ABSTRACT
Edmund Husserl categorizes the constitution of phenomenological time, which is neither active nor discrete, as a form (indeed the most basic form) of continuous synthesis. For Husserl, by contrast, categorial synthesis provides the first step in an account of the categories and fundamental forms of judgment through which experience becomes meaningful. Husserl's engagement with the notion of synthesis in his early work is primarily concerned with active synthesis (though there are traces of the notion of passive synthesis as early as the Logical Investigations). Perhaps the most obvious function of passive synthesis in providing the preconditions for meaningful perceptual experience is the "synthesis of identification." Martin Heidegger's conception of the hermeneutic "as" is, in essence, an appropriation and careful re-working of the Husserlian account of categorial synthesis (and the process of categorial intuition generally) within an existential-hermeneutic framework. For Maurice Merleau-Ponty meaning and even logic originate first and foremost not in the predicative, conceptual, or semantic structures of language.
