Cyril McDonnell

One of my main areas of research is Heidegger’s controversial development in the early decades of the twentieth century of Husserl’s idea of phenomenology. This has led me to investigate (i) Brentano’s re-introduction and modification of the scholastic concept of intentionality into a root- concept of his novel science of ‘descriptive psychology’ in the mid-1870s (and ff.), taking into account his engagement with British empiricists (Locke, Hume, Mill); (ii) Husserl’s advancement of Brentano’s new science of descriptive psychology into a descriptive-eidetic psychology of the intentionality of consciousness in the Logical Investigations (1900–01) and subsequent definition of transcendental phenomenology as a version of post-Kantian transcendental idealism in Ideas I (1913); (iii) Heidegger’s re-direction of phenomenology in his first major, albeit unfinished publication in philosophy and phenomenology Being and Time (1927), towards raising anew the question of the meaning of being from within the horizon of temporality grounded in an Kierkegaardian-existentialist approach to ontology that deploys Diltheyean hermeneutics as a methodological consideration for this task. This required (iv) further investigation into the unfolding of hermeneutic methods of enquiry in the origins of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century phenomenology, with reference to Schleiermacher and Dilthey, and their influence on Heidegger’s reconfiguration of Husserl’s version of transcendental phenomenology into a ‘hermeneutic’ phenomenology.  I also have research interests in Kant’s objections to natural theology and subsequent post-Kantian philosophy of religion elaborated by Hegel, Schleiermacher, Kierkegaard, Levinas, and Desmond, as well as research interests in three topics in moral philosophy: (i) the relation of morality to law; (ii) the concept and moral justification(s) of punishment; (iii) the history and concept of rights.