Normativity and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger

Steven Crowell has been for many years a leading voice in debates on twentieth-century European philosophy. This volume presents thirteen recent essays that together provide a systematic account of the relation between meaningful experience (intentionality) and responsiveness to norms. They argue for a new understanding of the philosophical importance of phenomenology, taking the work of Husserl and Heidegger as exemplary, and introducing a conception of phenomenology broad enough to encompass the practices of both philosophers. Crowell discusses Husserl's analyses of first-person authority, the semantics of conscious experience, the structure of perceptual content, and the embodied subject, and shows how Heidegger's interpretation of the self addresses problems in Husserl's approach to the normative structure of meaning. His volume will be valuable for upper-level students and scholars interested in phenomenological approaches to philosophical questions in both the European and the analytic traditions.

Introduction; Part I. Transcendental Philosophy, Phenomenology, and Normativity: 1. Making meaning thematic; 2. Husserlian phenomenology; 3. The matter and method of philosophy; Part II. Husserl on Consciousness and Intentionality: 4. The first-person character of philosophical knowledge; 5. Phenomenological immanence, normativity, and semantic externalism; 6. The normative in perception; 7. Husserl's subjectivism and the philosophy of mind; Part III. Heidegger, Care, and Reason: 8. Subjectivity: locating the first-person in being and time; 9. Conscience and reason; 10. Being answerable: reason-giving and the ontological meaning of discourse; Part IV. Phenomenology and Practical Philosophy: 11. The existential sources of normativity; 12. Husserl and Heidegger on the intentionality of action; 13. Heidegger on practical reasoning, agency, and morality.

Steven Crowell is Joseph and Joanna Nazro Mullen Professor of Philosophy at Rice University. He is the author of Husserl, Heidegger, and the Space of Meaning (2001) and editor of The Prism of the Self: Philosophical Essays in Honor of Maurice Natanson (1995), Transcendental Heidegger (with Jeff Malpas, 2007) and The Cambridge Companion to Existentialism (Cambridge University Press, 2012).