Type
Text
Type
Dissertation
Advisor
Casey, Edward | Welton, Donn | Grim, Patrick | Drummond, John.
Date
2013-12-01
Keywords
Events, Husserl, Phenomenology | Philosophy
Department
Department of Philosophy.
Language
en_US
Source
This work is sponsored by the Stony Brook University Graduate School in compliance with the requirements for completion of degree.
Identifier
http://hdl.handle.net/11401/76611
Publisher
The Graduate School, Stony Brook University: Stony Brook, NY.
Format
application/pdf
Abstract
This dissertation develops a phenomenology of events through an application, and critical re-evaluation, of key concepts in the philosophy of Edmund Husserl. I argue that non-phenomenological approaches to events fail to account for the availability of `things that happen' as intentional objects. How are they intelligible as objects of thought and experience? Why is their manner of being `things' one in which they happen (rather than exist, for example)? I argue, moreover, that we can best address these questions through a phenomenological analysis of propositions that express what happens--propositions like `My tooth fell out'--rather than nominal expressions like `earthquake' and `wedding'. With this focus in mind, I turn to Husserl's theory of judgment, which provides a framework with which to approach these propositions, and the intentional objects to which they correspond. Husserl's theory treats judgments as meaning-intentions that are directed towards states of affairs. It includes careful analyses of the `synthetic' cognitive activity through which our pre-predicative experience is objectified, generating a new `thing'--a state of affairs-- which is thereafter available as an object of reference. For Husserl, however, the paradigm of judgment is the copular, property-ascribing judgment `S is p.' I argue that judgments about what happens are unlike property-ascribing judgments, because they are grounded in a different kind of experience. The experience of `happening' is not the experience of `property-having'. To experience happening is rather to intuit the manifestation of force in its effects. Accordingly, the judgments through which we intend and thus objectify the experience of happening--turning it into a `thing'--have (paradigmatically) a different structure than copular property-ascriptions. Rather than ascribe properties to objects, they assign objects to roles in a dynamic structure, in which they participate as e.g. `agents' and `patients' of force. I examine the notion of force mainly in a mechanical context, but argue that it can be usefully expanded to other domains of experience as well. | 214 pages
Recommended Citation
Colapinto, Andres, "Things that Happen: Husserl's Theory of Judgment and the Problem of Events" (2013). Stony Brook Theses and Dissertations Collection, 2006-2020 (closed to submissions). 2501.
https://commons.library.stonybrook.edu/stony-brook-theses-and-dissertations-collection/2501