Judgment and Sachverhalt: An Introduction to Adolf Reinach’s Phenomenological Realism

172 Pages·1995·9.78 MB·English

by  James M. Dubois (auth.)

JUDGMENT AND SACHVERHALT
PHAENOMENOLOGICA
COLLECTION FONDEE PAR H.L. V AN BREDA ET PUBLIEE
SOUS LE PAm ONAGE DES CEN1RES D' ARCHIVES-HUSSERL
132
JAMES M. DUBOIS
JUDGMENT AND SACHVERHALT
AN INTRODUCTION TO
ADOLF REINACH' S
PHENOMENOLOGICAL REALISM
Comite de redaction de la collection:
President: S. IJsseling (Leuven)
Membres: J.N. Mohanty (Philadelphia), P. Ricreur (Paris),
E. Stroker (Koln), J. Taminiaux (Louvain-Ia-Neuve)
Secretaire:J. Taminiaux
JAMES M. DUBOIS
Internationale Akademie for Philosophie. Liechtenstein
JUDGMENT AND
SACHVERHALT
An Introduction to
Adolf Reinach' s Phenomenological Realism
SPRINGER-SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA, B.V.
A C.I.P. Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-90-481-4564-5 ISBN 978-94-015-8470-8 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-94-015-8470-8
Printed on acid-free paper
All Rights Reserved
© 1995 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
Originally published by K1uwer Academic Publishers in 1995
No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or
utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and
retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements Vll
Introduction 1
Chapter I / JUDGMENTS AND STATES OF AFFAIRS 7
1. What is a Judgment? 7
2. Intentionality, Presentation,
and Intuitive Fullness 16
3. States of Affairs and Relations 21
4. Nonstandard Instances of Judgment 30
5. Evidence, Knowledge, and Belief 34
Chapter II / NEGATION AND CORRESPONDENCE 47
1. Autonomy and Heteronomy in the Realm of
States of Affairs 47
2. Building Up States of Affairs in, and for,
Acts of Meaning 58
3. Negative Properties and Logical Concepts 67
vi
Chapter III / INSIGHT AND THE A PRIORI 77
1. The Nature of A priori Necessity 78
2. A priori States of Affairs: Synthetic and Analytic,
Formal and Material 86
3. Towards an Ontology of Essences and Concepts 96
4. Insight and Argumentation 107
Chapter IV / LOGIC AND ARITHMETIC 115
1. The Intersection of Logic, Psychology,
and Judgment 116
2. States of Affairs and the Science of Demonstration 118
3. Numbers and Predication 124
Chapter V / THE DISCOVERY OF SOCIAL ACTS 129
1. Social Acts as Nonjudging Statements 130
2. The Uninventability and Indefinability
of the Promise 13 5
3. Reinachian Objects 141
Chapter VI/ REINACH AS PHENOMENOLOGIST 145
1. The Phenomenological Attitude 148
2. The Ideal Amidst the Real 151
3. Towards a "Subjective" Grounding of Social Acts 154
Bibliography 159
Index 167
Acknow ledgements
This book has a long history, and my acknowledgements must
accordingly reflect this.
As a student at Franciscan University of Steubenville I was first
introduced to phenomenological realism, above all, as it is
exemplified by Dietrich von Hildebrand. Here I must thank James
Harold and Michael Healy, who inspired me to pursue a career in
philosophy.
At the University of Rhode Island, I completed a Masters thesis
on the roots of phenomenological realism, and was further guided by
several persons teaching within this tradition. Fritz Wenisch, Mark
Roberts, and Stephan Schwarz all played some role in fostering my
continued interest in doing philosophy in the style and manner of the
early phenomenologists. It was here that I first discovered and fell
in love with the work of Adolf Reinach. I thank my father for all of
the support and encouragement he has given me, especially during
this period.
Given this background, it is somewhat intelligible that a young
man from New England should end up in Liechtenstein. At the
Internationale Akademie fur Philosophie in Liechtenstein I was able
to work with persons uniquely well-versed in the tradition of the
early phenomenologists. The present book is largely based on the
doctoral dissertation I completed and defended in Liechtenstein.
Barry Smith, a co-editor of Reinach's Siimtliche Werke, and Josef
Seifert, the Rektor of the lAP and a leading representative of
contemporary phenomenological realism, served as my first and
second readers respectively. Many thanks are due to them for their
Vlll ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
guidance. I also thank Fritz Wenisch and John Crosby, the translator
of Reinach's The Apriori Foundations of the Civil Law, for carefully
reading my text and offering many helpful suggestions. Many thanks
are also due to John White for proofreading the camera-ready
manuscript, and, together with Patricia Donahue-White, for
providing moral support and intellectual stimulation throughout my
time in Liechtenstein.
I thank the Stiftungsrat of the Academy in Liechtenstein for a
generous stipend which allowed me to write my dissertation, and
Franciscan University for giving me my first post, within which the
final version of this text was produced. I thank Fr. Peter Haas of
Vorarlberg for providing me with a much-needed quiet location
where my dissertation was written.
Mention also must be made of Maja de Keijzer at Kluwer, and
the members of the editorial board of the Phaenomenologica series.
I thank them for their editoral advice and their confidence in my
manuscript.
Above all, I thank my wife Susan for her love, support, and
courage. Without her encouragement I would not have pursued my
vocation as a philosopher. It is to her that I dedicate this book.
Introduction
Adolf Reinach, born in Mainz, in the year 1883, has been called
HusserI's "first real co-worker in the development of the
phenomenological movement" (Willard, 1969, p. 194). He was the
only student of HusserI to complete a Habilitation and to join him
as a teacher in Gottingen, and as Spiegelberg notes, independently
of each other "the Gottingen students of phenomenology like
Wilhelm Schapp, Dietrich von Hildebrand, Alexandre Koyre, and
Edith Stein, in their accounts of this period refer to Reinach, not to
HusserI, as their real teacher in phenomenology" (1982, p. 191).
Edith Stein writes of the seminars that Reinach led: "We students
probably all agreed that we were here more than anywhere else
learning about philosophical method" (Crosby, ed., p. xxviii).
Referring to these same seminars, Roman Ingarden says that Reinach
was the very heart of our collective efforts, the active spirit
opening up new aspects and paths of investigation in a creative
attitude which never rested, never lost its grip in difficult
situations. Thus one was brought by him to the attitude of
creative philosophising and one could enjoy the participation in
the development of a new philosophy, though one was in fact
merely a philosophical child. (Mulligan, ed., p. 17)
Spiegelberg notes that "Reinach's importance for the development of
early phenomenology is particularly remarkable considering the brief
life span of 34 years granted him for the development of his ideas
and his influence." He further speculates that it "was his death in
action in 1917 rather than Husserl's going to Freiburg which cut
short not only his own promise but that of the Gottingen
2 INTRODUCTION
phenomenological Circle" (p. 192).
The students of Gottingen, however, did not permit Reinach's
work to be soon forgotten. In 1922 they prepared and published his
Gesammelte Schriften. These writings are, in the words of HusserI,
"not large in number and size; but each of them is rich in ideas and
insights and deserves the most careful of study" (Crosby, ed., p. xi).
Further testimony of the lasting value of Reinach's work is seen in
the efforts of Schuhmann and Smith to produce a new critical
edition of Reinach's collected works, the Siimtliche Werke (1989).
Nevertheless, in spite of Reinach's historical import as a founding
member of the phenomenological movement, and in spite of the
philosophical value of his writings from the point of view of content
and methodology, his thought has received pathetically little
attention, particularly within the English language. This is not to say
that there is a complete lack of studies on his thought. In 1973, we
find a well-researched dissertation by Brettler devoted entirely to
Reinach's philosophy. The monograph series, Aletheia, has published
English translations of almost half of Reinach's collected works,
together with some fine studies on Rejnach's legal philosophy by
Crosby and Seifert. Mulligan (1987) has edited a volume, Speech
Act and Sachverhalt: Reinach and the Foundations of Realist
Phenomenology, which contains a number of valuable articles on
Reinach's philosophy, as well as what is probably the finest
biography on Reinach, and a thorough annotated bibliography
compiled by Smith. And of course we find isolated articles devoted
to Reinach in edited volumes and journals. Nevertheless, most of
this literature focuses on his philosophy of law rather than his
general philosophical system, and further, we do not find one single
author book published in the English language on any aspect of
Reinach's thought.
The present little book is offered as a contribution towards filling
this gap in the literature on Reinach, and indeed on phenomenology.
As the subtitle suggests, it is an introduction to Reinach's thought.
As I see it, an introduction may freely differ from a survey
inasmuch as it makes no pretense to cover, however superficially,
the whole of a given subject. There are many aspects of Reinach's