Congratulations to Margaret Stark-Schuhriemen, who defended her doctoral dissertation on March 27th! Her topic was "The Role of Habitus in the Formation and Preservation of Knowledge in the Phenomenology of Edmund Husserl" and her director was Msgr. Robert Sokolowski, Ph.D, Professor of Philosophy at the Catholic University of America.
Margaret Stark was born in South Carolina and raised in the suburbs of Chicago. She received her bachelor’s degree in Philosophy from the University of Dallas in 2018. She lives in Silver Spring, Maryland with her husband Conor and their daughter, Rachel, and a daughter expected in August of 2026. Margaret teaches philosophy at Catholic International University.
Dissertation Abstract:
How is it that we have knowledge? It seems evident that we acquire knowledge and that our previous acquisitions shape the way we learn, and yet it is difficult to explain how knowledge as an immaterial reality can be retained or developed. Beginning in 1912, Husserl set himself to the perennial philosophical task of explaining the formation and development of habitual knowledge in the ego. The aim of this dissertation is to present Husserl’s account, explain its significance for his phenomenology, and situate it within the long philosophical history of the topic.
Husserl begins at the level of perception, devoting considerable attention to our perceptual familiarity with ordinary objects in the world. Even at this level, Husserl distinguishes between the receptive activity by which we acquire a Habitus of some object, our passive awareness of objects, and our associative tendency to group like objects together. Our receptively constituted Habitus serves as the direct precursor to predicative knowledge. Through his descriptive analysis, Husserl clarifies the origin of knowledge and grounds the logical categories at the most basic level of awareness.
At the predicative level, Husserl distinguishes between three kinds of habituality. There is a habituality pertaining to the Sachverhalt, the judgment, and the activity of judging. Predicative habitual knowledge is the ideal form because it gives us abiding knowledge of an object in such a way that we can communicate it to others.
Having given a descriptive analysis of habitual knowledge, Husserl was faced with the challenge of explaining how this knowledge adheres in the ego. This problem caused him to abandon his Ideas I account of the pure ego and his Humean account of the personal ego. Drawing on the insights of Augustine, Husserl describes the ego as a living pole of identity that grows and develops towards a telos. The ego grows through the acquisition of habitual judgments and abilities, which adhere in it as determinates in a substrate.
Husserl’s account of habitual knowledge is unique, and yet deeply influenced by the history of the problem. He was inspired to investigate the nature of habit by Hume, whose influence is manifest in his doctrine and style. Yet, Husserl’s investigation of habit led him farther from Hume’s account of knowledge and the ego and closer to the thought of Aristotle and Augustine. Husserl’s use of these sources led to interesting and remarkable parallels between his account and that of Thomas Aquinas.