About My Research Interests

General Remarks

(For a Breakdown of Current Research, click here)

First off, in attempting to characterize my own work, I should like to say that I personally find the traditional distinction between “analytic” and “continental” philosophy unproductive. The former suggests a systematic concept, the latter a geographic location (the European continent). This contradistinction is altogether skewed and fudges many nuances that come into play when doing serious (“rigorous”) philosophy. Instead, I suggest distinguishing philosophical work into historical and systematic directions of doing philosophy. Now I do think that Gadamer is right in stressing that philosophical problems have their “history of effects” (“Wirkungsgeschichte”) in being handed down to us through the course of history. This means, one cannot ignore history (the historical, social, economic etc. setting) when tackling systematic problems, on the one hand. On the other, one cannot completely give oneself over to history and disregard the systematic claims that every serious philosopher makes. In my work, I see myself as trying to combine both aspects. When dealing with systematic problems, one cannot ignore the historical setting, the “life-world” in which they were first uttered, and the historical manner in which these issues developed. When working on a single figure or period, one can equally not confine oneself to a mere historical consideration but should attempt to see the systematic problem that these authors were struggling with. This merging of historical and systematic analysis is the goal I attempt to attain in my work, in writing as well as in the classroom.

I first became seriously interested in philosophy when reading authors from the phenomenological movement. Indeed, the phenomenological method of getting “to the things themselves” seemed to be a fruitful method of dealing with philosophical problems. After an intensive phase of studying Heidegger, I turned to Husserl, who seemed to offer a greater rigor and detail in his analyses. I soon became intruiged by the method of phenomenology itself. The problems with this method are dealt with in great detail in the famous “Sixth Cartesian Meditation,” a text that Husserl's assistant and collaborator Eugen Fink drafted. I read this highly original text as a critique of Husserl's philosophical intentions. The dispute between both and a possible defense of Husserl's position were the topics of my dissertation, which I completed before looking at any unpublished manuscripts from Husserl's Nachlass. Working on the Husserliana edition in the Archives in Louvain for the most part confirmed the hunches of my earlier interpretations. Many texts that I found (and firstly transcribed) can now be found quoted in my book, which appeared in 2002, nearly five years after the completion of my doctorate; it is a significantly reworked version of my dissertation. The Husserliana edition (vol. XXXIV) appeared earlier in the same year and features a selection of Husserl's late reflections on method, as this was Husserl's main concern in the last decade of his life.

During my work in the Archives, I discovered that Husserl dealt intensively with the neo-Kantian philosopher Paul Natorp over the course of three decades. Looking up from Husserlian manuscripts and around into the other philosophical circles at the same time—i.e., roughly between 1900 and 1930—I came to realize that Husserl and the phenomenological movement as a whole were merely one part of a larger tendency, however disunited, in philosophy. Indeed, other philosophers from other schools were also working on similar problems as Husserl and his pupils. This led me to consider as well the strongest philosophical movement at the time in Europe, the neo-Kantian movement. Working on the relationship between phenomenology and neo-Kantianism in general, on that between Husserl and Natorp in particular became the topic of my post-doctoral research project supported by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. These neo-Kantian thinkers—to mention only Hermann Cohen, Paul Natorp, Ernst Cassirer, Heinrich Rickert, Emil Lask—were highly acclaimed philosophers in their days, but are now, regrettably, almost unknown and are only slowly being rediscovered. While there is currently a considerable neo-Kantian renaissance in Europe, this school is also slowly becoming recognized by scholars of 20th century philosophy in North America. The largest obstacle in this reappropriation is the fact that most of the works of these authors are either out of print or not translated or both. There is lots of work to be done in this field. Incorporating this “critical” school in reconsidering 20th century philosophy brings many issues and problems of today into greater relief. In fact, it renders more fully understandable other, more known philosophical currents in the last and present century, such as existentialism, hermeneutics, Anglo-American philosophy and the Frankfurt School. The problems that the neo-Kantians dealt with, however, are also of general interest for contemporary philosophy, in theoretical philosophy, ethics, political philosophy and other fields.

I see the philosophy of the first third of the 20th century essentially as a response to the philosophical challenge posed by Kant. This challenge can be subsumed under the term “transcendental turn,” i.e., the turn to subjectivity and the ensuing transcendental idealism. In this sense, Cassirer has (I believe rightly) termed the philosophy as of the Enlightenment as a whole “modern idealism.” Both the neo-Kantians and the phenomenologists, in their fashion and method, attempted to either recast the main tenets of this idealism to suit the challenges posed by the 20th century, or saw their projects as modifying or even fundamentally criticizing transcendental philosophy. In my current research, I attempt to come clearer about these issues and interconnections between different philosophical schools and methods in that period (one would also have to mention the Lebensphilosophen and the existentialist movement), but not merely in a historical manner, but in order to clarify the status of transcendental philosophy and the question of subjectivity. Yet, historically speaking, I intend to pursue these issues further by moving both backward and forward from the first half of the 20th century; backward by making my way back to German Idealism and Kant; forward by learning how these problems further develop in the latter half of the 20th century, e.g., in hermeneutics (e.g., Gadamer) and the philosophy of mind (McDowell and others).

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