Introduction
meditating on Husserl's phenomenology
pp. 1-7
in: , From affectivity to subjectivity, Berlin, Springer, 2007Abstract
The simplest way to determine the sense of what we call thinking or philosophizing is to take over a concept from the tradition and reflect again on its scope and content. One traditional answer to the question of what we "do" when we think is characterized as "meditation," and it is not by chance that Husserl entitled one of his major publications "Meditations." Beside the apparent historical connection to Descartes, the other major reasons for Husserl's choice are two features of thinking that are in play in even the most everyday sense of the word, namely (1) meditation as a subjective activity, and (2) the loss of the subject in its object. I would like to briefly elucidate these two aspects.