Posts Tagged phenomenology
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
Corey Anton on the Phenomenology of the Senses
Posted by Seth Paskin in Misc. Philosophical Musings, Web Detritus on December 29, 2011
There’s a guy on youtube named Corey Anton, who is a Professor of Communication Studies at Grand Valley State University. He’s posted a ton of videos on a broad range of subjects, many philosophical. He’s one of those that comes up when you search on the usual suspect terms and I’ve had occasion to watch him from time to time. I find the videos hit or miss based on my mood and the topic, but he’s got over 12k subscribers, so he’s clearly speaking to an established audience.
I just checked out his one titled “Phenomenology of the Senses”: (video quality is a bit choppy)
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.
Ed Creeley on Phenomenology and Theater Performance
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Other (i.e. Lesser) Podcasts on December 20, 2011
It’s a strange but established fact that a number of strains in continental philosophy are most readily found in university departments other than philosophy: post-modernism, critical theory, semiotics, structuralism, post-structuralism, etc. I’d not previously thought, though, that this extended to phenomenology. Here is at least one example of this happening:
It’s a podcast (not sure why it isn’t under iTunes U instead of podcasts) by the “School of English, Communications and and Performance Studies, Monash University,” that features (in this episode) Ed Creeley presenting a paper on using phenomenology to analyze theater performance. The lecture is the “April 6″ entry here, under “The trials and tribulations of phenomenological analysis in performance studies.”
In the first part of the lecture, Creeley gives a few of the variations in phenomenological method, and name drops some entries that we’ve not yet brought up. Interestingly, he describes A. N. Whitehead as a “process phenomenologist,” as if regular phenomenology (like, say, Being and Time) doesn’t take into account change over time (with all the talk of essences in Husserl, this illusion is understandable). This all seems a helpful enough introduction, but by the middle of the lecture, he gets down to the business of how this can be applied to theater performance, and here’s where it seems to go wrong insofar as I understand the scholarship he’s invoking. He describes Husserl’s phenomenological reduction as, in this case, boiling down the usual complexity by which a performance is analyzed (in terms of the text involved, though I was unclear on exactly what he had in mind here) to the emotional experience of the actors doing the scene. As useful (I suppose) as this might be for Creeley’s project, it has next to nothing to do with what Husserl meant by reduction, which was the suspension of ontological attribution to the contents of experience (i.e. during reduction, you’re not a realist or idealist; you just describe the phenomena and don’t care whether they have any correlate beyond experience). The only analogy for applying this to theater that I can think of is something like judging a performance seen on TV without regard to whether there were real actors or just CGI creations doing it, or whether it’s a dream in my head for that matter.
Episode 48: Merleau-Ponty on Perception and Knowledge
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Podcast Episodes on December 17, 2011
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:41:47 — 93.3MB)
Discussing Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s “Primacy of Perception” (1946) and The World of Perception (1948).
What is the relation of perception to knowledge? In M-P’s phenomenology, perception is primary: even our knowledge of mathematical truths is in some way conditioned by and dependent on the fact that we are creatures with bodies and senses that work the way they do. Science is great, but it doesn’t discover the truth of things hiding behind perception: it is an abstraction from certain kinds of perceptions. Other modes of approaching things, e.g. art, can equally well give us knowledge, though of a different kind.
Mark, Seth, Wes, and Dylan argue over whether this thesis is just a bunch of truisms and despair over not having read The Phenomenology of Perception, the longer work which what we did read was meant to summarize. Is M-P just saying that scientific knowledge is defeasible, which scientists already believe? Read more about this topic.
Buy “The Primacy of Perception and its Philosophical Consequences,”
End song: “Write Me Off” by Mark Lint and the Simulacra. Read about it.
If you enjoy this episode, please donate at least $1:
JPS, per BBC
Posted by Daniel Horne in Things to Watch on December 9, 2011
You’ll find precious little discussion of Transcendence of the Ego within the Sartre episode of Human, All Too Human, the BBC’s 1999 documentary on existentialist thinkers previously name-checked by Seth. However, you do get a capsule summary of Sartre’s thesis around the 10-minute mark. BBC provides some lucid illustrations of certain Sartrean arguments, particularly his entertaining (and somewhat telling) “pervert’s argument” against solipsism. The creepy, hyper-dramatic soundtrack is unfortunate — assigning existentialism such a morbid affect doesn’t help its cause, whatever the Gauloises-smoking set might think. Points also deducted for interviewing the inexplicably famous BHL, whose contribution is to summarize Sartre thusly, “He was freedom.” Just fast-forward through that part.
-Daniel Horne
Some additional thoughts on Sartre
Posted by Seth Paskin in Misc. Philosophical Musings on December 2, 2011
When we were recording the episode, we were all aware that we got hung up on unreflected consciousness and how consciousness of consciousness was not reflected consciousness or self-consciousness. As a result, I thought we gave short shrift to the latter half of the essay. If that sounds convoluted, listen to the episode. There’s nothing wrong with the way the conversation went – that’s the nature both of such dialogues and a good example of the strengths and weaknesses of our format which was recently discussed here.
Listening to the episode, we did actually hit on the major themes of reflected consciousness and the ego, but in very short order. I want to call out a few things to clarify.
Episode 47: Sartre on Consciousness and the Self
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Podcast Episodes on November 30, 2011
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 2:01:28 — 111.3MB)
Discussing Jean-Paul Sarte’s The Transcendence of the Ego (written in 1934).
What is consciousness, and does it necessarily involve an “I” who is conscious of things? Sartre says no: typical experience is consciousness of some object and doesn’t involve the experience of myself as someone having this consciousness. It’s only when we reflect on our own conscious experiences that we posit this “I.” The ego is our own creation, or more precisely a social creation. This means that far from being some primordial structure of all experience, this transparent thing inside us that we have more immediate knowledge of than anything else, the ego is an object: it has parts we don’t see, and we can be wrong when we make judgments about it. Other people might even know us better than we know ourselves.
This is a difficult text, and we spend lots of time bickering about what Sartre might mean by terms like “transcendent” or “non-positional consciousness,” so surely you will love that. Read more about the topic.
Buy the book
End song: “Thing in the World,” by Mark Lint. This song was begun around 1996 but mostly written and wholly recorded just now, with Mark playing all the instruments, with lyrics actually motivated by this Sartre reading.
Read more about the Close Reading product on Sartre described at the end of the episode. We’ll post an announcement if Wes’s Sartre notes are ever actually finished.
If you enjoy your listening experience, please donate at least $1:
Topic for #48: Merleau-Ponty on the Role of Perception in Knowledge
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in General Announcements, Things to Watch on November 23, 2011
Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s magnum opus–his equivalent to Being & Nothinginess or Being & Time–is The Phenomenology of Perception.
So the Phenomenology of Perception is a very fat book that purports to give an existential phenomenology, from an analysis of perception (attention, judgment, “the phenomenal field”), to the various aspects of having a body (its spatiality, sexuality, expression, and how mechanistic psychology and classical psychology teat it), to a consequent analysis of time and freedom. …All stated with much less of the horrific made-up terminology of Heidegger or B&T-era Satre than you’d expect.
However, that book is much too long, and takes a long time to get around to saying much, so instead, we chose to read a sort of presentation of that work to a lay audience.World of Perception,
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
Heidegger on Schleiermacher’s Second Address
Posted by Daniel Horne in PEL's Notes on June 23, 2011
Let us think for a while of a farmhouse in the Black Forest, which was built some two hundred years ago by the dwelling of peasants. Here the self-sufficiency of the power to let earth and heaven, divinities and mortals enter in simple oneness into things, ordered the house.
- Martin Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking” (1951)
Schleiermacher’s On Religion provided me a kind of Rosetta Stone by which to decipher certain Heideggerian concepts. Heidegger discussed On Religion’s Second Address in lectures he gave on religion in 1920-21. I agree with those who believe Schleiermacher’s influence remained well into Heidegger’s later writings, and I feel that in any event the Second Address informed Heidegger’s monism.
Heidegger’s later gnomic talk of “the relation of man and space” is more understandable to me if viewed through the prism of Schleiermacher’s “third realm” of religious intuition, separate and distinct from either conceptual thought or moral action.
Capturing Schleiermacher’s Romantic Mood
Posted by Daniel Horne in Things to Watch on June 14, 2011
Can modern film depict Schleiermacher’s nature-obsessed 18th century Romantic mood? Probably not, but let’s go.
I thought I better understood Husserlian phenomenology after reading Sartre’s Nausea, which even in translation has some gripping prose. The clip above, from Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu (1979) exudes both the German Romantic aesthetic, and a phenomenological approach of sorts. Bonus points if you catch the moment where subject separates from object. Plus, it stars the totally insane Klaus Kinski as Dracula. Not to be missed.
Lawrence Cahoone on Hegel’s Phenomenology
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Web Detritus on April 5, 2011
Here’s an audio-only lecture by Lawrence Cahoone:
Listen on youtube.
Cahoone here emphasizes very different themes than we talked about on the episode, specifically the theistic themes (he characterizes “Spirit” as “pantheistic” or “panentheistic,” both of which have been used to describe Spinoza; the former means everything is God, while the latter means everything is within God, but God can exceed creation as we’re aware of it) as well as politics.
Hegel’s Phenomenology, according to Cahoone, involves detailing the shapes or forms of Spirit (geist) as they evolve in human history. “God is evolving, and human beings are part of that evolution, by which God comes to full self-consciousness or self-recognition.”
Episode 32: Heidegger: What is “Being?”
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Podcast Episodes on February 7, 2011
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:51:38 — 102.3MB)
Discussing Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927), mostly the intro and ch. 1 and 2 of Part 1.
When philosophers try to figure out what really exists (God? matter? numbers?), Heidegger thinks they’ve forgotten a question that really should come first: what is it to exist? He thinks that instead of asking “What is Being?” we ask, as in a scientific context, “what is this thing?” This approach then poisons our ability to understand ourselves or the world that we as human beings actually inhabit, as opposed to the abstraction that science makes out of this.
This is Seth’s big episode: this was his primary concentration in his later grad school years. Plus: Nazis, trying to figure out things by free associating about their origins in ancient Greek, and whoopee cushion record breaking news!
End song: “Find You Out,” from the brand new New People album, Impossible Things.
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
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!
Read the text online or purchase it.
End song: “Sleep,” from the Mark Linsenmayer album Spanish Armada, Songs of Love and Related Neuroses (1993).
Topic for #32: Heidegger: What is “Being?”
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in General Announcements on December 24, 2010
When philosophers do ontology (coming up with a list of types of things that “exist,” what are they actually doing? Martin Heidegger thinks this is a real problem: What is existence? What is “being?” It is, he thinks, the core problem behind all of philosophy, the underlying thought nagging us that needs to be settled before we can ground science coherently discuss ethics or anything else. Worse yet, though we start our inquiry with some intuitive notion that there is a problem here, this doesn’t come to us formulated in a specific, concrete question, so we not only have to answer the question; we have to figure out what the question is.
Heidegger’s answer, not surprising given that he was Husserl’s student, is that we need to use phenomenology, i.e. the careful description of experience, though Heidegger has different ideas than Husserl about exactly how this can be most fruitfully done. So to figure out being, we end up by starting with an analysis of “the being for whom being is a question,” i.e. ourselves.
We’ll be reading the beginning of Heidegger’s most famous work Being and Time (1927): definitely the Introduction and Chapters I and II of Part One, though our discussion may range through Chapter IV.
Episode 15: Hegel on History
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Podcast Episodes on February 24, 2010
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (0.0KB)
Discussing G.W.F Hegel’s Introduction to the Philosophy of History. Though he didn’t actually write a book with this name, notes on his lectures on this topic were published after his death, and the first chunk of that serves as a good entrance point to Hegel’s very strange system.
How should a philosopher approach the study of history? Is history just a bunch of random happenings, or is it a purposive force manipulating us to fulfill its hidden ends? If you have asked yourself this question in this way, then you, like Hegel, are mighty strange.
Here we talk about the unfolding of the world-historical spirit, world-historical individuals (hint: not you), dialectic, his alternative to the social contract, the formation of the self based on what others label you, the geist of America, why a constitutional monarchy is obviously the best form of government, and heaps more.
Read with us: Pages 14-128 of this online version or buy the book with only the part we’re concerned with.
End Song: “Cold,” by Madison Lint (2004), described in my music blog.
Episode 4: Camus and the Absurd
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Podcast Episodes on June 22, 2009
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:37:18 — 89.2MB)
Discussing Camus’s “An Absurd Reasoning” and ”The Myth of Sisyphus” (1942).
Does our eventual death mean that life has no meaning and we might as well end it all? Camus starts to address this question, then gets distracted and talks about a bunch of phenomenologists until he dies unreconciled. Also, let’s all push a rock up a hill and like it, okay? Plus, the fellas dwell on genius and throw down re. the Beatles, the beloved Robert C. Solomon and Malcom Gladwell’s Outliers.
An abridged version of the reading covered with most of the good stuff in it is here. An unabridged version of “An Absurd Reasoning” is here.
End song: “My Friends” by Mark Lint and the Simulacra (2000).
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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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