Papers by Patrick Eldridge
Husserl on Depiction, eds. Regina-Nino Mion, John Brough, and Claudio Rozzoni, 2025
This chapter (1) updates Husserl's theory of image-consciousness by specifying the temporal and p... more This chapter (1) updates Husserl's theory of image-consciousness by specifying the temporal and positional structures involved in the intention of photographs, and (2) draws on his writings on empathy and intersubjectivity to describe both the basic awareness the spectator has of a photographer and the more nuanced awareness they can generate of specific styles of particular photographers. It delineates this Husserlian position through a reflection on the photography of Jacques Henri Lartigue and by positioning it in relationship to classic works in the philosophy of photography and more recent analytic work in that domain.
Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology, 2022
A review article of Emmanel Alloa's "Looking Through Images: A Phenomenology of Visual Media".
Husserl Studies, 2024
This article investigates Husserl's arguments for the constitutive role of memory in producing th... more This article investigates Husserl's arguments for the constitutive role of memory in producing the awareness of objective time. Husserl explicitly connects his thoughts on time and memory to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, while developing an original understanding of the syntheses of recognition and reproduction. This offers a novel avenue for considering what is transcendental about Husserl's phenomenology of memory. I contend that Husserl developed three transcendental functions of memory with a quasi-Kantian cast in writings from 1917 to 1926. These three functions concern the re-identifiability of objects over time, the objectuality (Gegenständlichkeit) of moments in time, and the rigidity of the relations between moments. An exposition of these three transcendental functions and a comparison with Kant's critical philosophy of time establish what sort of legitimacy objective time had for Husserl and how memory served as its subjective condition of possibility. This article also offers an account of the connection between individuation and memory and a novel comparison between Husserl and Kant on the topic of memory in transcendental philosophy.
Encyclopedia of Phenomenology, 2023
A concise overview of the major contributions to the phenomenological literature on memory
Phenomenology in an African Context: Contributions and Challenges, 2023
This contribution demonstrates and critically evaluates the phenomenological nature of Paulin Hou... more This contribution demonstrates and critically evaluates the phenomenological nature of Paulin Hountondji’s critique of ethnophilosophy. Through a synoptic reading of Hountondji and Husserl, it shows how Hountondji’s understanding of intentionality and philosophical responsibility unite the seemingly disparate impulses of his work: the elaboration of a philosophical theory of objective knowledge, the critique of theoretical extraversion in African, and the demand for a sociological theory of collective representations. The article offers some alternative readings of the Husserlian resources that Hountondji draws upon, with the aim of highlighting and, to a limited extent, resolving the key tensions in Hountondji’s critique of ethnophilosophy, namely, the theories of subjectivity, intersubjectivity, and the relationship between a transcendental philosophy and an empirical politics in a post-colonial, theoretically extraverted setting. The article presents a reading of the phenomenological reduction that is foreign to Hountondji’s writings on Husserl, but one that nonetheless organically unites the opposition in his conception of the African philosopher’s responsibilities to their community and to the truth.
Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 2021
This article demonstrates why Husserl struggled to understand the conditions of possibility of fa... more This article demonstrates why Husserl struggled to understand the conditions of possibility of false memory, and how only the genetic dimension of his phenomenology enabled him to conceive of a specifically mnemic form of falsehood. For a false memory to deceive us, we must trust that it is true, but in order to have a phenomenology of its falsehood, the memory must appear as false. Husserl’s theory of false memory responds to both of these demands by showing how distorting syntheses (repression, filling-in, re-touching) conceal themselves, without making it impossible to discover their distorting effects. Key to meeting these two demands is Husserl’s account of how the unconscious functions as the ‘untrue’ basis of memory, and how all recollections (both true and false) require affective, associative syntheses between present conscious experience and past unconscious experience, syntheses that are subject to many vicissitudes.
Continental PhContinental Philosophy Review, 53(4), 401-417, 2020
I advance a phenomenology of forgetting based on Husserl’s accounts of time-consciousness and pas... more I advance a phenomenology of forgetting based on Husserl’s accounts of time-consciousness and passive synthesis. This theory of forgetting is crucial for understanding the transcendental constitution of the past. I argue that without forgetting, neither memory nor retention suffice for a consciousness of the past as past, since both are irreducibly connected to the Living Present. After an initial survey of the challenges that confront a phenomenology of forgetting (i.e. the “forgotten” is defined by its lack of phenomenality), I provide a descriptive analysis of forgetting as a complex process that integrates an accomplishment of retention that Husserl called “temporal contraction” with an accomplishment of passive synthesis that Husserl called “affective fusion.” Temporal contraction is the accomplishment that creates a qualitative (not quantitative) distinction between near-retentions and far-retentions. Affective fusion enables us to provide a positive (not privative) phenomenological description of the withdrawal of egoic investment in intentional experiences. Taken together, these two syntheses generate a double concealment in which consciousness both forgets its object and forgets that it has forgotten it, thereby constituting it as part of the truly absent past.
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 2018
In this paper I investigate an underappreciated element of Husserl’s phenomenology of images: the... more In this paper I investigate an underappreciated element of Husserl’s phenomenology of images: the consciousness of the depicted subject (Sujet or Bildsujet), which Husserl calls the Sujetintention, e.g. the awareness of the sitter of a portrait.
This is a penultimate draft of my paper: Eldridge, P. (2018) "Depicting and Seeing-in. The 'Sujet' in Husserl's Phenomenology of Images." Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 17.3: 555-573. Please refer to and cite that final published version.
This paper offers a phenomenological analysis of (1) the relationship between regret and episodic... more This paper offers a phenomenological analysis of (1) the relationship between regret and episodic memory, (2) the temporal structure of " regretful memory " , (3) the affective and evaluative dimension of regretful memory, and (4) the counterfactual dimension of regretful memory. Based on Husserl's phenomenology I offer an analysis of regret's complex structures of intentionality and time-consciousness. Husserl held that episodic memory requires two temporal orientations on one's own experience: the past now that one relives and the present now in which one does the reliving. If memory generally entails two temporal perspectives, regretful memory brings in a third point of temporal reference: that now that could have been. Drawing on Hoerl & McCormack (2016) I give an account of regret as a mnemic and counterfactual form of intentional consciousness that confronts an alternative past and attempts to negotiate between two essential yet conflicting features of its actual past: its contingency and its irreversibility. On this basis I then draw on Bagnoli (2000) to offer a phenomenological theory of regretful memory as an emotional mode of valuing possibilities that belong to the past.
Observer Memories and Phenomenology, Jan 1, 2015
This paper explores the challenge that the experience of third-person perspective recall (i.e. ob... more This paper explores the challenge that the experience of third-person perspective recall (i.e. observer memories) presents to a phenomenological theory of memory. Specifically this paper outlines what Husserl describes as the necessary features of recollection, among which he includes the givenness of objects in the first person perspective. The paper notes that, on first sight, these necessary features cannot account for the experience of observer memories as described by Neisser & Nigro (1983). This paper proposes that observer memories do not so much entail a shift of perspective as they do a process of self-objectification and as such do not break with the phenomenological emphasis on the first person perspective.
This paper was originally published in Phenomenology and Mind, 7 (2015) pp.213-223. Visit: http://www.phenomenologyandmind.eu/
This article extrapolates a theory of memory as an intentional consciousness from Sartre’s early,... more This article extrapolates a theory of memory as an intentional consciousness from Sartre’s early, scattered references to memory. There are three key questions: How does Sartre conceive of memory’s intentional structure? Its temporal structure? And how does memory display both continuity and discontinuity in the stream of consciousness? Starting from the Sartrean insight that memory is a “double consciousness” the article offers an analysis of how memory helps to constitute a temporally complex mode of being-in-the-world. Aside from memory’s usefulness in this regard, memory also has the power to disturb consciousness and disrupt its projects. Roland Barthes’ concept of the punctum—which is connected to analyses of mourning—helps to clarify this. A synoptic analysis of Sartre and Barthes allows for a phenomenological description of how consciousness can be stuck in the past, confronted by something that was, and which holds the mind captive.
This is a version of a paper published in Sartre Studies International, vol. 22 n. 1 (2016) pp. 117-131. Published version is available on JStor. Visit: http://journals.berghahnbooks.com/sartre-studies
Books by Patrick Eldridge
Early Phenomenology in Central and Eastern Europe: Main Figures, Ideas, and Problems, 2020
This book presents the origins of Central and Eastern European phenomenology. It features chapter... more This book presents the origins of Central and Eastern European phenomenology. It features chapters that explore the movement's development, its most important thinkers, and its theoretical and historical context. This collection examines such topics as the realism-idealism controversy, the status of descriptive psychology, the question of the phenomenological method, and the problem of the world.
The chapters span the first decades of the development of phenomenology in Czechoslovakia, Poland, Romania, Russia, and Yugoslavia before World War II. The contributors track the Brentanian heritage of the development. They show how this tradition inspired influential thinkers like Celms, Špet, Ingarden, Frank, Twardowski, Patočka, and others. The book also puts forward original investigations. Moreover it elaborates new accounts of the foundations of phenomenology. While the volume begins with the Brentanian heritage, it situates phenomenology in a dialogue with other important schools of thought of that time, including the Prague School and Lvov-Warsaw School of Logic.
This collection highlights thinkers whose writings have had only a limited reception outside their home countries due to political and historical circumstances. It will help readers gain a better understanding of how the phenomenological movement developed beyond its start in Germany. Readers will also come to see how the phenomenological method resonated in different countries and led to new philosophical developments in ontology, epistemology, psychology, philosophy of culture, and philosophy of religion.
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Papers by Patrick Eldridge
This is a penultimate draft of my paper: Eldridge, P. (2018) "Depicting and Seeing-in. The 'Sujet' in Husserl's Phenomenology of Images." Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 17.3: 555-573. Please refer to and cite that final published version.
This paper was originally published in Phenomenology and Mind, 7 (2015) pp.213-223. Visit: http://www.phenomenologyandmind.eu/
This is a version of a paper published in Sartre Studies International, vol. 22 n. 1 (2016) pp. 117-131. Published version is available on JStor. Visit: http://journals.berghahnbooks.com/sartre-studies
Books by Patrick Eldridge
The chapters span the first decades of the development of phenomenology in Czechoslovakia, Poland, Romania, Russia, and Yugoslavia before World War II. The contributors track the Brentanian heritage of the development. They show how this tradition inspired influential thinkers like Celms, Špet, Ingarden, Frank, Twardowski, Patočka, and others. The book also puts forward original investigations. Moreover it elaborates new accounts of the foundations of phenomenology. While the volume begins with the Brentanian heritage, it situates phenomenology in a dialogue with other important schools of thought of that time, including the Prague School and Lvov-Warsaw School of Logic.
This collection highlights thinkers whose writings have had only a limited reception outside their home countries due to political and historical circumstances. It will help readers gain a better understanding of how the phenomenological movement developed beyond its start in Germany. Readers will also come to see how the phenomenological method resonated in different countries and led to new philosophical developments in ontology, epistemology, psychology, philosophy of culture, and philosophy of religion.