Representation and the historical sciences

Lester Embree

pp. 209-217

in: Frank M. Kirkland, Chattopadhyaya (eds), Phenomenology: East and West, Berlin, Springer, 1993

Abstract

This essay is an exercise in constitutive or Husserlian phenomenology. First it is shown how signitive consciousness or, preferably, representational awareness contrasts with presentational awareness and has three and only three species. This analysis is freely derived from Husserl's 1st "Logical Investigation" and is then used to elucidate the evidencing (Evidenz) that in archeology, art history, and historiography corrigibly justifies believing in objects in the realm of predecessors which, as such, cannot be objects of presentational awareness. Whether the second part of this account overlaps a part of the Husserlian corpus or not is not known, the point being more to engage in phenomenological investigation of the matters themselves than in scholarship on the master's texts.

Cited authors

Husserl Edmund