work on passive synthesis. By drawing out the centrality of the concept of synthesis in the Logical Investigations, I show how synthesis is at the foundation of intentionality as such, and also indicate the continuity of descriptive categories that run through both the early and the late Husserl. The Introduction to this study schematizes the modem history of the concept of synthesis, and reviews the secondary literature on Husserl's concept of synthesis.