Chapter 1 : Phenomenology - By Movement / School - The Basics of Philosophy The Phenomenological Philosophy in France an Analysis of its Themes, Significance and Implications. Phenomenology is the study of experience, how things appear to us. But phenomenology came of age with Edmund Husserl, who turned the Hegelian perspective into a rigorous philosophical method. Husserl in turn gave birth to a number of remarkable students, who together would set the tone for much of European philosophy in the twentieth century. Edmund Husserl As a movement and a method, as a "first philosophy," phenomenology owes its life to Edmund Husserl â, a German-Czech Moravian philosopher who started out as a mathematician in the late nineteenth century and wrote a book on the philosophy of mathematics, Philosophie der Arithmetik ; The Philosophy of Arithmetic. His view was that there was a strict empiricism, but on being shown by the great German logician Gottlob Frege that such an analysis could not possibly succeed, Husserl shifted his ground and started to defend the idea that the truths of arithmetic had a kind of necessity that could not be accounted for by empiricism. Thus, one of the main themes of his next book, Logische Untersuchungen, ; The Logical Investigations, was a protracted argument against "psychologism," the thesis that truth is dependent on the human mind. Rather, Husserl argues that necessary truths are not reducible to our psychology. By the end of the nineteenth century, a new perspectivism or some would say a relativism had come into philosophy. Friedrich Nietzsche, in particular, had argued that all knowledge is perspectival and that philosophy could not be reduced to a single perspective, that philosophy might be relative to a people, or to our particular species, or even to individual psychology. Against any such relativism, Husserl insisted on philosophy as a singular, rigorous science, and his phenomenology was to provide the key. It is often debated whether phenomenology is a philosophy or a method, but it is both. As a "first philosophy," without presuppositions, it lays the basis for all further philosophical and scientific investigations. Husserl defines phenomenology as the scientific study of the essential structures of consciousness. By describing those structures, Husserl promises us, we can find certainty, which philosophy has always sought. To do that, Husserl describes a methodâ or rather, a series of continuously revised methodsâ for taking up a peculiarly phenomenological standpoint, "bracketing out" everything that is not essential, thereby understanding the basic rules or constitutive processes through which consciousness does its work of knowing the world. That is, every act of consciousness is directed at some object or other, perhaps a material object, perhaps an "ideal" objectâ as in mathematics. Thus, the phenomenologist can distinguish and describe the nature of the intentional acts of consciousness and the intentional objects of consciousness, which are defined through the content of consciousness. It is important to note that one can describe the content of consciousness and, accordingly, the object of consciousness without any particular commitment to the actuality or existence of that object. Thus, one can describe the content of a dream in much the same terms that one describes the view from a window or a scene from a novel. A General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, Husserl distinguishes between the natural standpoint and the phenomenological standpoint. The former is our ordinary everyday viewpoint and the ordinary stance of the natural sciences, describing things and states-of-affairs. The latter is the special viewpoint achieved by the phenomenologist as he or she focuses not on things but on our consciousness of things. This is sometimes confused by the fact that Husserl insists that the phenomenologist pay attention to "the things themselves," by which he means the phenomena, or our conscious ideas of things, not natural objects. One arrives at the phenomenological standpoint by way of a series of phenomenological "reductions," which eliminate certain aspects of our experience from consideration. Husserl formulates several of these, and their nature shifts throughout his career, but two of them deserve special mention. The second reduction or set of reductions eliminates the merely empirical content of consciousness and focuses instead on the essential features, the meanings of consciousness. Thus Husserl like Kant defends a notion of "intuition" that differs from and is more specialized than the ordinary notion of "experience. In his early work, including Ideas, Husserl defends a strong realist positionâ that is, the things that are perceived by consciousness are Page 1
assumed to be not only objects of consciousness but also the things themselves. A decade or so later, Husserl made a shift in his emphasis from the intentionality of the objects to the nature of consciousness as such. His phenomenology became increasingly and self-consciously Cartesian, as his philosophy moved to the study of the ego and its essential structures. In Husserl was invited to lecture at the Sorbonne in Paris, and on the basis of those lectures published his Cartesianische Meditationen ; Cartesian Meditations, The Paris Lectures were also published some years later. He argues there that "the monadically concrete ego includes the whole of actual and potential conscious life" and "the phenomenology of this self-constitution coincides with phenomenology as a whole including objects " Cartesian Meditations, 68, para. These statements suggest the strong idealist tendency in his later philosophy. As in the s, Husserl again reinvented phenomenology, this time with a shift toward the practical, or what some might call the more "existential" dimension of human knowledge. In Crisis, the focus turned to the "lifeworld" and the nature of social existence, topics that played little role in his earlier investigations of the philosophy of arithmetic and the nature of individual consciousness but would come to play a much greater role in the "existential" phenomenology that would follow. Martin Heidegger Martin Heidegger â was a student of Husserl. Before that, he was a theology student, interested in much more concrete matters of human existence than his teacher, and his questions concerned how to live and how to live "authentically"â that is, with integrity, in a complex and confusing world. His use of phenomenology was subservient to this quest, although the quest itself soon transcended the phenomenological method. Being and Time, Like his teacher Husserl, Heidegger insists that philosophical investigation begin without presuppositions. Such a philosophy could not possibly be presuppositionless. So Heidegger abandons the language of mind, consciousness, experience, and the like, but nevertheless pursues phenomenology with a new openness, a new receptivity, and a sense of oneness with the world. This search for authenticity will carry us into the now familiar but ever-renewed questions about the nature of the self and the meaning of human existence. To ensure that we do not fall into Cartesian language, Heidegger suggests a new term the first of many. Dasein literally, "being-there" is the name of this being from whose perspective the world is being described. Dasein is not a consciousness or a mind, nor is it a person. It is not distinguished from the world of which it is aware. It is inseparable from that world. Dasein is, simply, "Being-in-the-World," which Heidegger insists is a "unitary phenomenon" not being the world. Thus, phenomenology becomes ontology the nature of being as well. Being-in-the-World is not primarily a process of being conscious or knowing about the world. Science is not the primary concern of Dasein. What he can doâ what he does doâ is engage in his craft. He shows you that he knows how to do this and that by simply doing it. This knowing how is prior, Heidegger tells us, to knowing that. In effect, our world is essentially one extended craft shop, a world of "equipment" in which we carry out various tasks and only sometimesâ often when something goes wrongâ stop to reflect on what we are doing and look at our tools as objects, as things. They are, first of all, just tools and material to be used, and in that sense we take them for granted, relying on them without noticing them. Our concept of "things" and our knowledge of them is secondary and derivative. Thus the notion of Dasein does not allow for the dualism of mind and body or the distinction between subject and object. All such distinctions presuppose the language of "consciousness. But, then, what is the self? It is, at first, merely the roles that other people cast for me, as their son, their daughter, their student, their sullen playmate, their clever friend. That self, the Das Man self, is a social construction. There is nothing authentic, nothing that is my own, about it. Scheler was an intense man whose considerable contribution to philosophy was the introduction of emotion into the overly formal Kantian conception of ethics that still ruled the Continent. In Wesen und Formen der Sympathy ; English trans. The Nature of Sympathy,, he resurrected moral sentiment theory and gave a central place in ethics to such emotions as love and hate. He argued that emotions have been understood by philosophers as merely "subjective" and argued a "cognitive" view, such that emotions could be construed as a source of knowledge. There is even, he argued, an emotional a priori, a universal and necessary status to the emotions that philosophers had neglected. But where Nietzsche blames Christianity, Scheler a Catholic exonerates his religion and shifts the blame instead to the bourgeoisie. What Page 2
was becoming evident in phenomenologyâ and in European philosophy more generallyâ was a loosening up, a rejection of formality, an acceptance and an attempt to understand the less rational aspects of human existence. It is an interpersonal phenomenology rather than an Ego-or Dasein-based phenomenology, and interpersonal ethics, including love, plays a central role in it. He was first of all concerned with the nature of human freedom and the correlative sense of responsibility. Consciousness is free to choose and free to "negate" or reject the given features of the world. As in Husserl, consciousness is essentially intentionality, but for Sartre it is nothing but intentionality, an activity directed at the world. Consciousness is active, essentially critical, and consists not just of perception, thoughts, and ideas but as much of desires, wishes, emotions, moods, impulses, and imaginings, negating the world as it is. Sartre celebrates our remarkable freedom to imagine the world other than it is. Our perceptions of the world, he argues, are always permeated by imagination, so that we are always aware of options and alternatives. Furthermore, there is no self or ego behind consciousness, no agent behind the activity. Thus, Sartre distinguishes consciousness from the self, and self, he insists, is "in the world, like the self of another [person]. Sartre defines his ontology in terms of the opposition of "being-in-itself" and "being-for-itself," manifested in the tension between the fact that we always find ourselves in a particular situation defined by a body of facts that we may not have chosenâ our "facticity"â and our ability to transcend that facticity, to imagine, and chooseâ our transcendence. He tells us that consciousness "is what it is not, and is not what it is"â a playful paradox that refers to the fact that we are always in the process of "transcending" ourselves. He also defines a third ontological category, "being-for-others," which makes our lives with other people an essential part of our existence. Merleau-Ponty went on to develop his own radical revision of the phenomenology of freedom and the essentially embodied nature of human consciousness. Following Sartre, Merleau-Ponty expanded the role of the body in phenomenology. It is a radical move, and phenomenology could not quite keep up with it. So when phenomenology was replaced in French thinking, by the new wave of poststructuralism, the body retained its now privileged position but phenomenology moved to the margins. It is still practiced by diehard Husserlians and Sartreans, and it has become a valuable toolâ one among manyâ for researchers on all sorts of psychological topics, but as an exclusive approach to philosophy, a "first philosophy," it is now for the most part simply a part of history. Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint. Edited by Oskar Kraus and Linda L. Translated by Antos C. Routledge, Kegan and Paul, Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Translated by Dorion Cairns. General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology. Translated by Hazel E. Formalism in Ethics and Non-formal Ethics of Values. Translated by Manfred S. Page 3
Chapter 2 : Sofia University Phenomenology (from Greek phainã³menon "that which appears" and lã³gos "study") is the philosophical study of the structures of experience and theinnatdunvilla.com a philosophical movement it was founded in the early years of the 20th century by Edmund Husserl and was later expanded upon by a circle of his followers at the universities of GÃ ttingen and Munich in Germany. Phenomenologists conduct research in ways that share most of the following positive and negative features. Phenomenologists tend to oppose the acceptance of unobservable matters and grand systems erected in speculative thinking; 2. Phenomenologists tend to oppose naturalism also called objectivism and positivism, which is the worldview growing from modern natural science and technology that has been spreading from Northern Europe since the Renaissance; 3. Positively speaking, phenomenologists tend to justify cognition and some also evaluation and action with reference to what Edmund Husserl called Evidenz, which is awareness of a matter itself as disclosed in the most clear, distinct, and adequate way for something of its kind; 4. Phenomenologists tend to believe that not only objects in the natural and cultural worlds, but also ideal objects, such as numbers, and even conscious life itself can be made evident and thus known; 5. The Year Spread of Phenomenology According to Nations and Disciplines Phenomenology began in the philosophical reflections of Edmund Husserl in Germany during the mids and is thus over a century old. Before World War I it spread to Japan, Russia, and Spain and also from philosophy to psychiatry; during the s it spread to Australia, France, Hungary, The Netherlands and Flanders, Poland, and the United States and to research on communicology then called symbolism, education, music, and religion; and during the s it spread to Czechoslovakia, Italy, Korea, and Yugoslavia and to research on architecture, literature, and theater. Right after World War II, phenomenology then spread to Portugal, Scandinavia, and South Africa, and also to research on ethnicity, film, gender, and politics; in the s and s it spread to Canada, China, and India and to dance, geography, law, and psychology; and, finally, in the s and s it spread to Great Britain and also to ecology, ethnology, medicine, and nursing. In view of its continual development and its spread into other disciplines as well as across the planet, phenomenology is arguably the most significant philosophical movement in the 20th century. Tendencies and Stages within Philosophical Phenomenology Thus Far Four successively dominant and sometimes overlapping philosophical tendencies and stages can be recognized within the century-old, planetary, and multidisciplinary movement called phenomenology, and an expanding agenda of issues can be related to this broad scheme. This work is most famous for its attack on psychologism, which is the attempt to absorb logic into empirical psychology. Besides logic, this work reflects interest in mathematics, language, perception, and various types of re-presentation e. Within this tendency, Adolf Reinach added philosophy of law to the phenomenological agenda; Max Scheler added ethics, value theory, religion, and philosophical anthropology; Edith Stein added philosophy of the human sciences and has been recently recognized for work on gender; and Roman Ingarden added aesthetics, architecture, music, literature, and film. This procedure involves suspending acceptance of the pregiven status of conscious life as something that exists in the world and is performed in order to secure an ultimate intersubjective grounding for the world and the positive sciences of it. Besides those mentioned, Alfred Schutz, J. Seebohm, and Robert Sokolowski have both criticized and continued constitutive phenomenology. Hannah Arendt, influenced by Karl Jaspers as was Heidegger, seems to have been the first existential phenomenologist after Heidegger. However, this third aspect and phase in the tradition of the movement took place chiefly in France. The early Emmanuel Levinas interpreted Husserl and Heidegger together and helped introduce phenomenology into France. This third tendency is concerned with topics such as action, conflict, desire, finitude, oppression, and death. Arendt contributed to political theory and the problematics of ethnicity, Beauvoir raised the issue of gender and old age, Merleau-Ponty creatively continued the appropriation of Gestalt psychology in his descriptions of perception and the lived body, and Sartre focused on freedom and literature. Schrag, Gianni Vattimo, and Page 4
Carlo Sini. The issues addressed in hermeneutical phenomenology include simply all of those that were added to the agenda in the previous tendencies and stages. What is different is the emphasis on hermeneutics or the method of interpretation. This tendency has also included much scholarship on the history of philosophy and has had extensive influence on the human sciences. While realistic and constitutive phenomenology arose and first flourished in Germany before and after World War I and existential phenomenology spread out from France after World War II, hermeneutical phenomenology appears to have been most actively pursued in the United States during the s and s. Phenomenology into the 21st Century With the collapse of the Soviet Union and greater contact with the remarkably enduring Eastern European traditions of phenomenology as well as the ever growing interest within Latin America and Asia and indeed in most nations on earth, and, finally, with the continuing increase in international travel and means of communication such as the Internet, it may be that the fourth, hermeneutical, and American period is giving way to a fifth and planetary period of phenomenology. The shape that phenomenological philosophy will take in the first decades of its second century is difficult to say. Work in the four established tendencies will certainly continue. But perhaps the emphasis will be on philosophical anthropology and related issues such as ecology, gender, ethnicity, religion, and technology as well as continuing concerns with aesthetics, ethics, philosophy of the human and natural kinds of science, and politics. Page 5
Chapter 3 : Project MUSE - The Phenomenological Movement: A Historical Introduction (review) Get this from a library! French literature and the philosophy of consciousness: phenomenological essays. [Ian W Alexander; A J L Busst]. Later developments Phenomenology of essences A different type of phenomenology, the phenomenology of essences, developed from a tangential continuation of that of the Logische Untersuchungen. Moritz Geiger applied the new approach particularly to aesthetics and Adolf Reinach to the philosophy of law. A Polish philosopher, Roman Ingarden, did major work in structural ontology and analyzed the structures of various works of art in its light; Hedwig Conrad-Martius, a cosmic realist at the University of Munich, worked intensively in the ontology of nature; and others made comparable contributions in other fields of philosophy. From then on he pursued the course of phenomenology with the greatest interest, and from he belonged to the narrow circle of students and followers of the movement. To be sure, there appeared very early a difference between Husserl and Heidegger. Discussing and absorbing the works of the important philosophers in the history of metaphysics was, for Heidegger, an indispensable task, whereas Husserl repeatedly stressed the significance of a radically new beginning andâ with few exceptions among them Descartes, John Locke, David Hume, and Kant â wished to bracket the history of philosophy. In it, phenomenology was understood as a methodological conceptâ a concept that was conceived by Heidegger in an original way and resulted from his questioning back to the meanings of the Greek concepts of phainomenon and logos. His manner of questioning can be defined as hermeneutical in that it proceeds from the interpretation of the human situation. What he thematized is thus the explanation of what is already understood. By conceiving of Dasein as being-in-the-world, Heidegger made the ancient problem concerning the relationship between subject and object superfluous. The basic structures of Dasein are primordial moodness Befindlichkeit, understanding Verstehen, and logos Rede. These structures are, in turn, founded in the temporalization of Dasein, from which future, having-been past, and present originate. Dissemination of phenomenology Following upon the work of Husserl, phenomenology eventually became a worldwide movement. Similarly, Jean-Paul Sartre, the leading existentialist of France, took his point of departure from the philosophies of Husserl and Heidegger. The meaning of nothingness, which Heidegger in this lecture made the theme of his investigations, became for Sartre the guiding question. The distinction between being-in-itself en-soi and being-for-itself pour-soi pervades the entire investigation. The in-itself is the opaque matterlike substance that remains the same, whereas the for-itself is consciousness permeated by nothingness. The influence of Hegel becomes apparent when the author tries to interpret everything in a dialectical wayâ i. The basic characteristic of being-for-itself is bad faith mauvaise foi, which cannot be overcome, because facticity being-already and transcendence being-able-to-be cannot be combined. Although Sartre sees and describes these forms of behaviour strikingly and precisely, he limits himself to those modes that fit his philosophical interpretation. The significance of psychology, recognized by Husserl, emerges again in Sartre and leads to a demand for an existential psychoanalysis. For Sartre, freedom is the basic characteristic of humanity; thus, Sartre belongs to the tradition of the great French moralist philosophers. In his later works, as in his Critique de la raison dialectique ; Critique of Dialectical Reason, Sartre turned to Marxism, though he developed a method of understanding that was influenced by hermeneutics. Here the choice made by the individual is limited by social and psychological conditions. Gustave Flaubert de â ; The Family Idiot: Gustave Flaubert, â, is an example of this new method of understanding and interpretation, which combines Marxist elements with interpretations of a highly personal nature taken from depth psychology. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who, together with Sartre and his companion, the philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, was an important representative of French existentialism, was at the same time the most important French phenomenologist. Merleau-Ponty gave a new interpretation of the meaning of the human body from the viewpoint of phenomenology and, connected with this, of the human perception of space, the natural world, temporality, and freedom. Page 6
Phenomenology thus became a way of showing the essential involvement of human existence in the world, starting with everyday perception. Versuch einer Kritik der logischen Vernunft ; Formal and Transcendental Logic, pointed to the significance of Husserl for modern logic; and Jacques Derrida, the father of deconstruction, combined phenomenology and structuralism in his interpretation of literature. In other European countries The entire posthumous works of Husserl, as well as his personal library, were transferred to the Catholic University of Leuven Louvain, in Belgium. Thanks to the initiative of H. Van Breda, founder of the Husserl Archives, several scholars worked intensively on the manuscripts for several decades. By the early 21st century, more than 40 volumes of collected works had been published. Van Breda was also the director of the Phaenomenologica seriesâ totaling volumes by the early 21st centuryâ in which the most important publications in the field of phenomenology taken in a very broad sense were published. Van Breda also organized international colloquia on phenomenology. In the Netherlands, Stephan Strasser, oriented particularly toward phenomenological psychology, was especially influential. And in Italy, the phenomenology circle centred around Enzo Paci. The Husserl scholar Jan Patocka, a prominent expert in phenomenology as well as in the metaphysical tradition, was influential in the former Czechoslovakia; in Poland, Roman Ingarden represented the cause of phenomenology; and there were also important representatives in such countries as Portugal, the United Kingdom, South America, Japan, and India. Later, however, a noticeable change took place, chiefly because of the work of two scholars at the New School for Social Research in New York City: Alfred Schutz, an Austrian-born sociologist and student of human cognition, and Aron Gurwitsch, a Lithuanian-born philosopher. Schutz came early to phenomenology, developing a social science on a phenomenological basis. While in Paris, Gurwitsch influenced Merleau-Ponty. The essays on phenomenology published by Gurwitsch in the United States were among the best. His comprehensive knowledge ranged from mathematics, via the natural sciences, to psychology and metaphysics. Phenomenology in other disciplines Of greater significance is the role of phenomenology outside philosophy proper in stimulating or reinforcing phenomenological tendencies in such fields as mathematics and the biological sciences. Jaspers was followed by the Swiss psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger and several others. The phenomenological strand was also very pronounced in American existential psychiatry and affected sociology, history, and the study of religion. More recently, phenomenology has influenced research in some areas of cognitive science. Page 7
Chapter 4 : Phenomenology - Later developments theinnatdunvilla.com Existentialism, by A. MacintyreSartre the philosopher, by S. HampshireThe phenomenological philosophy in France, by I.W. AlexanderImagination, by H. Ishiguro. Personalism Emmanuel Mounier â was a guiding spirit in the French personalist movement, and founder and director of Esprit, the magazine which was the organ of the movement. Mounier, who was the child of peasants, was a brilliant scholar at the Sorbonne. Interest of Mounier and Marcel in the problems of technology moved French philosophy forward. Jean-Paul Sartre and Existentialism[ edit ] Sartre â was, if only by birth, the first truly 20th-century French philosopher. He was probably also the most famous, as a dramatist, screenwriter, novelist and critic. Sartre popularized and named existentialism, making it better known to the lay-person than, for instance, deconstruction. Phenomenology and Marxism were two other key concerns of his. Merleau-Ponty is classified as an existentialist thinker because of his close association with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, and his distinctly Heideggerian conception of Being. Sartre, for instance, became more influenced by Marx during the course of his life. He said the former was the philosophy and the latter was the science, and claimed that in history science has always preceded Philosophy. Structuralism[ edit ] The structuralist movement in French philosophy was highly influenced by the Swiss thinker Ferdinand de Saussure â His ideas laid the foundation for many of the significant developments in linguistics in the 20th century. This current was further explored by Claude-Levi Strauss in ethnology. His work influenced important figures like Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan significantly. From, a magazine was run in Paris, called Tel Quel, which also dabbled excessively in structuralist analysis of texts. Jacques Lacan â was specifically interested in the philosophy of psychoanalysis. He could be said to be relevant to the more modern foundations of discursive psychology. Post-structuralism[ edit ] Post-structuralism is, like structuralism, an ambiguous term in some respect. Michel Foucault â, although sometimes considered close to structuralism, quickly drew apart from this movement, developing a specific approach to semiology and history which he dubbed "archeology. Practical Philosophy, and also wrote on Bergson, Leibniz, Nietzsche, etc. Both Deleuze and Foucault attempted to take distance from the strong influence of Marxism and psychoanalysis in their works, in part by means of a radical reinterpretation of Marx and Freud. Jacques Derrida â was an Algerian-born French philosopher, known as the founder of deconstruction. His voluminous work had a profound impact upon continental philosophy and literary theory. He is well known for his articulation of Postmodernism after the late s. Key thinkers include psychoanalytic and cultural theorist Luce Irigaray born, psychoanalyst and writer Julia Kristeva born, writer and philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, writer and cultural theorist Helen Cixous and artist and psychoanalyst Bracha Ettinger. Important influences[ edit ] One suggested way of understanding French philosophy of this period, it has been suggested, is to locate the major influential figures in their current. It was attended by George Batailles and a young Jacques Lacan among others. Marx was introduced to philosophers both inside and outside the university. Many, like Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, grew up during the Resistance against Nazi occupation, during which time they were introduced to Marxist-Leninists. The Acephale group is partly responsible for reclaiming Nietzsche for Western Philosophy, after decades of Nazi appropriation. She used phenomenological conceptualizations of consciousness, time and memory to conceptualize Woman. Attended only by clinical trainees at first, as time wore on Lacan opened up his seminars to philosophers and artists of various kinds. The role of politics[ edit ] 20th century French philosophers lived through several very important political upheavals during their time. On the one hand, there was the Resistance against the Nazi forces. For Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, this was the first introduction to communism. Later, they would both become members of the PCF. The other important political event of that era was the Algerian War of Independence, to which the young Foucault, Derrida and Frantz Fanon went. While the PCF had a problematic role to play, dissident Marxist-Leninists of that era went there to help rebelling Algerians. Undoubtedly, for the next generation, the great political upheaval was the Page 8
student-worker protests of May Many young radicals broke away from Marxismâ Leninism towards Maoism at this point, while there were several Anarchists, Trotskyites, Situationists etc. Each of these events have shaped the content as well as the form of the writing of these French philosophers. Time and again, the movements have questioned the French state, the university, imperialism and capitalism as well. This has provided impetus, material and structural change to the current of French philosophy consistently. Page 9
Chapter 5 : Phenomenology theinnatdunvilla.com Phenomenology is a philosophical tradition or movement of the first half of the 20th Century, developed largely by the German philosophers Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, which is based on the premise that reality consists of objects and events ("phenomena") as they are perceived or understood in the human consciousness, and not of anything independent of human consciousness. Scotland has played an immense role in European high culture through the centuries, and among its cultural links none have been greater than those with France. This book shows that the links with France stretch back deep into the Middle Ages, and continue without a break into the eighteenth century, the Age of Enlightenment. In one way or another all of the major figures of the Scottish Enlightenment were in close relation to France, and though this book attends to the broad picture of the cultural links binding the two countries, the focus is on certain individuals, especially David Hume, Thomas Reid, Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson, and certain of their French counterparts such as Montesquieu, Madame de Condorcet, Victor Cousin and Theodore Jouffroy. Prominent among the areas under discussion are scepticism and common sense, morality and the role of sympathy, and civil society and the question of what constitutes good citizenship. Written for general reader, considers the achievement of this particular period of Scottish history. This book attends not only to the ideas that made the Scottish Enlightenment such a noted moment, but also to the people themselves who generated these ideas â men such as David Hume and Adam Smith. This book examines a number of landmark shifts in our account of the relationship between human and divine existence, as reflected through the perception of time and corporeal experience. Drawing together some of the best scholars in the field, this book provides a representative cross-section of influential trends in the philosophy of religion e. According to the doctrine of univocity there is a fundamental concept of being that is truly predicable of everything that exists. In the period leading up to the Scottish Reformation, there was intense debate in Scotland over matters of faith. From John Duns Scotus, the greatest Scottish philosopher of his age, to his 15th and 16th century successors, John Ireland, John Mair of Haddington and George Lokert of Ayr, this book is the only comprehensive study of Scottish philosophy from the 12th to the 16th centuries, and proves that the Scottish Philosophical School began well before the Enlightenment. This book is unique in that it provides the first-ever substantial account of the seven-centuries-old Scottish philosophical tradition. The book focuses on a number of philosophers in the period from the later-thirteenth century until the mid- twentieth and attends especially to some brilliantly original texts. All these thinkers and many others are discussed in these pages. This clearly written and approachable book gives us a strong sense of the Scottish philosophical tradition. This book is ideal for readers wishing to cross disciplinary boundaries and to challenge anthropocentric thinking in accounts of human evolution. It would be ideal for professional researchers in the fields covered by the book as well as for graduate students and advanced undergraduates. Phenomenology between aesthetics and idealism: By outlining some key issues raised by phenomenological and hermeneutic philosophers in relation to earlier idealists, in connection to aesthetics and the philosophy of art, the author is able to highlight some of the key theoretical parameters of modern European philosophy. Phenomenology between aesthetics and idealism discusses figures, such as Mikel Dufrenne, who are not normally covered in short introductions to phenomenology and aesthetics, but who are nonetheless important to the historical development of this rich philosophical tradition. Also discussed are thinkers like Benjamin, Deleuze and Derrida, who critically reacted to, extended or abandoned key aspects of the phenomenological philosophies associated with Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. Page 10
Chapter 6 : Phenomenology (philosophy) - Wikipedia Only comprehensive account of how Husserlian phenomenology was introduced in France Complements other histories of phenomenology, including Spiegelberg's "Phenomenological Movement" Distinguishes receptions of phenomenology among academic philosophers and religious thinkers. Given its continual development and appropriation in various other disciplines most notably - ontology, sociology, psychology, ecology, ethics, theology, philosophy of mind it is considered to be one of the most significant philosophical movements in the twentieth century. Husserl - The Father of Phenomenology Main article: He began his academic career as a mathematician, defending his doctoral dissertation in Vienna in While in Vienna, he attended lectures by the prominent psychologist and philosopher Franz Brentano, who was exercise a considerable influence on Husserl in the years to come. In Husserl converted to Protestantism and the following year he defended his Habilitation on the concept of number at the university in Halle, where he was to spend the next fourteen years as Privatdozent. During this period, his deepening study of mathematics led him to consider several foundational problems in epistemology and theory of science. These interests resulted in his first major work, Logical Investigations, which is considered to be the founding text of phenomenology. This text marked his development from the descriptive phenomenology of his earlier work to transcendental phenomenology. Husserl also retired in and was succeeded by Martin Heidegger as the chair of the department in Freiburg. During the last five years of his life, Husserl fell prey to the anti-semitism of the rising Nazi party in Germany. In he was taken off the list of university professors and denied access to the university library. Amidst his marginalization from the university milieu in Germany during the s, Husserl was invited to given lectures in Vienna and Prague in These lectures were developed to comprise his last major work, The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology Most of the books that Husserl himself published during his life were in essence programmatic introductions to phenomenology. But they constitute only a small portion of his vast writing. Because Husserl was in the habit of writing down his phenomenological reflections each day, he also left behind approximately 45, research manuscripts. When these manuscripts were deemed to be in jeopardy during the Second World War, they were smuggled to a monastery in Belgium. Eventually, these manuscripts along with other unpublished lectures, articles, and papers were organized to create the Husserl-Archives, founded at the Institute of Philosophy in Leuven where they remain to this day. The Husserl-Archives continue to be published in a critical edition called Husserliana and continue to be a major source of phenomenological research. One of aspirations and advantages of phenomenology is its desire and unique ability to retrieve many of the decisive aspects of classical philosophy. Husserl, along with Alexius Meinong, Christian von Ehrenfels, Kasimir Twardowski, and Anton Marty, were students of Brentano in Vienna and their charismatic teacher exerted significant influence on them. It is not only the founding text of phenomenology, but also one of the most important texts in 20th century philosophy. Psychologism maintains that psychology should provide the theoretical foundation for epistemology. Because of the nature of perceiving, believing, and judging are psychic phenomenon, empirical investigations of psychology is the proper domain in which these forms of knowing ought to be investigated. According to psychologism, this applies to all scientific and logical reasoning. For Husserl, this position overlooks the fundamental difference between the domain of logic and psychology. Logic is concerned with ideal objects and the laws that govern them and cannot be reduced to a subjective psychical process. Husserl argues that the ideal objects of logic and mathematics do not suffer the temporal change of psychic acts but remain trans-temporal and objective across multiple acts of various subjects. Thus, the fundamental error of psychologism is that it does not distinguish between the object of knowledge and the act of knowing. Logicism, on the other hand, is the view that these ideal objects and their laws constitute the foundation of knowing and remain totally autonomous from empirical conditions. Thus, the domain of logic is sui generis and does not need to trace back the structures of thinking back to pre-predicative experience of concrete Page 11
objects in the world. Logicism fails, according to Husserl, because it does not take into account the ways in which subjective acts function in structuring ideal objectivity. In order to account for the subjective processes of psychology and the ideal objectivity of logic, Husserl developed his theory of intentionality. Through it he tried to account for both acts of consciousness and the structure of ideal objects without reducing one to the other. By focusing on the relation or correlation between acts of consciousness and their objects, Husserl wanted to describe the a priori structure of these acts. In so doing, he suspended the metaphysical status of these objects of experience. More specifically, through this process of bracketing metaphysical questions he attempted to carve out an epistemological position that was neither a metaphysical realism nor a metaphysical idealism, but metaphysically neutral. It is analogous to the mathematical procedure of taking the absolute value of a certain number, e. When one brackets the natural attitude, they are, in essence, bracketing its common place validity in order to discover its meaning. The reduction, on the other hand, is the term Husserl eventually used to describe the thematization of the relation between subjectivity and the world. For this reason, transcendental phenomenology is also often called constitutive phenomenology. The transcendental turn in phenomenology is perhaps the most controversial and contested aspect of the discipline. Husserl first developed it in Ideas I, which remains one of his most criticized works. It has most notably been critiqued by Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Paul Ricoeur who saw it as a reversion to a kind of idealism along the lines of Kant or Fichte. Genetic phenomenology can best be described in contrast to static phenomenology, a distinction that Husserl made as early as Static phenomenology is the style of analysis that is found in the Logical Investigations and Ideas I, for instance, and primarily focuses on the fixed intentional relation between an act and an object. It is usually confined to a certain domain of experience whether it be ideal objects or physical objects, etc. But Husserl eventually became concerned with the origin and history of these objects. The experience of various objects or state of affairs includes patterns of understanding which color these experiences, a process that Husserl calls sedimentation. This is the process in which previous experiences come to shape and condition others. Genetic phenomenology attempts to explore the origin and history of this process in any given set of experiences. This phenomenological approach is most typified in the work that occupied Husserl in the years before his death, The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology In it, along with other works from this period, can be found the following concepts that occupy a central role in his genetic analysis: Page 12
Chapter 7 : What is Phenomenology? CARP The Phenomenological Movement: A Historical Introduction (review) Maurice Alexander Natanson Journal of the History of Philosophy, Volume 1, Number 1, October Overview[ edit ] In its most basic form, phenomenology attempts to create conditions for the objective study of topics usually regarded as subjective: Although phenomenology seeks to be scientific, it does not attempt to study consciousness from the perspective of clinical psychology or neurology. Instead, it seeks through systematic reflection to determine the essential properties and structures of experience. Phenomenologists reject the concept of objective research. They believe that analyzing daily human behavior can provide one with a greater understanding of nature. They assert that persons should be explored. This is because persons can be understood through the unique ways they reflect the society they live in. Phenomenologists prefer to gather "capta", or conscious experience, rather than traditional data. They consider phenomenology to be oriented toward discovery, and therefore they research using methods that are far less restrictive than in other sciences. The object of consciousness is called the intentional object, and this object is constituted for consciousness in many different ways, through, for instance, perception, memory, retention and protention, signification, etc. Throughout these different intentionalities, though they have different structures and different ways of being "about" the object, an object is still constituted as the identical object; consciousness is directed at the same intentional object in direct perception as it is in the immediately following retention of this object and the eventual remembering of it. Though many of the phenomenological methods involve various reductions, phenomenology is, in essence, anti- reductionistic ; the reductions are mere tools to better understand and describe the workings of consciousness, not to reduce any phenomenon to these descriptions. As a philosophical perspective, phenomenology is its method, though the specific meaning of the term varies according to how it is conceived by a given philosopher. Sometimes depicted as the "science of experience," the phenomenological method is rooted in intentionality, i. Intentionality represents an alternative to the representational theory of consciousness, which holds that reality cannot be grasped directly because it is available only through perceptions of reality that are representations of it in the mind. Husserl countered that consciousness is not "in" the mind; rather, consciousness is conscious of something other than itself the intentional object, whether the object is a substance or a figment of imagination i. Hence the phenomenological method relies on the description of phenomena as they are given to consciousness, in their immediacy. According to Maurice Natanson, p. To "bracket" in this sense means to provisionally suspend or set aside some idea as a way to facilitate the inquiry by focusing only on its most significant components. The phenomenological method serves to momentarily erase the world of speculation by returning the subject to his or her primordial experience of the matter, whether the object of inquiry is a feeling, an idea, or a perception. According to Husserl the suspension of belief in what we ordinarily take for granted or infer by conjecture diminishes the power of what we customarily embrace as objective reality. By shifting the center of gravity from consciousness psychology to existence ontology, Heidegger altered the subsequent direction of phenomenology. Hegel, phenomenology is an approach to philosophy that begins with an exploration of phenomena what presents itself to us in conscious experience as a means to finally grasp the absolute, logical, ontological and metaphysical Spirit that is behind phenomena. This has been called dialectical phenomenology. When generalized to the essential features of any possible experience, this has been called transcendental phenomenology see Varieties. Although the term "phenomenology" was used occasionally in the history of philosophy before Husserl, modern use ties it more explicitly to his particular method. Following is a list of important thinkers, in rough chronological order, who used the term "phenomenology" in a variety of ways, with brief comments on their contributions: Carl Stumpf â, student of Brentano and mentor to Husserl, used "phenomenology" to refer to an ontology of sensory contents. He is considered to be the founder of contemporary phenomenology. Max Scheler â developed further the phenomenological Page 13
method of Edmund Husserl and extended it to include also a reduction of the scientific method. Francisco Varela â, Chilean philosopher and biologist. Developed the basis for experimental phenomenology and neurophenomenology. This branch of philosophy differs from others in that it tends to be more "descriptive" than " prescriptive ". Varieties of phenomenology[ edit ] The Encyclopedia of Phenomenology Kluwer Academic Publishers, features separate articles on the following seven types of phenomenology: Naturalistic constitutive phenomenology see naturalism studies how consciousness constitutes things in the world of nature, assuming with the natural attitude that consciousness is part of nature. Generative historicist phenomenology see historicism studies how meaningâ as found in our experienceâ is generated in historical processes of collective experience over time. Realistic phenomenology also realist phenomenology elsewhere studies the structure of consciousness and intentionality as "it occurs in a real world that is largely external to consciousness and not somehow brought into being by consciousness. Page 14
Chapter 8 : Publications Existential Philosophy and Literature Enter your mobile number or email address below and we'll send you a link to download the free Kindle App. Then you can start reading Kindle books on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required. Oct 7, 14 Phenomenology posits that rather than the a priori meaning of "I" and "object" the meaning derived from experience is the primary driver of being. Merleau-Ponty is popular among environmentalists, but his writing and to some extent his logic and interpretation of Husserl is suspect. Oct 7, 14 1: Oct 7, 14 3: Zumthor is perhaps the best architect in the phenomenological school. There are three main schools of modern architectural theory; Conceptual, Phenomenological, and Formative. Formative and conceptual seem to have won out. Perhaps what is so confusing about phenomenology is that its proponents like Steven Holl say they are using it, when in fact they are using more of a conceptual or formal approach. Fortunately, we are coming to the end of "Modernism" as an architectural theory, and hopefully future theories will create more liveable, habitable, socially responsible architecture. Oct 7, 14 6: There are no more trends by the way. You can also suggest by way of Deleuze and Derrida origin of geometry by husserl to Delanda that we have not really trended out, but merely bifurcated into to children thoughts of phenomenonology. Sure the problem is the inherent subjectivity of it, but when you realize the formal and conceptual that claim more objective positions are essentially just as subjective you understand that "objectivity" has run its course. That is the crisis of european science and transcendentalism. In short, even a small school of neurophenomologist understand the strictly "objective" or third party agreeable conceptual and formal truths are limited and therefore a method of study that incorporates "objectivity" and "subjectivity" will be far more illuminating and frankly a move to evolve science to another level. Rem Koolhaas buildings are great on paper and simple enough in concept that everyone gets it, but I have yet to experience a Koolhaas building that was worth experiencing I am hoping the Seatle library may be able to do that. Oct 7, 14 7: Applied to architectural design, phenomenology as practiced by Holl, Zumthor, et al. This was very much in reaction to the extensive symbolic manipulation of Postmodernism and the rationalist abstraction of twentieth century modernism. Architects had lost touch with the immediate pleasures of simply experiencing a beautiful place or object and got caught up playing pointless mind games with one another Eisenman comes to mind. But the phenomenological approach has its limits as well. The aesthetic power of architecture does not derive solely from ephemeral sensory pleasures. The focus on sensory phenomena to the exclusion of everything else is a dead end. They are important, but if you strip away the metaphors and meanings in pursuit of perceptual power, you simply create another kind of unintelligible sterility. The sensory delights need to have some kind of organizing meaning and intelligible order to them - some conceptual content to orient them in our experience of the world and our place in it. I think ultimately Holl, Zumthor, etc. Ignatius Chapel is a masterpiece, where the Beijing Linked Hybrid is a mess. Oct 7, 14 8: That is to bad I really like the cleanness of it all. But you are right about it not being socially responsible though. Does anybody else agree that Modernism is dying or dead? Well I took off into the Web and Modernism has been dying for some time now. Note the date of the article. In general I think our world-view has embraced a more nuanced approach to seeing the world. Oct 8, 14 What you see today is Neo-Modernism. Real Modernism was a technique, theory, and a method, not a "style". Philip Johnson redefined modernism as a style with his book "International Style". This killed true modernism by turning it into just a style. Postmodernism, Structuralism, Post-Structuralism, etc Just know it is not true modernism, but just a formal stylistic approach. Phenomenology was one of the many post-modernist theories. Like other forms of post-modernism it offers a critique on modernism. My suggestion to all architects is to learn what Phenomenology is critiquing, then develop your own theories beyond modernism. Oct 8, 14 1: Oct 8, 14 2: I kind of felt A Pattern Language was so general it was a shot in the dark, hardly worth believing and almost laughable, although it had some decent points Oct 9, 14 Page 15