Information about Phenomenology

• Martin Heidegger believed that Husserl's approach overlooked basic structural features of both the subject and object of experience (what he called their "being"), and expanded phenomenological enquiry to encompass our understanding and experience of Being itself, thus making phenomenology the method (in the first phase of his career at least) of the study of being: ontology.

Historical overview of the use of the term

• Friedrich Christoph Oetinger (1702 - 1782) German pietist, for the study of the "divine system of relations"^[3]
• David Hume (1711 – 1776) Scottish philosopher, called variably a skeptic or a common sense advocate. While this connection is somewhat tendentious, Hume, in A Treatise of Human Nature, does seem to take a phenomenological or psychological approach by describing the process of reasoning causality in psychological terms. This is also the inspiration for the Kantian distinction between phenomenal and noumenal reality.^[4]
• Johann Heinrich Lambert (1728–1777) (mathematician, physician and philosopher) for the theory of appearances underlying empirical knowledge.^[5]
• Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), in the Critique of Pure Reason, distinguished between objects as phenomena, which are objects as shaped and grasped by human sensibility and understanding, and objects as things-in-themselves or noumena, which do not appear to us in space and time and about which we can make no legitimate judgements.
• Georg Hegel (1770–1831) challenged Kant's doctrine of the unknowable thing-in-itself, and declared that by knowing phenomena more fully we can gradually arrive at a consciousness of the absolute and spiritual truth of Divinity. Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, published in 1807, prompted many opposing views including the existential work of Søren Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre, as well as the materialist work of Marx and his many followers.
• Franz Brentano (1838-1917) seems to have used the term in some of his lectures at Vienna, where Edmund Husserl studied with him and came under his influence.
• Carl Stumpf (1848-1936), student of Brentano and mentor to Husserl, used it to refer to an ontology of sensory contents.
• Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) established phenomenology at first as a kind of "descriptive psychology" and later as a transcendental and eidetic science of consciousness. He is considered as the founder of contemporary phenomenology.
• Max Scheler (1874-1928) developed further the phenomenological method of Edmund Husserl and extended it to include also a reduction of the scientific method. He influenced the thinking of Pope John Paul II and Edith Stein.
• Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) criticized Husserl's theory of phenomenology as he attempted to develop a theory of ontology that led him to his original theory of Dasein, the non-dualistic human being.
• Alfred Schütz (1899-1959) developed a phenomenology of the social world on the basis of everyday experience which has influenced major sociologists such as Harold Garfinkel, Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann.

Husserl and the origin of his Phenomenology

Precursors and influences

• Skepticism (for the concept of the epoché)
• Descartes (Methodological doubt, cogito)
• British empiricism (Locke, Hume, Berkeley, Mill)
• Immanuel Kant and neokantianism (for Husserl's transcendental turn)
• Bernard Bolzano (for his ideas on Logic as Wissenschaftslehre)
• Karl Weierstrass (Husserl studied under him in Berlin and took over many elements for his Philosophy of Arithmetic)
• Franz Brentano (for the concept of intentionality and the method of descriptive psychology)
• Carl Stumpf (psychological analysis, influenced Husserl's early works)

Husserl's Logische Untersuchungen (1900/1901)

Transcendental phenomenology after the Ideen (1913)

• "noetic" refers to the intentional act of consciousness (believing, willing, hating and loving ...)
• "noematic" refers to the object or content (noema) which appears in the noetic acts (respectively the believed, wanted, hated and loved ...).

Realist phenomenology

Existential phenomenology

For Husserl, the phenomenological reduction is the method of leading phenomenological vision from the natural attitude of the human being whose life is involved in the world of things and persons back to the transcendental life of consciousness and its noetic-noematic experiences, in which objects are constituted as correlates of consciousness. For us, phenomenological reduction means leading phenomenological vision back from the apprehension of a being, whatever may be the character of that apprehension, to the understanding of the Being of this being (projecting upon the way it is unconcealed).^[8]

According to Heidegger, philosophy was not at all a scientific discipline, but more fundamental than science itself. According to him science is only one way of knowing the world with no specialized access to truth. Furthermore, the scientific mindset itself is built on a much more "primordial" foundation of practical, everyday knowledge. Husserl was skeptical of this approach, which he regarded as quasi-mystical, and it contributed to the divergence in their thinking.

Instead of taking phenomenology as prima philosophia or a foundational discipline, Heidegger took it as a metaphysical ontology: "being is the proper and sole theme of philosophy".<ref name="heideproblems" /> Yet to confuse phenomenology and ontology is an obvious error. Phenomena are not the foundation or Ground of Being. Neither are they appearances, for as Heidegger argues in Being and Time, an appearance is "that which shows itself in something else," while a phenomenon is "that which shows itself in itself."

While for Husserl, in the epochè, being appeared only as a correlate of consciousness, for Heidegger being is the starting point. While for Husserl we would have to abstract from all concrete determinations of our empirical ego, to be able to turn to the field of pure consciousness, Heidegger claims that: "the possibilities and destinies of philosophy are bound up with man's existence, and thus with temporality and with historicality".<ref name="heideproblems" />

However, ontological being and existential being are different categories, so Heidegger's conflation of these categories is, according to Husserl's view, the root of Heidegger's error. Husserl charged Heidegger with raising the question of ontology but failing to answer it, instead switching the topic to the Dasein, the only being for whom Being is an issue. That is neither ontology nor phenomenology, according to Husserl, but merely abstract anthropology. To clarify, perhaps, by abstract anthropology, as a non-existentialist searching for essences, Husserl rejected the existentialism implicit in Heidegger's distinction between being (sein) as things in reality from Being (Da-sein) as the encounter with being, as when being becomes present to us, i.e. is unconcealed. ^[9]

Existential phenomenologists include: Martin Heidegger (1889 – 1976), Hannah Arendt (1906 – 1975), Emmanuel Levinas (1906 – 1995), Gabriel Marcel (1889 – 1973), Jean-Paul Sartre (1905 – 1980), Paul Ricoeur (1913 - 2005) and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908 – 1961).

Criticisms of phenomenology

Please help [ improve this article] by expanding this section. See talk page for details. Please remove this message once the section has been expanded. (tagged since April 2007)

Daniel Dennett has criticized phenomenology on the basis that its explicitly first-person approach is incompatible with the scientific third-person approach, going so far as to coin the term "autophenomenology" to emphasize this aspect and to contrast it with his own alternative, which he calls heterophenomenology. Dennett's criticism reflects a more general attitude among analytic philosophers of mind. Phenomenologists, however, are often quick to point out that the relationship between phenomenological and natural scientific methods has been a major theme in phenomenology since at least Husserl [see The Crisis of the European Sciences], though Dennett makes no real attempt to engage with the work of phenomenologists on this issue. Many proponents of phenomenology argue that natural science can make sense only as a human activity, i.e., an activity which presupposes the fundamental structures of the 'first-person perspective.' While not hostile to the natural sciences per se, many thinkers in the phenomenological tradition would regard criticisms such as Dennett's metaphysical rather than purely scientific claims, and thus susceptible to the usual criticisms directed at metaphysical theories of all kinds [see anything by Heidegger]. Powerful defenses of the phenomenological approach against science-inspired reductive naturalism have been made by Hubert Dreyfus and Charles Taylor among others.

As part of an ongoing debate with Hubert Dreyfus, John Searle has argued that much of the work done by phenomenologists on the philosophy of mind suffers from what he terms the 'Phenomenological Illusion'[1]. Searle defines the Phenomenological Illusion as the mistake of assuming that what is not phenomenologically present is not real, and that what is phenomenologically present is an adequate description how things really are. According to Searle, this leads some phenomenologists to make mistaken claims about subjects such as meaning, social reality, functions, and causal self referentiality. Searle himself makes explicit that, defined as the examination of consciousness, he has no problem with phenomenology itself.

List of Phenomenologists and Phenomenology-Derived Theorists

Peter Berger Maurice Blanchot Stanley Cavell Jacques Derrida Mikel Dufrenne Hubert Dreyfus Hans-Georg Gadamer Amadeo Giorgi Aron Gurwitsch Martin Heidegger

Michel Henry Edmund Husserl Roman Ingarden Michael Jackson (anthropology) Karl Jaspers Richard Lanigan Emmanuel Levinas Thomas Luckmann Gabriel Marcel

Maurice Merleau-Ponty Eugene Minkowski Christian Norberg-Schulz Jose Ortega y Gassett Alexander Pfänder Georges Poulet Adolf Reinach Paul Ricoeur

Jean-Paul Sartre Max Scheler Alfred Schütz Herbert Spiegelberg Edith Stein Pierre Thevenaz Herman Van Breda Karol Wojtyła Dan Zahavi

See also

Phenomenology of religion Hermeneutics Geneva School Structuralism Poststructuralism Social constructionism Gestalt therapy Philosophical Anthropology

Existentialism Deconstruction Gestalt therapy Phenomenography Philosophy of technology Emergy Personhood Theory Phenomenology (psychology) Important publications in phenomenological psychology

Further reading

• The IAP LIBRARY offers very fine sources for Phenomenology.
• The London Philosophy Study Guide offers many suggestions on what to read, depending on the student's familiarity with the subject: Phenomenology
• Dermot Moran, Introduction to Phenomenology (Oxford: Routledge, 2000) - Charting phenomenology from Brentano, through Husserl and Heidegger, to Gadamer, Arendt, Levinas, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and Derrida.
• Robert Sokolowski, "Introduction to Phenomenology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2000) - An excellent non-historical introduction to phenomenology.
• Herbert Spiegelberg, "The Phenomenological Movement: A Historical Introduction," 3rd ed. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1983). The most comprehensive source on the development of the phenomenological movement.
• David Stewart and Algis Mickunas, "Exploring Phenomenology: A Guide to the Field and its Literature" (Athens: Ohio University Press 1990)
• Michael Hammond, Jane Howarth, and Russell Kent, "Understanding Phenomenology" (Oxford: Blackwell 1995)
• Christopher Macann, Four Phenomenological Philosophers: Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty (New York: Routledge: 1993)
• Jan Patočka, "Qu'est-ce que la phénoménologie?" In: Qu'est-ce que la phénoménologie?, ed. and trans. E. Abrams (Grenoble: J. Millon 1988), pp. 263–302. An answer to the question, What is phenomenology?, from a student of both Husserl and Heidegger and one of the most important phenomenologists of the latter half of the twentieth century.
• William A. Luijpen and Henry J. Koren, "A First Introduction to Existential Phenomenology" (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press 1969)
• Richard M. Zaner, "The Way of Phenomenology" (Indianapolis: Pegasus 1970)
• Hans Köchler, Die Subjekt-Objekt-Dialektik in der transzendentalen Phänomenologie. Das Seinsproblem zwischen Idealismus und Realismus. (Meisenheim a.G.: Anton Hain, 1974) (German)
• Hans Köchler, Phenomenological Realism: Selected Essays (Frankfurt a. M./Bern: Peter Lang, 1986)
• Mark Jarzombek, The Psychologizing of Modernity (Cambridge University Press, 2000).
• Pierre Thévenaz, "What is Phenomenology?" (Chicago: Quadrangle Books 1962)
• ed. James M. Edie, "An Invitation to Phenomenology" (Chicago: Quadrangle Books 1965) - A collection of seminal phenomenological essays.
• ed. R. O. Elveton, "The Phenomenology of Husserl: Selected Critical Readings" (Seattle: Noesis Press 2000) - Key essays about Husserl's phenomenology.
• eds. Richard Zaner and Don Ihde, "Phenomenology and Existentialism" (New York: Putnam 1973) - Contains many key essays in existential phenomenology.
• Albert Borgmann and his work in philosophy of technology.
• eds. Natalie Depraz, Francisco Varela, Pierre Vermersch, "On Becoming Aware: A Pragmatics of Experiencing" (Amsterdam: John Benjamins 2003) - searches for the sources and the means for a disciplined practical approach to exploring human experience.
• Don Idhe, "Experimental Phenomenology: An Introduction" (Albany, NY: SUNY Press)
• Sara Ahmed, "Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects Others" (Durham: Duke University Press 2006)
• Michael Jackson (anthropology), Existential Anthropology

External links

• What is Phenomenology?
• About Edmund Husserl
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry
• Organization of Phenomenology Organizations
• Romanian Society for Phenomenology
• Phenomenology Online
• Dialectical Phenomenology
• The New Phenomenology

Journals

• Bulletin d'analyse phénoménologique
• Janus Head: Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature, Continental Philosophy, Phenomenological Psychology, and the Arts
• Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology
• Research in Phenomenology
• Newsletter of Phenomenology (online-newsletter)
• Studia Phaenomenologica ISSN 1582-5647
• Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology
• The Roman Ingarden Philosophical Research Centre
• Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences

References

1. ^ id="CITEREFSmith2007">Smith, David Woodruff (2007), Husserl, London-New York: Routledge
2. ^ Partially based on Schuhmann, Karl (2004), ""Phänomenologie": Eine Begriffsgeschichtilche Reflexion", in Leijenhorst, Cees & Piet Steenbakkers, Karl Schuhmann. Selected Papers on Phenomenology, Dordrecht / Boston / London: Kluwer, pp. 1-33
3. ^ Ernst Benz, Christian Kabbalah: Neglected Child of Theology
4. ^ Ernest Campbell Mossner. The Life of David Hume. Oxford University Press, 1980.
5. ^ Lambert, Johann Heinrich (1772). Anmerkungen und Zusätze zur Entwerfung der Land- und Himmelscharten. Von J. H. Lambert (1772.) Hrsg. von A. Wangerin. Mit 21 Textfiguren. (xml). W. Engelmann, reprint 1894.
6. ^ Rollinger, Robin (1999), Husserl's Position in the School of Brentano, Dordrecht / Boston / London: Kluwer
7. ^ On the Logical Investigations, see Zahavi, Dan & Frederik Stjernfelt, eds. (2002), One Hundred Years of Phenomenology (Husserl's Logical Investigations Revisited), Dordrecht / Boston / London: Kluwer; and Mohanty, Jitendra Nath, ed. (1977), Readings on Edmund Husserl’s Logical Investigations, Den Haag: Nijhoff
8. ^