Husserl and Heidegger on Human Experience

Abstract

In this 1999 book Pierre Keller examines the distinctive contributions, and the respective limitations, of Husserl's and Heidegger's approach to fundamental elements of human experience. He shows how their accounts of time, meaning, and personal identity are embedded in important alternative conceptions of how experience may be significant for us, and discusses both how these conceptions are related to each other and how they fit into a wider philosophical context. His sophisticated and accessible account of the phenomenological philosophy of Husserl and the existential phenomenology of Heidegger will be of wide interest to students and specialists in these areas, while analytic philosophers of mind will be interested by the detailed parallels which he draws with a number of concerns of the analytic philosophical tradition.

Internalism, externalism, and transcendental idealism

“…Where should one place phenomenology on the internalism-externalism scale? There has been a widespread tendency to argue that whereas Husserl's transcendental methodology commits him to internalism, the existential phenomenologies of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty are committed to a form of externalism since they fully endorse the view that the mind is essentially determined by its intentional relationship to the world (Keller, 1999;cf. McClamrock, 1995).…”

Husserl’s Way to Authentic Being

“…In this paper I have made the case that a more 14 My emphasis; Pierre Keller (1999), for instance, makes the following claim: ''Any justification of our beliefs also depends on the context in which we find ourselves. There is no way to provide a justification of our beliefs that transcends all context whatsoever, as traditional philosophers such as Descartes and Husserl think, who seek to identify beliefs that have a certainty that is completely independent of any particular context of justification'' (157; my emphasis).…”

Understanding the "lived Experience" of Sport Event Volunteers: Using the Hermeneutic Circle as a Guiding Conceptual Framework

“…The process of studying the lived experiences of sport event volunteering may further be challenged by the fallibility of memories in terms of the problems of individuals to access and recall stored data at times even though memory storage is described as being of a permanent nature (Keller, 1999;Spinelli, 2005). In view of the adopted research focus of this commentary that rests on the lived experiences of sport event volunteers, it is the episodic component that the research is concerned with, it requires sport event volunteers to recall a specific period of time in their lives when they were helping with the staging of a particular sport event and to retrieve specific memories in relation to this activity.…”

“…Another issue emerges from the idiosyncrasy of lived experience that challenges researchers how we know what the particular moments and activities that have been lived through by the research participant were really like. From the point of view of the researcher who is as an outsider to a sport event volunteer's lived experience, the issues of authenticity emerge (see Keller, 1999). It is the research participant who has lived through being a sport event volunteer and who is required to reflect on what she or he has lived through.…”