The Transcendence of the World: Phenomenological Studies

Evan Simpson is a philosophy professor and dean of humanities at
McMaster University and the editor of Anti-foundationalism and Practical
Reasoning: Conversations Between Hermeneutics and Analysis.

These ambitious “Phenomenological Studies” focus on and extend the
philosophical views of Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Jean-Paul
Sartre. Holmes discusses the meaning these writers attach to an
objective world independent of anyone’s particular awareness of it,
but he also shows how this conception might accommodate a diversity of
puzzling events not considered by classical phenomenologists, ranging
from the strange behavior of the entities studied by quantum mechanics
to the possibility of mental telepathy. The fundamental thought is that
the world should not be viewed as impenetrable to consciousness and
independent of it but as transparent yet also transcending the
consciousness of any particular individual. The world “is meant as in
a world experienceable by others.” The peculiar grammar of this phrase
shows that readers must contend with considerable technical philosophy
in order to follow the discussion to the end. They will also have to
tolerate and master a number of neologisms—“phenomenologizing,”
“retrotentional,” “mundanized,” “enworlded.” Even then they
will have to suppose that mental telepathy is an imaginable
phenomenon—an idea the book takes for granted but does not attempt to
articulate or demonstrate. Any such fuller account must wait. Since
there are fewer than 90 pages of text, this book can provide only a
prolegomenon to a full analysis of the problems it begins to explore.