Husserl on Hallucination: A Conjunctive Reading

Abstract

Several commentators have recently attributed conflicting accounts of the relation between veridical perceptual experience and hallucination to Husserl. Some say he is a proponent of the conjunctive view that the two kinds of experience are fundamentally the same. Others deny this and purport to find in Husserl distinct and non-overlapping accounts of their fundamental natures, thus committing him to a disjunctive view. My goal is to set the record straight. Having first briefly laid out the problem under discussion and the terms of the debate, I then review the proposals that have been advanced, disposing of some and marking others for further consideration later in the paper. A. D. Smith's disjunctive reading is among the latter. I discuss it at length, arguing that Smith fails to show that Husserl's views on perceptual experience entail a form of disjunctivism. Following that critical discussion, I present a case for a conjunctive reading of Husserl's account of perceptual experience.

Phenomenologists on Perception and Hallucination: Husserl and Merleau‐Ponty

“…Even if it is reasonable to read Husserl as also accepting the assumption in question – which it may not be (cf. Bower, 2020, pp. 571–2) – the disjunctivist interpretation still has to overcome the second hurdle.…”

“…In my discussion of conjunctivist interpretations of Husserl, I shall therefore leave Romano aside and focus on Bower (2020), who presents a much stronger conjunctivist case and has the additional advantage of providing detailed arguments against A. D. Smith's original disjunctive reading.…”

“…The core of Bower's extended criticism (Bower, 2020, pp. 558–69) of A. D. Smith's proposal is the following.…”

“…Smith made this suggestion with trepidation, stating the he feared many would regard his proposal as ‘silly’. And indeed, despite some qualified support for Smith's thesis, the majority of commentators agree that Husserl could not have been a disjunctivist (Bower, 2020; Cimino, 2021; Romano, 2012; Staiti, 2015). 5 However, the anti‐disjunctivist readers disagree among themselves over the correct characterization of Husserl's positive views.…”

“…Yet Bower's point (I think) is that given the implausibility of the view, the principle of charity requires us to avoid attributing it to him unless forced to do so by his text. And the interpretation is not, as it happens, forced upon us (Bower, 2020, p. 576).…”