Costello, Peter. Layers in Husserl's Phenomenology: On Meaning and Intersubjectivity

COSTELLO, Peter. Layers in Husserl's Phenomenology: On Meaning and Intersubjectivity. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012. xiv + 225pp. Cloth, $60--Phenomenology is sometimes understood, usually by those who have had little actual contact with the works of its major exponents, to be a peculiarly introspective approach to philosophy. According to this view, research in phenomenology primarily consists in first-person descriptions of the various states of one's own consciousness. But a seminal insight in phenomenology, as inaugurated by Edmund Husserl at the turn of the twentieth century, is that consciousness is not transparent to itself, that the field of our experience is always haunted by the presence of others and by the sense of our own inherence within an historical horizon that transcends us. We are always interpreters, rather than simply reporters, in the field of our experience--and because that field is irreducibly intersubjective, the practice of interpreting the forms of experience is one that must be undertaken in dialogue with others. Peter Costello's book begins from this seminal phenomenological insight and exemplifies the approach to philosophical research that this insight entails. It is a superbly written study of the philosophy of Edmund Husserl, but its engagement with Husserl's work serves its larger aim of extending the field of phenomenological insight. While Costello covers a number of different topics in Husserl's phenomenology, from the foundations of logic to temporality and historicity, issues that preoccupied Husserl at different points in his career, he demonstrates the unity of Husserl's project by means of his own insight into the crucial role played in each of these various analyses by the term Deckung and its cognates. The author begins with a discussion of intersubjectivity, and in this connection introduces Husserl's concept of overlaying (Deckung). In this discussion we see that Deckung, which is sometimes misleadingly translated into English as coinciding, really implies a kind of overlaying in which difference, or noncoincidence, is preserved. As Costello explains, this concept is crucial for Husserl's account of the way in which we perceive other persons because it allows us to see how this process happens as a form of passive synthesis, beginning from an immediate sense of the similarity between our animate bodies, rather than as a kind of active inference. While Husserl recognizes that I can have no direct access to another's experience, he also does not subscribe to the view that there is some kind of mysterious process behind my ability to recognize other persons as subjects, or minds. …

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