Intersubjectivity and Objectivity in Adam Smith and Edmund Husserl

320 Pages·2012·1.86 MB·English

by  Christel Fricke

Christel Fricke | Dagfinn Føllesdal (Eds.)
Intersubjectivity and Objectivity in Adam Smith and Edmund Husserl
A Collection of Essays
P h i l o s o p h i s c h e F o r s c h u n g
P h i l o s o p h i c a l R e s e a r c h

Herausgegeben von / Edited by

Johannes Brandl • Andreas Kemmerling
Wolfgang Künne • Mark Textor

Band 8 / Volume 8
Christel Fricke | Dagfinn Føllesdal (Eds.)

Intersubjectivity and Objectivity in
Adam Smith and Edmund Husserl

A Collection of Essays
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The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliographie;
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Contents

Preface
Introduction 5

1 A Phenomenological Approach to Intersubjectivity
in the Sciences 17
Frode Kjosavik
2 Husserl’s Approaches to Volitional Consciousness 45
Henning Peucker
3 “We-Subjectivity”: Husserl on Community and
Communal Constitution 61
Ronald McIntyre
4 Husserl on Understanding Persons 93
Christian Beyer
5 Imagination and Appresentation, Sympathy and
Empathy in Smith and Husserl 117
John J. Drummond
6 Mengzi (Mencius), Adam Smith and
Edmund Husserl on Sympathy and Conscience 139
Iso Kern
7 Overcoming Disagreement – Adam Smith and
Edmund Husserl on Strategies of Justifying
Descriptive and Evaluative Judgments 171
Christel Fricke
8 Intersubjectivity and Moral Judgment in Adam Smith’s
Theory of Moral Sentiments 243
Vivienne Brown
9 Sympathy in Hume and Smith: A Contrast,
Critique, and Reconstruction 273
Samuel Fleischacker

Contributors 313
Preface

The idea of reading Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments side by
side with Husserl’s phenomenology and his theory of intersubjectivity in
particular was first explored in two workshops, hosted by the Oslo based
Centre for the Study of Mind in Nature in 2007 and 2008. The editors of
the present volume jointly hosted these workshops. We would like to thank
the Center for the Study of Mind in Nature for providing the funding as
well as for generous administrative support. Many thanks are due to the
contributors to this volume who found the idea of a joint reading of
Husserl and Smith inspiring. Dagfinn Føllesdal commented on previous
versions of some of the essays in this volume and suggested improvements.
Kjell Sindre Schmidt did most of the editorial work, and we would like to
thank him most cordially for his immense patience, enthusiasm and
attention to detail.

Introduction
Christel Fricke and Dagfinn Føllesdal
Adam Smith (1723 – 1790) and Edmund Husserl (1859 – 1938) are not
often read side by side. Smith was a central figure of the Scottish
Enlightenment, after 1776 increasingly known for his work in economics,
who had a successful career both as an academic teacher and researcher
and as a civil servant. Husserl was a Czech-German phenomenologist, a
Jewish scholar who, towards the end of his academic career at the
University of Freiburg, was exposed to the anti-Semitic repressions of the
Nazi regime and its local representatives, one of them a former assistant of
his, namely Martin Heidegger. Smith’s philosophical work is focused on
topics belonging to the realm of practical philosophy. Apart from a few
essays on rhetorics, aesthetics, and the history of science, he mainly wrote
and lectured about moral theory, economics and the philosophy of law.
Husserl’s focus is on topics of theoretical philosophy, he wrote about
epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of mind and philosophy of
mathematics with only a borderline interest in matters of normative ethics.
And while he makes claims to a Humean and a Kantian heritage, he hardly
ever mentions Smith in his writings.
There is no evidence for Husserl having been very familiar with
Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments or any other part of his work. In the
lectures entitled Introduction into Ethics (from 1920 and 1924), Husserl
mentions Adam Smith, together with Anthony Earl of Shaftesbury, Francis
Hutcheson and David Hume, as a philosopher of the moral sense theory
(see Hua XXXVII, p.148); but whereas he dedicates long passages to his
reading of Shaftesbury, Hume, and then of Kant, Smith does not get any
1
particular attention. And in the earlier Lectures on Ethics and Theory of
Value (from 1908 – 1914), Husserl refers to Adam Smith as a philosopher
who believed that, for justifying our emotionally grounded moral judg-
ments, we have to refer to God as the source of our moral sense (see Hua

1 Husserl, Edmund (1950ff.) Husserliana – Edmund Husserl, Gesammelte Werke, The
Hague: Dordrecht, (quoted as “Hua” with reference to volume and page number).