second year course outlines 2012-2013 - School of Social Sciences ...

experience? Some have argued that our experience of the present is itself temporally
extended
(the so-called specious present view, held by William James), others that our perception of
the
present moment is accompanied by an imaginative awareness of the recent past (Brentano).
Husserl argues for the existence of a primitive sort of memory (retention) which permeates
all
perceptual awareness of temporally extended objects (events).
Husserl’s view might be criticised in a number of ways, two of which would be: (i) the worry
that the
retention-primal impression-protention structure that he attributes to all experience cannot
really
explain the phenomenon of experienced duration, and (ii) the concern that retention does not
really
differ in any significant way from recollection.
The Reading
‘The Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness’ is, at times, a difficult read. It is,
however,
recognised as an important contribution to the perplexing topic of our awareness of the
passing of
time. Husserl spends a good deal of time describing retention (and to a lesser extent,
protention),
and distinguishing it from another type of memory, recollection. The reading also includes a
difficult
but important discussion of the duration of experience itself (§18).
Questions to Consider:
1. What do you think the phenomenon is that Husserl is attempting to characterise?
2. For much of this reading Husserl is concerned to distinguish between what he calls
primary
memory (retention) and secondary remembering (recollection). What is the difference
between the two? Do you think that Husserl has made a good case for his view that they
are different in kind?
3. In §§16-17 Husserl distinguishes between two senses of ‘perception’. What does this
distinction amount to?
4. Husserl doesn’t say very much about it, but what is protention (expectational intuition)?
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Lecture 5 (Week 5): Perception I – the objects of perception (Heidegger)
Required Reading:
Heidegger, M. 1925. The Fundamental Discoveries of Phenomenology, its Principle, and
the
Clarification of its Name (§5). In Moran, D. & Mooney, T. The Phenomenology Reader.
London: Routledge, 2002. [S]
Recommended Reading:
Crane, T. 2006. Is there a perceptual relation. In Gendler, T. & Hawthorne, J. Eds.
Perceptual
Experience. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Also available at www.timcrane.com
Further Reading:
Carman, T. 2003. Heidegger’s Analytic: Interpretation, Discourse and Authenticity in Being
and
Time. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Chs.3-4.
Christensen, C. B. 1997. Heidegger’s Representationalism. Review of Metaphysis 51 [O]
*Hopp, W. 2008. Husserl on sensation, perception and interpretation. Candadian Journal
of
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