Austin responds

This comes from an email, but I know he won’t mind if I post it here:

“Husserl’s epistemology does a lot of work for you that was already in Aristotle and the Medievals, namely, I think the role of ‘Sensual Objects’ in your thought could be substituted by the ‘Image’ in Aristotle’s theory of the Imagination. This is especially so when it develops further in people like Averroes and Aquinas.”

Actually, I think Austin is right about this. And with memory, as well… Aristotle does not think memories are bundles of qualities. For example, when I remember the River Nile (which I see several times per day) what I remember according to Aristotle is the river, not my perceptions of the river. And Aristotle is right, of course. Any given perception of the Nile will have some exact configuration of sparkling sunlight and some very particular hue, but your memory subtracts most of that detail.

I’m not sure if this has been written about, but one of the reasons the Kripke-Marcus priority controversy never interested me much is because both Aristotle and Husserl had already said something similar (the latter when speaking in the Logical Investigations about “nominal acts”). Kripke handles the problem even more forcefully, in my opinion, but I think much of the power of his ideas came from the shocking context in which they were uttered. It wasn’t an idea that fit very well with mainstream analytic philosophy at the time. (But in general, I don’t think much of the maneuver of claiming that all of someone’s ideas can be found already in early writers, because that game can be played infinitely, and explains nothing.)

Austin’s post and his email give me an interesting idea for a project, in fact… Try to write a 50-page article summarizing all of my ideas, and references can be to any philosophers except Husserl and Heidegger. They must not be mentioned. Come to think of it, one of my last grad student lectures at DePaul tried that same stunt with Heidegger, and worked well, but I no longer remember what I said or how I did it. The point being– the fact that my “historical route” to the vicarious causation theory was through two particular philosophers does not mean that the ladder cannot be kicked away. But on the whole, I find that using Husserl and Heidegger as the entryway (I do it again in L’objet quadruple) is a fairly clear way of doing it, given the widespread familiarity people have with those two thinkers.