Note: this assignment, due Dec. 4, is for students in Group IV (Rowe, Spielman, Conrad) only.
Please respond to the following question in
approximately two pages (double spaced). (Needless to say this should
be your own original work.)
In §49 of the Ideas, p. 110, Husserl
discusses a possibility which he calls the ``annihilation of the
world,'' in which my experiences would no longer have the coherence
necessary to make them experiences of one self-consistent
reality. Obviously, in that case, the contents of my consciousness
would be different than they now are (Husserl says the would be
``modified''): whereas they are now orderly, coherent, characterized
by a background ``general positing'' of natural reality, etc., they
would then be chaotic and lack any long term positing of transcendent
objects. Why doesn't this show, according to Husserl, that
consciousness is dependent on the world? Why does it not
contradict what he says in §88 (pp. 215-16): that after the
``bracketing'' or ``exclusion'' of the entire world (so that only consciousness is left as a ``residuum''), ``everything, so to
speak, remains as of old''?