Elmar Holenstein

From 1977 to 1990 Holenstein taught philosophy at the Ruhr University in Bochum, Germany, then at ETH Zurich until his retirement in 2002 when he moved to Yokohama, Japan. In the academic year 1986/87 he was guest professor at the University of Tokyo and in 2004 Tang-Chun-I Professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Between 1971 and 1997 he continued his studies at the Husserl archive in Leuven, at Harvard University with Roman Jakobson, and at the University of Hawai'i. He was a member of the "linguistic universals project UNITYP" of the Swiss linguist Hansjakob Seiler at the University of Cologne and pursued further research with Joseph Greenberg at Stanford University, also at the Institute of the Studies of Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa in Tokyo, and at the Collegium Budapest.

Elmar Holenstein studied philosophy, psychology, and linguistics at the universities of Louvain/Leuven, Heidelberg, and Zurich from 1964 to 1972. His Ph.D. dissertation dealt with the phenomenology of the pre- and non-conceptual human experience as explored by Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), the German founder of the phenomenological movement in philosophy. Holenstein gained professorial status (habilitation) by a book on the phenomenological structuralism of Roman Jacobson.

Elmar Holenstein (born 7 January 1937 in Gossau, Canton St. Gallen) is a Swiss philosopher with research interests in the fields of philosophical psychology, philosophy of language and cultural philosophy.

Holenstein views Prague Structuralism as understood by Roman Jakobson (1896–1982) as a Husserlian structuralism expanded by dimensions of inter-subjectivity and of the unconscious that enlarge the understanding of the subject. According to Jakobson, phenomenology and structuralism form – in contrast to a dominant fashionable understanding – an inseparable unity. They are as interconnected, just as the participant and the observer perspectives as well as formal and semantic (i.e. content) aspects prove to be in language studies. Inspired by the Swiss philosopher Anton Marty, Jakobson, and Greenberg, Holenstein deals in depth with putative language universals and their possible understanding.

From the start Holenstein's actual research interest in his studies of language centered on the relationship between experience, language, and thinking, later increasingly on that between "nature" and "mind", the traditional "mind-body" problem, and in connection with it on the heuristic function of the comparison between natural and artificial intelligence. Based on gestalt-psychology and cognitive science, he claimed early that the categorical structuring of perceiving and thinking is much less language-dependent than it was claimed during the early twentieth century in the heyday of linguistic relativism. Neurology may prove that the freedom of will as the basis of human action is imaginary, but it is incapable to prove that consciousness is not a psychological reality. Not only the outdated mechanistic physics as Descartes (1596–1650) conceived it but also today's physics is unable to explain consciousness. Therefore, we have to admit that we do not know the inmost fabric of nature, its intima fabrica, as Albrecht von Haller (1708–1777) put it, that serves as origin of consciousness. In Holenstein's view an enlarged naturalist understanding of consciousness seems to be valid in psychology as well as in ethics.