J.J. Drummond – författare

The rift which has long divided the philosophical world into opposed schools-the "Continental" school owing its origins to the phenomenology of Husserl and the "analytic" school derived from Frege-is finally closing. But this closure is occurring in ways both different and in certain respects at odds with one another. On the one hand scholars are seeking to rediscover the concerns and positions common to both schools, positions from which we can continue fruitfully to address important philosophical issues. On the other hand successors to both traditions have developed criticisms of basic assumptions shared by the two schools. They have suggested that we must move not merely beyond the conflict between these two "modem" schools but beyond the kind of philosophy represented in the unity of the two schools and thereby move towards a new "postmodern" philosophical style. On the one hand, then and for example, Husserl scholarship has in recent years witnessed the development of an interpretation of Husserl which more closely aligns his phenomenology with the philosophical concerns of the "analytic" tradition. In certain respects, this should come as no surprise and is long overdue. It is true, after all, that the early Husserl occupied himself with many of the same philosophical issues as did Frege and the earliest thinkers of the analytic tradition. Examples include the concept of number, the nature of mathematical analysis, meaning and reference, truth, formalization, and the relationship between logic and mathematics.

Philosophers contributing new ideas are commonly caught within a received philosophical vocabulary and will often coin new, technical terms. Husserl understood himself as advancing a new theory of intentionality, and he fashioned the new vocabulary of "noesis" and "noema". But Husserl's own statements regarding the noema are ambiguous. Hence, it is no surprise that controversy has ensued. The articles in this book elucidate and clarify the notion of the noema; the book includes articles which phenomenologically describe and analyze the noemata of various experiences as well as articles which undertake the "metaphenomenological" explication of the doctrine of the noema. These two enterprises cannot be isolated from one another. Any analysis of the noema of a particular type of experience will necessarily illustrate, at least by instantiating the general notion of noema. And any metaphenomenological account of the noema itself will guide particular researches into the noemata of particular experiences.

This collection of essays honors Robert Sokolowski on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday. Sokolowski, one of phenomenology's most accomplished practitioners for over thirty-five years, has addressed a broad range of issues central to philosophical reflection. His writings embody a passion for 'the truthful' and 'the good', the two themes to which most of the present essays address their concern. These essays consider Sokolowski's work directly, explicitly taking up themes he has addressed over the entirety of his career. The essays cover nearly the full range of Sokolowski's interests: his view of philosophy; his phenomenology of language and his account of the relation between language and being; his phenomenology of moral action; and his phenomenological theology of disclosure.

Against a background of ethics, this handbook aims to show the great fertility of the phenomenological tradition for the study of ethics and moral philosophy by collecting a set of papers on the contributions to ethical thought by major phenomenological thinkers. Twenty-one chapters in the book are articles by experts who explore the thought of the major ethical thinkers in the first two generations of the phenomenological tradition and direct the reader toward the most relevant primary and secondary materials. The final three chapters of the book sketch more contemporary developments in various parts of the world, and the first three chapters investigate the relations between phenomenology and the dominant normative approaches in contemporary moral philosophy.

Philosophers contributing new ideas are commonly caught within a received philosophical vocabulary and will often coin new, technical terms. Husserl understood himself as advancing a new theory of intentionality, and he fashioned the new vocabulary of `noesis' and `noema'. But Husserl's own statements regarding the noema are ambiguous. Hence, it is no surprise that controversy has ensued. The articles in this book elucidate and clarify the notion of the noema; the book includes articles which phenomenologically describe and analyze the noemata of various experiences as well as articles which undertake the `metaphenomenological' explication of the doctrine of the noema. These two enterprises cannot be isolated from one another. Any analysis of the noema of a particular type of experience will necessarily illustrate, at least by instantiating the general notion of noema. And any metaphenomenological account of the noema itself will guide particular researches into the noemata of particular experiences.

Against the background of the recent revival of ethics, this handbook aims to show the great fertility of the phenomenological tradition for the study of ethics and moral philosophy by collecting a set of papers on the contributions to ethical thought by major phenomenological thinkers.

As a result, John Brough, John Drummond, and I came up with the idea that we hold our own conference and do philosophy as we envisage it and at the same time honor its foremost exemplary practitioner whose sixtieth birthday was the following year.