Abstract

In this book the author collects a number of "phenomenological studies of various kinds of intentionality" written over the years since the appearance of his Presence and Absence: A Philosophical Investigation of Language and Being. He thinks of that book as a very formal one, and hopes to show in this one how Husserl's style of philosophical thinking illuminates "a range of diverse and more concrete phenomena". Although the book is thus frankly about appearances, the author makes the important reservation that "the things that are can also seem to be as they are"; in that sense he conceives of the project as "a venture into the question of being and a clarification of what we are". Sokolowski sets out to "describe a form of appearance" in each essay, but he supposes that being is the "origin of these forms"; that they are "forms through which being is diffracted at some distance from itself". One wonders, in the case of things that are and "seem to be as they are," whether this diffraction does not take place at all or takes place very close to being. Where the category of appearance plays so dominant a role as it does in phenomenology, the relation between appearance and being is always troublesome: where everything is in some sense appearance, how shall we sort out the things that are what they seem from the things that are seemings and nothing but seemings?