Synthese (2008) 160:309–311DOI 10.1007/s11229-006-9081-5

P R E FACE

The mind without, the world within

Dan Zahavi

Published online: 15 December 2006© Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2006

Inside and outside are inseparable. The world is wholly inside and I am wholly outside myself.

Merleau-Ponty

The current debate between internalists and externalists is in many ways quite com-plex. Not only are the terms used differently in the context of epistemology, philosophyof mind and ethics, but a bewildering proliferation of new versions of internalism andexternalism have emerged in recent discussions. Consequently, it makes very littlesense these days to ask in general whether somebody is an internalist or an external-ist, since the answer will depend on the specific kind of internalism or externalism onehas in mind.

In the present volume, the focus will be on the internalism–externalism debate asit is played out in the context of philosophy of mind. Thus, the internalism in questionis the one that, roughly speaking, amounts to the view that a subject’s beliefs andexperiences are wholly constituted by what goes on inside the mind of that subject,so that matters in the subject’s natural and cultural environment have no bearing ontheir content. Externalism, by contrast, is then the rejection of that view. More spe-cifically, however, the centre of attention will be on phenomenological conceptionsof the mind-world relation, and the central question asked will be whether classicalphenomenology—the philosophical tradition inaugurated by Husserl and continuedby such thinkers as Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty—is internalist or externalist inorientation.

What is the rationale behind compiling a special issue on this topic right now?There are several different reasons.

• One is that the very attempt to apply what must be considered a foreign con-ceptual framework on phenomenological theories of intentionality can be quite

D. Zahavi (B)Center for Subjectivity Research, University of Copenhagen,Købmagergade 46, 4 DK-1150,Copenhagen K, Denmarke-mail: zahavi@cfs.ku.dk

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revealing, since one by approaching and conceptualizing these theories froma new perspective will be able to appreciate their strengths and weaknessesdifferently.

• This is not to say, however, that the attempt to map the schema internalism–externalism onto phenomenology is quite unprecedented. In fact, it has becomea familiar move—at least in part of the literature—during the past 10–15 years.But this is precisely what constitutes one of the other motives behind this spe-cial issue. Although it has become less rare to make the link, there is as yet noconsensus on whether phenomenologists belong on one side of the fence or theother, though there has been a tendency to classify Husserl as internalist andpost-Husserlian phenomenologists as externalists. But given how fundamentalthe division between an internalist and an externalist take on the mind-worldrelation is, it should be realized that such a dichotomization would threaten thevery idea of a phenomenological tradition; it would be a unified tradition byname only. The contributions in this volume will examine some of the possibleexplanations for this outcome and at the same time appraise the accuracy of theprevailing interpretations. In doing so, issues such as the nature of phenomenolog-ical externalism, the link between externalism and transcendental idealism, andthe possible ramifications of the phenomenological rejection of representation-alism will be discussed. In addition, it will be necessary to investigate a numberof phenomenological core-concepts, including the concepts of noema, phenom-enological reduction, immanence and horizon. As it turns out, all the contribu-tions eventually reject the traditional interpretation of Husserlian phenomenol-ogy as being a classical internalist one. They differ in their alternative, however.Some argue that Husserlian phenomenology is fully compatible with some form ofexternalism, others argue that Husserlian phenomenology and by extension post-Husserlian phenomenology undermines the very internalism–externalism frame-work.

• This leads to the third and final motive behind this special issue which mightbe the theoretically most interesting one. It is pretty uncontroversial that thereare specific versions of both internalism and externalism that are anathema toall phenomenologists. This includes not only the kind of internalism known asCartesian materialism, i.e., the view that the mind can be identified with the brain,and that the brain is a self-contained organ, that can be understood in isolationfrom the world, but also those kinds of externalism that seek to reduce inten-tionality to brute causal mechanisms. The more fundamental question, however,is whether phenomenological accounts of the mind-world relation—to the extentto which one can speak of these under one heading—can at all be classified asfalling within some version of either internalism or externalism; or whether phe-nomenologists despite their other internal differences are in fact united in theirrejection of the very assumptions that underlie and guide the distinction betweeninternalism and externalism. If the latter should turn out to be the case, that is, ifit should turn out that the very alternative between internalism and externalismis inapplicable when it comes to phenomenological theories of intentionality, thetake-home message would be that phenomenology exemplifies that the forcedchoice between internalism and externalism is misguided. There are other optionsavailable.

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A few words about the individual papers:

We start out with A. David Smith’s paper Husserl and Externalism. In his paper,Smith argues that Husserl considered the individual object of any experience, be itperceptual or hallucinatory, essential to and partly constitutive of that experience,for which reason he is committed to a form of disjunctivism. Smith consequentlyargues that Husserl must be considered an externalist in at least one sense of the termand that there furthermore is nothing in the core commitments of his transcendentalphenomenology that makes it incompatible with externalism.

In his paper Phenomenological Immanence, Normativity, and Semantic External-ism Steven Crowell argues that transcendental phenomenology can accommodate themain thesis of semantic externalism, namely, that intentional content is not simply amatter of what is ‘in the head,’ but depends on how the world is. In his view, the stan-dard reading of Husserl as a Cartesian internalist can be undermined by rejecting itsfundamental assumption—that Husserl’s concept of the ‘noema’ is a mental entity—and by defending a concept of ‘phenomenological immanence’ that has a normative,rather than a psychological, structure.

In the third article of the volume, Internalism, Externalism and TranscendentalIdealism, Dan Zahavi first argues that there is a tight link between Husserl’s tran-scendental idealism and what has been called phenomenological externalism, andthat Husserl’s endorsement of the former commits him to a version of the latter. In asubsequent move, however, Zahavi questions whether the very alternative betweeninternalism and externalism—an alternative based on the division between inner andouter—is at all appropriate when it comes to phenomenological conceptions of themind-world relation, for which reason the very expression ‘phenomenological exter-nalism’ might be a misnomer.

In his contribution Reduction, Externalism and Immanence in Husserl andHeidegger, Felix O’Murchadha argues that the recent attempts to understand thedifference between Husserl and Heidegger by means of the categories of internaland external are misplaced. In his view, both thinkers are engaged in a way of doingphilosophy that unites them despite their differences and fundamental to this unityis precisely a rejection of the assumptions that guide the very distinction betweeninternalism and externalism.

In the final paper of the volume, Representationalism and the Phenomenologyof Mental Imagery, Evan Thompson sketches a phenomenological analysis of visualmental imagery the aim of which is to challenge representationalism in a way thatalso calls into question the very internalism-versus-externalism framework. Thomp-son argues that mental imagery is not a question of a mental picture being inspectedby the mind’s eye. But he also argues that a consideration of the differences betweenperception and imagery reveals that there are phenomenal differences in experiencethat are not representational differences. Thus, the conclusion reached is that standardinternalist and externalist accounts of mental imagery both remain unsatisfactory.