James and Husserl: The Foundations of Meaning

I. The World of Pure Experience.- 1. The fundamental tenets of Radical Empiricism.- 2. The absolute sphere of pure experience.- 3. A comparison with Bergson.- II. Sensation, Perception, Conception.- 1. Knowledge by acquaintance and “knowledge about”.- 2. The recognition of sameness.- 3. The fringe structure of the stream of consciousness.- 4. The complementarity of perception and conception.- 5. Comparison between Husserl’s epoché and James’s return to pure experience.- III. The Genesis of Space and Time.- 1. The pre-reflective givenness of spatiality.- 2. The elaboration of spatial coordinates.- 3. Husserl’s theory of horizons and James’s fringes.- 4. The temporal structure of the stream of consciousness.- 5. The theory of the specious present.- 6. Primary and secondary remembrance.- 7. Husserl’s analysis of the now-phase.- 8. Active and passive genesis.- IV. The Structure of the Self: A Theory of Personal Identity.- 1. A functional view of consciousness.- 2. The empirical self.- 3. The pure ego.- 4. Husserl’s distinction between the human ego and the pure phenomenological ego.- 5. The auto-constitution of the ego in temporality.- 6. The ambiguous situation of the body.- V. Intersubjectivity.- 1. Two inadequate solutions to the impasse of solipsism.- 2. Reference to a common spatial horizon.- 3. The problem of solipsism in the context of transcendental subjectivity.- 4. The coordination of alien spatial perspectives through imaginative variation.- VI. The Thing and its Relations: A Theory of the Constitution of the Physical World.- 1. The positing of thing-patterns within the stream of consciousness.- 2. The sense of reality.- 3. The various sub-universes of reality.- 4. The region of the “thing” as a guiding clue for phenomenological inquiry.- 5. The return to the concrete fullness of the life-world.- VII. Attention and Freedom.- 1. The correlation between the focus-fringe structure of the object and the subjective modalities of attention and inattention.- 2. James’s dependence upon the “reflex-arc” theory of human activity.- 3. The relationship between attention and freedom.- 4. Husserl’s study of attention as an index of intentionality.- 5. The spontaneity of the ego’s glance.- 6. James’s pragmatic justification of the possibility of freedom.- VIII. The Pragmatic Theory of Truth.- 1. Pragmatism as a method and as a genetic theory of truth.- 2. Four different types of truth and of verification.- A. The truth of knowledge by acquaintance.- B. The truth of “knowledge about”.- C. A priori truths.- D. The truth-value of belief.- 3. Husserl’s definition of truth as the ideal adequation between meaning-intention and meaning fulfillment.- 4. The retrogression from the self-evidence of judgment to the original founding evidences of the life-world.- Conclusion — Action: the Final Synthesis.