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Phenomenology and the experience of the historical

David Carr: Experience and history: phenomenological perspectives on the historical world. Oxford University Press, 2014

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Notes

  1. Carr (2014, p. 4). See also the following passage: “Different as they are from each other, one thing these two approaches have in common is that they begin with a gap between us and the past, between the present which we inhabit and the past to which we turn in history” (ibid., p. 3).

  2. Ibid., p. 1.

  3. Idem.

  4. Ibid., p. 46.

  5. Ibid., p. 63. Cf. Ch. 2, § 14.

  6. Ibid., p. 46.

  7. Ibid., p. 52.

  8. Ibid., p. 152.

  9. Ibid., p. 153.

  10. Cf. Ch. 6, § 4–6.

  11. Ibid., p. 153.

  12. This has been done in exemplary fashion in the text the Origins of Geometry (in Crisis, Appendix VI), where Husserl sought to show how ideal objects have a historical origin.

  13. Cf. ibid., p. 66.

  14. Ibid., p. 46.

  15. Idem.

  16. Ibid., p. 47.

  17. Dilthey (1970, p. 346).

  18. Carr (2014, p. 162). See the following passage as well: “Thus our expanded view of consciousness now includes history, so to speak, as part of its makeup. That is, the social past figures as background of individual and collective experience. And it does this prior to and independently of any cognitive interest we might take in the past or even any instruction we might receive about it. This is what it means to say, in Dilthey’s words, that we are “historical beings”: We are historical beings because we are conscious beings” (ibid., p. 161).

  19. Idem.

  20. Ibid., p. 59.

  21. Ibid., p. 58. Cf. also: “My point, however, is that in these cases, unlike some of the examples mentioned earlier, we didn’t need subsequent occurrences to know that these events were historically significant. We knew it at the time and in and through the experience itself” (ibid., p. 59).

  22. Ibid., p. 59.

  23. Idem.

  24. Ibid., p. 60.

  25. Ibid., p. 59.

  26. Ibid., p. 54.

  27. There is, as I have argued for above, a phase of transition where our expectations are ensuing a mutation and where the criteria for what would count as a fulfilling experience are admittedly blurred or unclear, but they are not totally absent either, and a more robust set of expectations will soon firmly establish itself.

  28. Obviously, perceptual awareness having a normative horizon does not mean that it prescribes anything; it just means that it sets its own standards, which may either be fulfilled or not fulfilled.

  29. Carr (2014, p. 174).

  30. For instance, in Getting Back into Place (1993) and in The Fate of Place (1997).

  31. Cf. Steinbock (1995).

  32. Carr (2014, p. 175).

  33. Ibid., p. 176.

  34. Ibid., p. 179.

  35. “From the individual point of view you and I do indeed occupy different presents, because we lead different lives, because we have different pasts and futures, and because the present is for each of us a function of the past and future events which frame it” (ibid., p. 179).

  36. Ibid., p. 180.

  37. Cf. Ch. 2, § 13.

  38. I have in mind the previously quoted passage: “your ‘now’ is as much a mark of your otherness and differentness from me as is your spatial ‘there’” (ibid., p. 180; my emphasis).

References

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Acknowledgments

Many thanks to David Carr for his generous comments on this paper.

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Correspondence to Maxime Doyon.

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This is a very slightly modified version of the paper that I gave at the Fifty-Fourth Annual Meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP), in Atlanta, on October 10th, 2015. Thanks to Dermot Moran for organizing the panel and for inviting Steve Crowell and I to engage with David Carr’s work. Thanks also to Hanne Jacobs, who moderated the session.

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Doyon, M. Phenomenology and the experience of the historical. Cont Philos Rev 49, 383–392 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-016-9365-5

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