|
Bob Sandmeyer, Ph.D. Email: bob.sandmeyer@uky.edu Office Phone: (859) 257-7749 Office: POT 1429
|
![[bobsandmeyer]](images/bobsandmeyer.jpg)
|
Dr. Sandmeyer's specialization ranges over the
phenomenological movement, existentialism, and continental
philosophy generally. His interests in life-philosophy particularly inform his passion for environmental philosophy. He has written a dissertation
on the phenomenological philosophy of Edmund Husserl. Presently he is engaged
in research into the rise of life as a theme by older and current phenomenologists, e.g., Max Scheler, Hans Jonas,
and Renaud Barbaras.
Having taught philosophy now for more than ten years in a
number of settings, he has experience teaching courses in phenomenology and
existentialism, environmental philosophy, the philosophy of biology, social
and political theory, ethics, and logic and critical reasoning.
Dissertation:
Title: "The Promised Land. The Problem of Edmund Husserl's True Philosophy." Advisor:
Dr. Ronald Bruzina.
Does Husserl express anywhere a systematic conception of his philosophy, or
does he proffer only "introductions" and fragmentary studies as are found in
his published writings? If his true philosophy lay in his unpublished research
manuscripts, as he argues, then it is in these that we may find a possible
systematic of phenomenological philosophy. In the first chapter, I examine the
composition and organization of Husserl's extant manuscripts. I show here that
Husserl's literary estate is composed of a large number of wide ranging but
highly fragmented investigations. In the second chapter, I offer reasons why
it is reasonable to look for a unitary conception of phenomenology expressed
in these manuscripts. Here I turn to Husserl correspondence, particular with
Wilhelm Dilthey and Georg Misch, to show that a self-described impulse works
its way through all his major investigations. Husserl identifies the origin of
this impulse in his encounter with Wilhelm Dilthey in 1905. In the third
chapter, I take up the task of clarifying the nature of this vaguely defined
impulse. I trace the development from static to genetic style of analyses by
Husserl in the first two decades of the twentieth century and show that with
this development an inconsistency arises in his philosophy. The method of
eidetic description of sense-constitution exemplified in his Logical
Investigations and Ideas, First Book fails to account for the
fundamental levels of passive intentionality disclosed in later time analyses.
Recognizing this dissonance, Husserl undertakes to produce a "system of
phenomenological philosophy" during the twenties and thirties in order to
bring under a single frame the earlier, static or ahistorical and later,
temporal or historical models of intentionality. I examine these efforts in
the last chapter and explain the aim and composition of final draft-plan of
the "system of phenomenological philosophy" produced by Husserl and his
assistant, Eugen Fink. That Husserl failed to publish this "system" marks the
great unfulfilled promise of his philosophy, but this does not signify the
failure of his philosophy. Rather the "system" opens a new way to understand
transcendental phenomenology and lays the ground for going beyond Husserl's
philosophy.