By Kyril Wolfe
Happy 2025! Our SoPheRE webinar is resuming this February, led again by Dr. Peter Costello. For the next webinar program, we will be studying Edmund Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations. Meetings will start in February, and continue through the spring. Details about the webinar can be found at the end of this post.
For those who do not know, the Cartesian Meditations is a later text of Husserl’s, first given as a series of lectures at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1929. The book serves as an introduction to Husserl’s phenomenological philosophy—the shortest and perhaps the clearest introductory text he ever wrote. At the same time, it also serves as a transitional work, where the key ideas of Husserl’s phenomenological project are brought to their most mature expression within the comprehensive framework of transcendental phenomenology. Nevertheless, the book’s particular framework for transcendental phenomenology also makes Cartesian Meditations one of Husserl’s most controversial works, especially in its description of the ego’s relationship with Others.
In the work, Husserl takes as his point of departure the Cartesian process of doubt and the certainty of the ego. Yet in contrast to Descartes—who, in a both rationalist and realist manner, proceeds from the ego to prove the existence of God and of the physical world—Husserl himself proceeds to inquire into how consciousness itself is conscious of the world. This inquiry leads us along familiar paths in Husserl’s phenomenology: the critique of the natural attitude, analyses of intentionality, noesis and noemata, apperception, synthesis and constitution, and so on. These investigations, in turn, lead Husserl to the core of the framework of transcendental phenomenology: the positing of the ego as a monad, the identification of transcendental phenomenology as a form of transcendental idealism, and the description/demonstration of monadological intersubjectivity, especially as preventing phenomenology’s collapse into solipsism.
Now, for the details of the webinar:
When: Every other Wednesday starting from February 19, 2025, and ending in May. Zoom sessions will start at 12pm EST and end no later than 2pm.
The Book: Edmund Husserl’s Cartesian Mediations: An Introduction to Phenomenology. We will use the English translation by Dorion Cairns (published by Nijhoff, 1960). The text can be found here. Our first meeting will be on the First Meditation, sections 3-11.
Participation and Format: The webinar is open to graduate students, recent PhDs, or established scholars in philosophy, literature, religious studies, the sciences, psychology, and other related areas. Participants should be willing to prepare graduate-seminar style presentations on particular sections of each of the five meditations in Husserl’s work.
Each week, participants will begin by summarizing, asking questions, posing problems—in that order—for approximately 15 minutes. Then we will have a large group discussion of each section before moving on the next section. The webinar will be paced slowly, in order to enable and encourage deep reading and textual work.
Host: The Webinar will be led by Dr. Peter Costello. Dr. Costello is Professor of Philosophy at Providence College, and the author of Layers in Husserl’s Phenomenology: On Meaning and Intersubjectivity (University of Toronto Press, 2014). He is also a longstanding member of SoPheRE who has run the society’s webinar for several years. His work focuses on phenomenology, especially phenomenology of religion, phenomenology of art and literature, and the work of Edmund Husserl.If you are interested: Contact Peter Costello at dr.petercostello@gmail.com. We also ask that participants be members of SoPheRE (with a modest annual membership fee) prior to the beginning of the webinar.