Posts Tagged Edmund Husserl
Thomas Sheehan (on Entitled Opinions) on Phenomenology
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Other (i.e. Lesser) Podcasts on January 27, 2012
Robert Harrison and Thomas Sheehan
Interviewer Robert Harrison starts the discussion expressing the excitement of applied, humanistic phenomenology, i.e. as it was used by existentialists like Sartre. Sheehan says that while there’s not much in the way of modern, creative phenomenology going on now, there are plenty of philosophers who use Husserl and Heidegger as a launching point for their own (apparently not phenomenological) philosophies, and that in particular you can’t understand Heidegger unless you understand him as a phenomenologist, as opposed to someone just concerned with ontology, i.e. metaphysics, which is what you might think given his discussions of the ancient Greeks and his emphasis on “Being.”
Here’s a little quiz for you to see if you got it: What does it mean to say that what Aristotle is to Plato, Heidegger is to Husserl?
Here’s the Entitled Opinions home page.
-Mark Linsenmayer
Three Types of “Reduction” in Phenomenology
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in PEL's Notes on December 22, 2011
John Townsend (who does video blogs about Merleau-Ponty) reminded me (here) that there’s more than one kind of “reduction” in phenomenology.
Since pretty much none of these were covered in our Husserl episode as far as I recall, I thought this was worth my time to do some quick Wikipedia research and report back.
The phenomenological reduction, or epoché, is a suspension of judgments about the existence or non-existence of the external world. For Husserl, we are normally in the “natural attitude,” which assumes metaphysical realism (as opposed to idealism), but he thinks that once we put aside that controversy, we can focus on the phenomena themselves. More generally, this is the phenomenological effort to stop shoving theories into our descriptions of experience, as, say, Hume pretty blatantly does when he states outright that our experience is all just impressions and ideas (which are really just faint impressions). It quickly becomes clear that this project of removing all theory from our descriptions is hopeless, but it’s a move in the right direction, in that we want to figure out, at least, what theories are presupposed by experience, which leads to a whole study of language and the ego and all that.
Topic for #47: Sartre on the Self
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in General Announcements on November 11, 2011
Jean-Paul Sartre is best known for his 1960′s existentialism and Marxist activism, but before he was a big celebrity, he was a phenomenologist who spent a lot of time grappling with Heidegger (his book Being and Nothingness
On this episode, we discuss Sartre’s 1934-written book The Transcendence of the Ego: An Existentialist Theory of Consciousness,
When we reflect, however, we create the me, i.e. “the ego.” So instead of the ego being transcendental, i.e. this big structural part of all experience, it becomes a thing in the world, constituted out of the different experiences that we and others have of ourselves: I can reflect upon myself as being a dead-mouse-lover, and like the experience of the dead mouse itself, which may on further examination prove to be a rat, or not dead, or an optical illusion, I could likewise be wrong about these self-apprehensions. Per Hegel, other people might even have more accurate views about us than we do ourselves.
Consciousness itself, though, according to Sartre, is not a thing in the world. It’s not identical to this ego that we find as an object. It’s not personal at all; consciousness is apprehended as wholly free, wholly uncaused, and aware of itself as a consciousness, though not, again, aware of a “self” sitting behind consciousness having these conscious experiences. Confused? So were we, during this recording that took place last Sunday and which will be posted some weeks from now. The core of four was present on this one, with no guest: Mark, Seth, Wes, and Dylan.
Read along with us by buying the book
Robert C. Solomon on Husserl’s Phenomenology
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Web Detritus on April 27, 2011
I couldn’t find any Solomon lectures on Hegel, but here’s one introducing Edmund Husserl, which I think is apt now that we’ve covered Hegel’s “phenomenology,” so you can reflect on the difference:
Maybe the only reference to Hegel here is the discussion of Husserl’s rejection of historicism, though I think it should be clear that “historicist” is would be an over-simplification when explaining Hegel. Hegel shared what Solomon describes here as Husserl’s rejection of “naturalism.” Unlike an empiricist, Husserl is explicitly in the business of discovering essential truths, though for Hegel this seems more difficult, as one seeming necessity at one phase of development in the Phenomenology of Spirit can end up being inadequately grasped and in need of improvement. Likewise, though, for Husserl, throughout the course of the Cartesian Meditations, I think you could argue that the phenomenological grasp gets more adequate: the contribution of other people doesn’t enter into it until near the end of the work, though that ends up being an essential factor in experience, and certainly one of the primordial ones as far as our non-reflective experience goes. This very same progression shows up in Hegel, where the early part of the book reflects in a Cartesian way on my experience right here-right now, and this works forward, adding more elements to in some way reconstruct/simulate/analyze more fully our actual experience.
-Mark Linsenmayer
U. of Winchester Lecture on Husserl’s Phenomology
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Web Detritus on February 5, 2011
Here’s another Husserl lecture to listen to, which sets Husserl in historical context as a contemporary of Freud prior to World War Two. The unnamed lecturer (I’ll be happy to update this post if someone can figure out who this is) talks a little about the relationship between Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and Husserl’s phenomenology.
The lecturer characterizes phenomena as phenomenology understands them as inherently mental, meaning that “phenomenology of consciousness” would be redundant. As I’ve tried to convey, I think this characterization of phenomena, i.e. the objects of consciousness, as mental, is problematic: it’s entirely the point that consciousness is what puts the mind in contact with things that are not mental, or more precisely, “the mental” is not rightly understood according to Husserl as a distinct sphere from the rest of the world; consciousness is inherently an openness to the world, not a parade of representations that somehow reflect (or fail to reflect) the world. However, the lecturer then goes on to describe Husserl as participating in the tradition of folks who tried to banish Cartesian dualism, which suggests the point I’ve just made.
Bryan McGee and Hubert Dreyfus on Husserl and Heidegger
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Things to Watch on January 17, 2011
Daniel has already linked to this video in comments, but I wanted to make an actual post about it:
The Husserl discussion here is pretty brief and not very revealing. Dreyfus, for one, is a Heidegger scholar and thinks that Husserl is only important insofar as he influenced Heidegger and showed (through his exemplification of it) the bankruptcy of a tradition going through Descartes and Kant, which entails starting your philosophical project with an analysis of consciousness and wondering how subjective consciousness can reach things out in the objective world when we think of or perceive or desire something. (More discussion of that issue is here.)
Robert Sokolowski audio on Husserl
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Web Detritus on January 14, 2011
In this clip (broken into five parts), Robert Sokolowski reads a paper in 2009 at a conference organized to celebrate Husserl’s 150th birthday:
He describes Husserl’s place in the history of philosophy (there’s a lot of talk of ancient philosophy in here) and outlines his project, including more on the phenomenological reduction (epoché). One theme is the perennial conflict between philosophy and what Sokolowski describes as its non-philosophical alternatives: science (including empirical psychology) and sophistry. Husserl isn’t just studying the structures of meaning (like Frege) but transcendental reality itself, just like philosophers back to the Greeks.
-Mark Linsenmayer
Consciousness (Intentionality) as Transcendent
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in PEL's Notes on January 13, 2011
An important point on the Husserl episode that I was trying to get across was his notion that “intentionality” as he uses it doesn’t just mean that all conscious acts have a target, i.e. something you’re conscious of, but that this content is not itself something subjective. When we grasp something in consciousness, we’re not just contemplating our own sensations (as Schopenhauer describes our inner sense checking out and making sense of the data fed in by our outer sense). Rather, consciousness is a connection between us and something objective: you and I in general can experience the same objects, whether they be physical objects or even the notion “Santa Claus.” If you and I think about that, we’re thinking about the same thing, which of course raises the question of what this thing is. Frege considers this “sense” that we both contemplate to be an objective entity that we have to admit into our ontology: we can’t take intentionality seriously and be materialists.
In reading Martin Heidegger’s The Basic Problems of Phenomenology,
Intentionality is said to be a character of experiences. Experiences belong to the subject’s sphere. What is more natural and more logical than to infer that, consequently, that toward which immanent experiences are directed must itself be subjective? But however natural and logical this inference may seem and however critical and cautious this characterization of intentional experiences and of that toward which they direct themselves may be, it is after all a theory, in which we close our eyes to the phenomena and do not give an account of them themselves.
Episode 31: Husserl’s Phenomenology
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Podcast Episodes on January 10, 2011
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:49:58 — 100.7MB)
Discussing Edmund Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations (1931).
How can we analyze our experience? Husserl thinks that Descartes was right about the need to ground science from the standpoint of our own experience, but wrong about everything else. Husserl recommends we “bracket” the question of whether the external world exists and just focus on the contents of our consciousness (the “cogito”). He thinks that with good, theory-free observations (meaning very difficult, unnatural language), we can give an account of the essential structures of experience, which will include truth, certainty, and objectivity (intersubjective verifiability): all that science needs. We’ll find that we don’t need to ground the existence of objects in space and other minds, because our entire experience presupposes them; they’re already indubitable.
Plus “Personal Philosophies” for Seth and Wes!
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End song: “Sleep,” from the Mark Linsenmayer album Spanish Armada, Songs of Love and Related Neuroses (1993).
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The Partially Examined Life is a philosophy podcast by some guys who were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living but then thought better of it. Each episode, we pick a text and chat about it with some balance between insight and flippancy. You don't have to know any philosophy, or even to have read the text we're talking about to (mostly) follow and (hopefully) enjoy the discussion. Discuss episodes and provide feedback here or via our Facebook group. You can also e-mail comments to mark@marklint.com or wesalwan@gmail.com.
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