Naturalism and the Ethical Meaning of Phenomenology (original) (raw)

Phenomenology and Naturalism: Editors' Introduction

Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, 2013

and Nature: Examining the Relationship between Phenomenology and Naturalism', points to a problem that, like many fundamental problems in philosophy, is at once strikingly contemporary and classical: how can we account for the place of human experience in nature when the special sciences that have emerged from experience to study nature seem unable to situate it? Questions about the relationship between consciousness and the natural world have been at the centre of many philosophical debates: how can we relate first-and third-person data? Is it possible to explain exhaustively, or at all, consciousness in naturalistic terms? Although these questions have been the driving force of much recent philosophical work, one issue in particular has been underexplored within this broad field: what is the relationship between phenomenology (as a philosophical method for describing lived experience) and the broadly accepted idea that philosophy should be consistent with a naturalistic worldview. Put otherwise, how does human thought think about a nature that by its own account precedes it; how can we think a world without thought? These are two sides of the same question. On the one hand, we ask: how do we think about experience or consciousness as located in nature? And on the other hand, how do we think about what exceeds or transcends thought, but does not exclude it (or rather contains it), namely nature? These questions have emerged in various registers and in different traditions throughout the history of philosophy and have taken on a particular poignancy with the rise of modern science and the naturalistic worldview that underpins it. But they all ultimately refer to a seemingly intractable ontological problem that has played a large role in the history of philosophy from the pre-Socratics to Kant and Heidegger: what is the

Naturalizing Husserlian Phenomenology: An Introduction

Psychoanalytische perspektieven (English issue), 2002

The aim of this article is to give an account of what the "naturalization" of phenomenology involves. First, we need to ask what phenomenology is, and second, what we mean by "naturalizing". This should enable us to outline precisely what is at stake for both parties, the one naturalizing and the one being naturalized. Broadly, to "naturalize" can be defined as to "integrate into an explanatory framework where every acceptable property is made continuous with the properties admitted by the natural sciences" (Petitot, 1999: 1-2). From the outset, however, a specific problem arises: the project of naturalizing phenomenology is mainly addressed as a naturalization of Husserl's phenomenology. In this respect, it is important to know that Husserl developed his phenomenological philosophy in a sustained reaction against naturalist interpretations, i.e., interpretations in the frame of the natural sciences, psychology in particular. His mature phenomenology can be considered a counterpart of any naturalist theory. To talk about the possibility of a naturalized phenomenology will turn out to be, from Husserl's point of view, a paradox. Therefore, one cannot treat phenomenology first, and enter the naturalizing debate later. From the beginning, the issue of naturalization is central. The first part of this paper deals with Husserlian phenomenology. Husserl's writings are abundant, complex and make subtle and less subtle shifts throughout his life. We will restrict ourselves to "The Idea of Phenomenology," a small collection of lectures from the beginning of his mature period (1907), and some themes from his "Philosophy as a Rigorous Science" (1910-1911). The second part introduces the contemporary cognitive sciences. It is explained how the cognitive sciences adopt a naturalist viewpoint toward mental phenomena and how this viewpoint is connected to the problem of experience. The third and final part deals with the adoption of phenomenology by the cognitive sciences: the naturalization of Husserl's phenomenology.

Phenomenology and Naturalism: A Hybrid and Heretical Proposal

international journal of philosophical studies, 2016

In this paper I aim to develop a largely non-empirical case for the compatibility of phenomenology and naturalism. To do so, I will criticise what I take to be the standard construal of the relationship between transcendental phenomenology and naturalism, and defend a ‘minimal’ version of phenomenology that is compatible with liberal naturalism in the ontological register (but incompatible with scientific naturalism) and with weak forms of methodological naturalism, the latter of which is understood as advocating ‘results continuity’, over the long haul, with the relevant empirical sciences. Far from such a trajectory amounting to a Faustian pact in which phenomenology sacrifices its soul, I contend that insofar as phenomenologists care about reigning in the excesses of reductive versions of naturalism, the only viable way for this to be done is via the impure and hybrid account of phenomenology I outline here.

The Question of Naturalizing Phenomenology

One of the most remarkable developments of the past decade has been the attempt to marry phenomenology to cognitive science. Perhaps nothing else has so revitalized phenomenology, making it a topic of interest in the wider philosophical and scientific communities. The reasoning behind this initiative is relatively straightforward. Cognitive science studies artificial and brain-based intelligence. But before we can speak of such, we must have some knowledge our own cognitive functioning. This, however, is precisely what phenomenology provides. It studies the cognitive acts through which we apprehend the world. Its results, which have been accumulating since the beginning of the last century, thus, offer cognitive science a trove of information for its projects. As obvious as this conclusion appears, it is not immune to some fundamental objections. The chief of these is that phenomenology does not concern itself with the real, psychological subject, but rather with the noncausally determined “transcendental” subject. If this is true, then the attempt to marry phenomenology with cognitive science is bound to come to grief on the opposition of different accounts of consciousness: the non-causal, transcendental paradigm put forward by phenomenology and the causal paradigm assumed by cognitive science. In what follows, I shall analyze this objection in terms of the conception of subjectivity the objection presupposes. By employing a different conception, I will then show how it can be met. My aim will be to explain how we can use the insights of phenomenology without denaturing the consciousness it studies.

Normativity between Naturalism and Phenomenology

There is an unresolved stand-off between ontological naturalism and phenomenological thought regarding the question whether normativity can be reduced to physical entities. While the ontological naturalist line of thought is well established in analytic philosophy, the phenomenological reasoning for the irreducibility of normativity has been largely left ignored by proponents of naturalism. Drawing on the work of Husserl, Heidegger, Schütz, Stein and others, I reconstruct a phenomenological argument according to which natural science (as the foundation of naturalization projects) is itself a part of the essentially normative life-world to the effect that ontological naturalism faces a bootstrapping problem. I aim to demonstrate that this stand-off is grounded in a deep disagreement about the possibility of reduction. I close by arguing that this deep disagreement turns on the question which conception about the nature of (natural) science is true. This result pits a perfectionist model of science (implied by ontological naturalism) against a pragmatist conception of science (in favour of the phenomenological argument). The motivation is that transforming the disagreement about the controversial principle into a disagreement about conceptions of science may help to offer a foundation for different attempts at solving the stand-off.

Phenomenology, Naturalism and the Sense of Reality

Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, 2013

Phenomenologists such as Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty reject the kind of scientific naturalism or ‘scientism’ that takes empirical science to be epistemologically and metaphysically privileged over all other forms of enquiry. In this paper, I will consider one of their principal complaints against naturalism, that scientific accounts of things are oblivious to a ‘world’ that is presupposed by the intelligibility of science. Focusing principally upon Husserl’s work, I attempt to clarify the nature of this complaint and state it in the form of an argument. I conclude that the argument is effective in exposing naturalism’s reliance upon impoverished conceptions of human experience, and that it also weakens the more general case for naturalism.

Phenomenology, Naturalism and Science: A Hybrid and Heretical Proposal

2017

Phenomenology and naturalism are standardly thought of as philosophical opponents, and the historical interaction between phenomenology and science throughout the twentieth century has sometimes been adversarial in nature. While the major phenomenologists have drawn deeply on science, they have often also sought to discipline the reach and ambition of science, with such attempts sometimes provocatively posed - e.g. science does not think. For the phenomenologist, the success of empirical science should be bracketed when doing philosophy, even if it is not so clear that considerations to do with the consequences of science for the life-world are quite so assiduously bracketed. Moreover, modes of reasoning that are characteristic of the empirical sciences (e.g. inference to the best explanation, reduction, causal explanation, etc.), and generally endorsed by the philosophical naturalist, are held to be non-phenomenological. In the opposite direction, phenomenology is frequently reproached by naturalists and scientists for being, as Daniel Dennett suggests, a theoretical trajectory with no agreed method and hence no agreed results; nothing that might play a role in engagement with science, as John Searle complains. On both of these commonly held views, then, phenomenology cannot be a potential research program in interaction with empirical sciences: the phenomenologist standardly embraces this; the naturalist typically bemoans it and suspects an untenable “first philosophy”. In this book, however, I argue that these understandings of phenomenology (and indeed of naturalism) should not be taken to be the final word, and that they are premised upon an understanding of transcendental phenomenology that is ultimately untenable and in need of updating. Phenomenology, as I seek to reorient it, is compatible with what is called liberal naturalism, as well as with weak forms of methodological naturalism, in virtue of being committed to a relationship of “results continuity” with relevant sciences (albeit indexed to future scientific and epistemic results), and exhibiting due attentiveness to Quinean sensitivity requirements, as I contend in the opening methodological chapter. The burden of this book will be to positively develop this claim, this naturalising of phenomenology, in a manner that does not amount to a Faustian pact in which phenomenology sacrifices its soul. To do this, the book is structurally organised around what I take to be core features of phenomenology. Although the book will not be predominantly expositional, or historical in focus, a remark from Maurice Merleau-Ponty best captures what I take to be these core features. In the Phenomenology of Perception he enigmatically remarks at one point: “if we rediscover time beneath the subject, and if we relate to the paradox of time those of the body, the world, the thing, and others, we shall understand that beyond these there is nothing to understand”. This seems like an outlandish statement in one sense, tantamount to a transcendental mysticism in which ambiguity is resolved and we access the real, once and for all. Of course, that is not what he means. He means that everything central to phenomenology is somehow ensnared in understanding the paradoxes of what Mark Sacks calls “situated thought”, and also that the paradoxes of situated thought cannot be overcome for philosophical reflection, and indeed, existential experience in general. The book is organised around the key elements of any situation as Merleau-Ponty describes them: time; the body; world; thing; and others. They all admit of a third-person perspective. They all also apparently irremediably have a first-person perspective and transcendentally condition our access to objects. And yet on most construals of naturalism – e.g. for the ontological and scientific naturalist – we are told that there is no ‘here’ and ‘now’ in nature. My book argues for a hybrid account of phenomenology and naturalism that is able to simultaneously respect both of these views, something akin to the manifest image and the scientific image for Wilfrid Sellars, without resorting to strategies of methodological separatism/incompatibilism, which seek to preserve a proper and autonomous space for phenomenological and empirical science, such that the twain does not meet.

Naturalism and transcendentalism in the naturalization of phenomenology

New ideas in psychology, 2006

In this article, an account is given of the relation between naturalism and transcendentalism in the current project of naturalizing phenomenology. This project usually takes the transcendental point of view to be in conflict with the naturalizing attitude and the contemporary sciences of cognition thus seem to require cutting Husserlian phenomenology from its anti-naturalist roots, i.e., naturalizing it. Yet, in abandoning both the anti-naturalist and the transcendental attitude, the naturalizing project has dropped the epistemological concerns and has concentrated on naturalizing phenomenology’s descriptive results concerning consciousness and subjective experience. This omission of Husserlian epistemology has a number of consequences for the naturalizing project itself. We want to examine these consequences, and, further, we want to see whether it is possible to combine a transcendental perspective with a naturalistic one. This amounts to asking whether it is possible to naturalize the transcendental–epistemological, and thus to give a naturalistic account, not only of subjective and conscious experience, but also of the epistemological part of Husserl’s project.

The Question of Naturalizing Phenomenology (new version)

The attempt to use the results of phenomenology in cognitive and neural science has in the past decade become increasingly widespread. It is, however, open to the objection that that phenomenology does not concern itself with the embodied, emprical subject, but rather with the noncausally determined “transcendental” subject. If this is true, then the attempt to employ its results is bound to come to grief on the opposition of two different accounts of consciousness: the non-causal, transcendental paradigm put forward by phenomenology and the causal paradigm assumed by cognitive and neural science. In what follows, I shall analyze this objection in terms of the conception of subjectivity the objection presupposes. By employing a different conception, I shall then show how it can be met. My aim will be to explain how we can use the insights of phenomenology without denaturing the consciousness it studies.