Introduction

John Drummond

Lester Embree

pp. 1-7

in: John Drummond, Lester Embree (eds), The phenomenology of the noema, Deventer, Kluwer, 1992

Abstract

Philosophers who contribute new ideas to philosophical discourse are commonly caught by and within the vocabulary which has controlled that discourse before them. Their new ideas must be stated either in the terms already used by philosophers, but with specific notice given of the new way in which they are being used, or in newly coined technical terms which, unfortunately, must be defined and explicated using the available vocabulary. Husserl understood himself as advancing a new theory of intentionality which avoided central difficulties in the theories of intentionality, esp. Brentano's, known to him. Husserl first explicitly develops his theory of intentionality in the Logical Investigations,¹ whose first edition was published in 1900-01. The fifth investigation, entitled "On Intentional Experiences and Their "Contents'," presents Husserl's detailed analysis of intentionality, distinguishes it from Brentano's, and initiates an account of knowledge in terms of intentionality, a project which is continued in the sixth investigation. The presentation of the Investigations, even while disagreeing with Brentano, extends Brentano's notion of what is best called "descriptive psychology." Husserl, however, soon came to recognize that phenomenology could not properly be conceived merely as a descriptive psychology and that a descriptive psychology was unable to address adequately problems surrounding the nature of cognition. Consequently, he moved beyond descriptive psychology to an explicitly transcendental phenomenology.

Cited authors

Husserl Edmund