Note: this assignment is for students in Group IV only.
The assignment is due, as an attachment, via the “Assignments” tool on
eCommons, by midnight Tuesday, December 1 (in PDF or any format easily
converted to PDF, e.g. MSWord, LATEX, RTF, plain text).
Please respond to the following question in approximately two pages (double
spaced). (Needless to say this should be your own original work.)
In §49 of the Ideas (p. 110), Husserl says that “the world of transcendent ‘res’
[i.e., the world of physical things (Dinge) and what is founded on them, the “real”
world] is entirely referred to consciousness and, more particularly, not to some
logically conceived consciousness but to actual consciousness.” But surely there
are many things in the world of which no one is actually conscious, although
someone, at least logically speaking, might be conscious of them. Using the
preceding discussion (especially §48 and the later parts of §47), explain
why this is not a problem for Husserl. That is: explain what “referred to
… actual consciousness” means, such that something can be “referred
to actual consciousness” even though nobody is actually conscious of
it.