philosophy of mind, moral psychology, and philosophy of action provide the primary focus for illustrating this claim.
Before going further, a word should be said about the concept of “norm” that is in play here. The term is often used in a narrow sense, according to which a norm is an explicitly formulated rule – whether conventional or rationally derived – that serves as the basis for determining whether something (an action, mainly) is permissible or obligatory. When the term is understood in this way, the idea that normativity is central to Husserlian and Heideggerian phenomenology may well appear perverse. But there is a wider sense according to which a norm is anything that serves as a standard of success or failure of any kind, and it is in this sense that I understand the term here. Thus a legislated statute is a norm, as are rules of games like chess or baseball; but “unspoken” rules, satisfaction conditions, cultural mores, manners, what is “normally” done – in short, whatever it is that measures our speech and behavior – are also norms. Kant links the “exemplary universality” of our experience of the beautiful with the normative by invoking the “presence of a rule that we cannot state,” and we can understand Platonic eide as norms in this sense as well: as ideal exemplars, they stand in relation to the things that share their names as standards for being those things. Like phenomenological “essences,” such exemplars are not rules in any sense, but they possess a kind of normative claim that precludes our thinking of them simply as entities that turn up in the world, whether as part of the latter’s causal nexus, as social facts, or as elements of the subject’s psychological outfitting. It is this that makes the normative a basic concern in phenomenology, since it belongs squarely within the scope of the latter’s distinctive sort of anti-naturalism (or anti-objectivism).
h us the normative is found wherever we can speak of rules, measures, standards, exemplars, ideals, concepts, and so on; wherever distinctions between better and worse, success and failure, can be made. I don’t pretend that discriminating between these various sorts of norm is not philosophically important; on the contrary, there is already a robust literature that essays this task, and if my argument goes through, tracing the differences and interconnections among these ways in which the space of meaning is constituted is a significant item on the phenomenological agenda. One example will be found in Chapter 10, where the distinction between the good and the right is touched upon. For the purposes of the general argument, however, only the wider concept of normativity is necessary.
The normative is at stake in the accounts of intentional content or meaning offered in both analytic and phenomenological traditions, and