Date of Award
Winter 1-21-2026
Degree Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Philosophy
First Advisor
Johanna Oksala
Second Advisor
Sebastian Luft
Abstract
Human life is permeated by values: we do not merely have a world of things and facts, but also objects are good or bad, beautiful or ugly, sacred or profane, useful or useless, etc. This dissertation asks why it is that we ascribe value to the sorts of things that we do. Its approach to studying value is “phenomenological,” meaning that this dissertation homes in on the way in which we experience valuableness in the world to study values themselves. Phenomenology is a movement in philosophy from the early 20th century, founded by Edmund Husserl, whose theory of value I propose. Although Husserl founded the phenomenological movement and many subsequent phenomenologists were inspired by his work, his phenomenology of value was not well known. This dissertation offers a critical restructuring of his theory of value, which sheds novel insights to central questions in value theory. My contention is that Husserl’s contribution to value theory lies in articulating the relationship between valuing subject, value experience, and valued object. Husserl’s first-person phenomenological approach to values challenges many dominant assumptions and theories of the ontology, normativity, and experience of values. I claim that values are primarily a certain sort of object, not qualities; that value experience can under certain circumstances be perceptual but is not per se perceptual; that the normativity of value judgments is traced back to the contents of pre-predicative value intuitions; and that attentive value experience entails affective activity. This dissertation ultimately sheds light on the way in which our affective experience binds us to objects and each other. We can through intuitive feeling and cognition discover a space of reasons for valuing a certain object, a space of reasons bound up between myself and the world.
Recommended Citation
Krema, Richard Andrew, "Valuation. A Husserlian Account" (2026). Dissertations. 4280.
https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss/4280
