Statement of Research Experience
Jacob Martin Rump
My research experience can be divided into three major phases: dissertation research as a visiting scholar at
the Edmund Husserl Archives and as participant in a variety of workshops and conferences on Husserl and
Wittgenstein in Europe (2010-2011); subsequent research on related systematic topics and completion of my
dissertation as an instructor and Dean’s Teaching Fellow at Emory University (2011-2013); and postdissertation research while teaching in philosophy at Kennesaw State University and Emory (2013-present).
Archival Research and Intensive Study of Husserl and Wittgenstein
I spent October 2010 to June 2011 as an invited researcher at the Husserl Archive at the University of
Cologne, Germany, researching unpublished manuscripts from Husserl’s later work, especially his theory of
meaning constitution in relation to embodied experience and the “life-world” in the period of later works
such as The Crisis. Work in the Cologne Husserl Archive allowed me to immerse myself in the German
language and to work under the supervision of Dieter Lohmar, a foremost authority on the aspects of
Husserl’s work most central to my research, including Husserl’s conceptions of “pre-predicative experience”
and “categorical intuition” and his relationship to Kant and Hume. During this time I also studied at the
2010 and 2011 Wittgenstein summer schools, working on the Philosophical Investigations and On Certainty under
the instruction of P.M.S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte, and participated in a workshop on Wittgenstein led
by Jaakko Hintikka and Danièle Moyal-Sharrock (all are internationally recognized experts on Wittgenstein’s
work). I also presented a refereed paper at the 2012 International Wittgenstein Symposium. During this
research year I also completed commissioned translations of an essay by the contemporary German
phenomenologist Bernard Waldenfels and of a review for the Journal of Nietzsche Studies (2011), and
published a paper in Sartre Studies International (2011). This research year was supported by the Jan Wojcik
Memorial Prize (awarded by the Journal of the History of Philosophy for dissertation research in the history of
philosophy), a Halle Foundation Fellowship, and competitive research grants from Emory University.
Systematic Research and Completion of the Dissertation
Subsequent dissertation research filled out my developing historical account with more systematic work on
contemporary debates at the intersection of epistemology, mind, and perception, especially work on debates
about non-conceptual content. A paper drawn from my dissertation relating these contemporary debates in
the work of John McDowell and Robert Hanna to Kant and Husserl was refereed and accepted for
presentation at a Humboldt Conference on Husserl and Classical Germany Philosophy (2012). That paper
was subsequently accepted for publication in a refereed volume on the same theme (published in 2014).
I used this work on debates about non-conceptual content in the dissertation alongside my
historical research to examine the role of non-linguistic and embodied pre-conditions for meaning in
everyday lived experience (Erlebnis), situating the project historically as a legacy of Kant's Critical
epistemology. Most contemporary non-conceptualist accounts of perceptual experience, while right in their
resistance to conceptualism, fail to adequately theorize the role of the non-conceptual on its own terms,
reducing non-conceptual elements of experience to a mere “fodder” for conceptualization and ignoring the
epistemic role the non-conceptual plays in structuring and orienting experience. I argued that this
shortcoming can be overcome through a phenomenological approach that examines the full range of
experiential structures—including those not mediated by language or concepts—by which meaning is
constituted.
The core of the dissertation expanded and defended this claim by tracing developments in the
theories of meaning of Husserl and Wittgenstein. In seeking to guarantee the objectivity of logic against
psychologism by assigning pure a priori status to the structure of possible meaning content, each authors'
early work situates meaning in a way that is “closed off” from the intentional structure of lived experience.
Through an analysis of Husserl's revisions for the second edition of the Logical Investigations (1913) and
Wittgenstein's writings on “phenomenology” in the late 1920s, I showed how both manifest an “opening
up” of the theory of meaning to intentionality and experience, for Husserl through a greater focus on the act
and quality of judgments in addition to their content, and for Wittgenstein through a revision of his earlier
conception of the role of projection in meaning.
The rest of the dissertation showed how, despite this commonality, the authors differ
methodologically in their views concerning the possibility of descriptions of lived experience: Husserl
explicitly takes up the task of the description of the phenomenological dimension of meaning in his project
of re-conceptualizing and expanding the Kantian Transcendental Aesthetic as the realm of transcendental
meaning constitution; Wittgenstein flirts with but eventually rejects the idea of a special “phenomenological
language” capable of such descriptions. I concluded my historical treatment by showing how this divergence
in the theory of meaning lies at the heart of the differences between Husserl's life-world and Wittgenstein's
notion of form(s) of life.
However, despite these important differences, I argue that developments in the theory of meaning
of both authors point to an inexact, non-linguistic dimension of meaningfulness or significance rooted in
experiential life. In neither case are the characteristic vagueness, non-conceptual status, and incomplete
analyzability of this dimension of meaning to be seen as shortcomings. What appears from the standpoint of
linguistic or conceptual analysis to be an undesirable inexactness is in terms of the later conceptions of both
philosophers the result of a recognition that the primacy of the lived and social meaningfulness of everyday life
includes but outstrips conceptual and linguistic representation.
While working on the dissertation I gave refereed presentations at the following conferences: The
Georgia Philosophical Society (2011), The Society for the Study of the History of Analytical Philosophy
(McMaster University, 2012), conference on “Philosophy in the 21st Century” (University of Pittsburgh,
2012) The Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (2012—and again in 2013 and 2014), and
the Main Program of the Pacific APA (San Francisco, 2013).
Post-dissertation Research
Since completion of the dissertation in spring 2013 I have continued to do research related to these topics
alongside full-time teaching, and have grown increasingly interested in the question of the relationship
between meaning—understood in the broad sense argued for in my dissertation—and the historical nature
of human experience, a topic that informs my proposed post-doctoral project and that will figure
prominently in a subsequent research project (currently in planning; a preliminary description is available on
my website). In April 2013 I was a refereed and funded speaker at a conference on the philosophy of history
in Copenhagen, Denmark, where I gave a talk on the use of geological tropes in the analysis of history in
Wittgenstein, Foucault, and the phenomenological tradition. A revised version of parts of that talk is
forthcoming in an edited volume on the philosophy of history. I also published a book review of Frank
Ankersmit’s Meaning, Truth and Reference in Historical Representation (2013) and a longer review article on Søren
Olesen’s Transcendental History (2014).
Since the dissertation I have also continued with my main historical research at the intersection of
phenomenology and analytic philosophy. I completed a 50-page translation of Theodor Elsenhans’
“Phenomenology, Ontology, Epistemology,” one of the first full-length reviews of Husserl’s Ideen I and an
early commentary on the phenomenological movement more generally (originally appearing in Kant Studien
in 1915; translation commissioned for a forthcoming collection of source documents commemorating the
centennial of the Ideen; draft translation available on my website). I was an invited commentator for a book
panel on Steven Crowell’s Normativity and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger at the 2014 meeting of the
Husserl Circle, and my review of Crowell’s book is forthcoming in Continental Philosophy Review. This summer
I also completed an invited essay on the early Wittgenstein for an interdisciplinary volume (in preparation)
on the relationship between meaning and mysticism. Most recently I have begun to engage more
contemporary work on mind, perception, and embodiment in relation to my historical research.
Jacob Martin Rump
Statement of Research Experience
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