Next Week: “What is a noema?”

Next week, the Phenomenology Research Group will host a talk from Zachary J. Joachim (Boston University):

It is well known that in Ideen 1, Husserl drops the ‘act-content-object’ schema in favor of ‘noesis-noema.’ But just what are these schemata for? Both are attempted answers to the question, ‘How must the world be such that one’s state of subjectivity counts as being of or about anything?’ Such schemata, then, are ontological: they describe the way the world must be. But they are also logical in the sense that interests Husserl from beginning to end: they describe not the law of inference (formal validity), but the law of thought or thinkability per se (objective validity). This identity of ontology and logic is what Kant and the German Idealists take the subject-matter of philosophy to be, whose successful clarification as such would allow philosophy in the modern era to begin. ‘Idealism’ is their name for that clarification. Husserl understands his idealism in this sense, too. He differs, though, in holding perception’s (not judgment’s) form of self-consciousness as the source of logical form, i.e., of thinkability or objectivity. His commitment to that difference is constitutive of his shift to noesis-noema as the schema expressive of philosophy’s proper subject-matter. In this paper, I offer first steps towards elucidating that schema in the above-mentioned way, starting with ‘noema.’ I argue that a noema is the objectivity of an object, i.e., its apparent unity, and that since ‘noema’ replaces the ‘content/object’ distinction, Husserl therewith espouses a no-content view of intentionality.

The event will take place on February 23, 3:30 to 5:30 PM in Cuneo Hall 212.