Social Phenomenology: Husserl, Intersubjectivity, and Collective Intentionality

Husserl on Collective Intentionality

Phenomenology of Intersubjectivity:

I confess to a degree of ambivalence in writing a paper on the relevance of the concept of intersubjectivity for psychoanalytic theory and practice. The concept has been around for the better part of a century, and while its history is unclear Husserl was apparently the first philosopher to employ the term as a fundamental facet of his philosophy, making it a cardinal principle of his philosoph...

Phenomenology and Intentionality

Horgan and Tienson (2002) argue that some intentional content is constitutively determined by phenomenology alone. We argue that this would require a certain kind of covariation of phenomenal states and intentional states which is not established by Horgan and Tienson’s arguments. We make the case that there is inadequate reason to think phenomenology determines perceptual belief, and that ther...

Phenomenology , Psychotherapy and the Quest for Intersubjectivity

Intersubjectivity is a key concept in phenomenology as well as in psychology and especially in psychotherapy, given the reliance of the therapeutic process on its location in relationship. While psychotherapy encompasses a range of what Owen (2006) terms “talking therapies”, this paper focuses mainly on the Freudian model of psychoanalysis and its connection with Husserlian and Heideggerian phe...

Collective intentionality and the social status of artifactual kinds

There is a well-developed view of artifacts according to which their nature depends on the intentions of their authors or creators. However, in the modern world of artifact design and creation, typically not one but many agents are involved in the process of making an artifact. In this paper, I showhow the intentional view can bemaintained even for ‘collective’ artifacts havingmultiple authors....