Intersubjectivity and Objectivity in Adam Smith and Edmund Husserl

A Collection of Essays

Christel Fricke, Dagfinn Føllesdal, Christel Fricke, Dagfinn Føllesdal

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9783110325188
• eBook ISBN: 9783110325942
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Phenomenology in Philosophy

Can we have objective knowledge of the world? Can we understand what is morally right or wrong? Yes, to some extent. This is the answer given by Adam Smith and Edmund Husserl. Both rejected David Hume's skeptical account of what we can hope to understand. But they held his empirical method in high regard, inquiring into the way we perceive and emotionally experience the world, into the nature and function of human empathy and sympathy and the role of the imagination in processes of intersubjective understanding. The challenge is to overcome the natural constraints of perceptual and emotional experience and reach an agreement that is informed by the facts in the world and the nature of morality. This collection of philosophical essays addresses an audience of Smith- and Husserl scholars as well as everybody interested in theories of objective knowledge and proper morality which are informed by the way we perceive and think and communicate.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. A Phenomenological Approach to Intersubjectivity in the Sciences
• 2. Husserl’s Approaches to Volitional Consciousness
• 3. “We-Subjectivity”: Husserl on Community and Communal Constitution
• 4. Husserl on Understanding Persons
• 5. Imagination and Appresentation, Sympathy and Empathy in Smith and Husserl
• 6. Mengzi (Mencius), Adam Smith and Edmund Husserl on Sympathy and Conscience
• 7. Overcoming Disagreement – Adam Smith and Edmund Husserl on Strategies of Justifying Descriptive and Evaluative Judgments
• 8. Intersubjectivity and Moral Judgment in Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments
• 9. Sympathy in Hume and Smith: A Contrast, Critique, and Reconstruction
• Contributors