Instructions

Note: this assignment is for students in Group III only.

The assignment is due, as an attachment, via the “Assignments” tool on eCommons, by midnight Thursday, October 22 (in PDF or any format easily converted to PDF, e.g. MSWord, LATEX, RTF, plain text).

Please respond to the following question in approximately two pages (double spaced). (Needless to say this should be your own original work.) In §10 of the Sixth Investigation, Husserl discusses a feature which is supposedly common to several situations. For example: (1) thinking “that is my inkpot” (while seeing my inkpot); (2) thinking about my inkpot (“symbolically”), then later actually seeing the very inkpot I was thinking of; (3) listening to a melody (hearing each new note as a further part of the melody, connected to the notes I’m no longer hearing and the ones I have yet to hear); (4) seeing a carpet which is partly covered by furniture (so that the pattern of the carpet continues into a part I can’t see). What exactly are these four experiences supposed to have in common? How are they supposed to be different? How is this supposed to explain what knowledge or cognition or recognition (Erkenntnis) is? How is it supposed to explain the way we perceive objects (as opposed to perceiving sense data)?