On Linguistic Puzzles

"I have a telephone conversation with New York. My friend tells me that his young trees have buds of such and such a kind. I am now convinced that his tree is... Am I also convinced that the earth exists?" 

- Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty

On Phenomenology And The Re-Return

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time

- T.S. Eliot

On Hegel's Success And Failure

"Hegel is commonly viewed as having attempted something truly magnificent and as having failed to preposterously to achieve it. But when we view his systematic thought as philosophical narrative, it turns out to be quite achievable (though still not modest in its pretensions)." 

- John McCumber, Time in the Ditch: American Philosophy and the McCarthy Era

On Metaphysics, Objects, And Phenomenology

The first implies that we move round the object; the second that we enter into it. The first depends on the point at which we are placed and on the symbols by which we express ourselves. The second neither depends on a point of view nor relies on any symbol. The first of knowledge may be said to stop at the relative; the second, in those cases where it is possible, to to attain the absolute.

- Henri Bergeson, La Pensée et le mouvant

On Hegel's Geist Contra Kant's Transcendental Ego

However, the transition from Kant's talk of "consciousness in general" and "synthetic unity of consciousness" to Hegel's conception of a literally general consciousness has been understandably challenged as one of the most confused and notoriously invalid moves in the history of philosophy.

- Robert C. Solomon, “Hegel’s Concept of Geist,” in The Review of Metaphysics, vol. 23, no. 4 (1970).

On The Ego And The World

'The world is my idea:' - this is a truth which holds good for everything that lives and knows, though man alone can bring it into reflective and abstract consciousness. If he really does this, he has attained philosophic wisdom.

- Arthur Schopenhauer, The World As Will And Idea, Vol. I, trans. R.B. Haldane and J. Kemp (Boston: Ticknor and Company, 1888).

On Hegelian Dialectic, Levinasian Infinite, And Bananas

Lol of the day: When talking about Hegelian dialectic in relation to Levinas' concept of the face of the other and the infinite concerning the necessary tension between the value of the individual and value of the institution, Dr. R. Wood states:

"Consider a 6'6" basketball player. He was so tall he could jump and get a quarter off the top of the backboard. But what is that without the institution of basketball -getting more bananas?"

On Feminism, Women, And Phenomenology

It is only in a human perspective that we can compare the female and the male of the human species. But man is defined as a being who is not fixed, who makes himself what he is. As Merleau-Ponty very justly puts it, man is not a natural species: he is a historical idea. Woman is not a completed reality, but rather a becoming, and it is in her becoming that she should be compared with man; that is to say, her possibilities should be defined.

In the upper classes women are eager accomplices of their masters because they stand to profit from the benefits provided. We have seen that the women of the upper middle classes and the aristocracy have always defended their class interests even more obstinately than have their husbands, not hesitating radically to sacrifice their independence as human beings. They repress all thought, all critical judgment, all spontaneous impulses; they parrot accepted opinions, they confuse with the ideal whatever the masculine code imposes on them; all genuineness is dead in the hearts and even in their faces.

- Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. and ed. H.M. Parshley (London: Picador, 1988).

On Husserl, Phenomenology, Descartes, And Augustine

When discussing Descartes and Phenomenology in his Cartesian Meditations Husserl quotes St. Augustine stating:

"Noli foras ire, in te redi in interiore homine habitat veritas."

(Do not wish to go out; go back into yourself. Truth dwells in the inner man)

- St. Augustine, De Vera Religione, 39 n. 72.

On Jean-Paul Sartre And Sartre's Phenomenology

"In general, Sartre's outlook is something of a hodge-podge of different ideas hammered somewhat idiosyncratically into a system, which never received the refinements to which an academic career would have exposed his thought."

"Sartre took courses in philosophy and psychology, and was known as a voracious reader, a prankster, and a composer of bawdy lyrics, and as something of a boxer. He was small and ugly but exceptionally strong."

"Sometime in 1932, on one of his breaks from Le Havre, Sartre had his famous conversation with Raymond Aron and Simone de Beauvoir in a Paris cafe about phenomenology. Aron was on holiday from Berlin where he was studying Husserlian phenomenology at the French Institute. Sartre had been talking about his study on contingency when Aron mentioned Husserlian phenomenology as a way of getting to concrete things themselves. According to de Beauvoir's recollections, Aron explained to Sartre that, as a phenomenologist, one could talk about the very glass on the table. According to de Beauvoir, Sartre almost turned pale with emotion. Sartre was so excited, he dragged de Beauvoir around the Paris bookshops to find something on Husserl and found Levina's study which he devoured, and from which he discovered that Husserl knew of contingency, the concept Sartre himself was exploring."

- Dermot Moran, Jean-Paul Sartre, in Introduction to Phenomenology (New York: Routledge Press, 2007).

On The Accessibility Of Husserl's Cartesian Meditations

"That Husserl's Cartesian Meditations is his most widely read work is not surprising. It is short, available in paperback, and its subtle - 'An Introduction to Phenomenology' -promises accessibility. As such an introduction, however, the work must be judged a dismal failure."

- A. D. Smith, Routledge Philosophy GuideBook to: Husserl and the Cartesian Meditations (London: Routledge, 2003).

On The "Hiddenness" Of Husserl

I can hardly understand Phenomenology at times. Needless to say, it's nice to know that even phenomenolgoists don't understand each other:

these circumstances forced me to delve into Husserl's work anew. However, my repeated beginning also remained unsatisfactory, because I couldn't get over a main difficulty. It concerned the simple question how thinking's manner of procedure which called itself 'phenomenology' was carried out. What worried me about this question came from the ambiguity which Husserl's work showed at first glance.

- Martin Heidegger, On Time and Being, trans. by John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson (London: SCM Press, 1962).