Kinds of Knowledge: Phenomenology and the Sciences (original) (raw)
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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.
Husserl's Phenomenology of Scientific Practice
Harald Wiltsche and Philipp Berghofer (eds) Phenomenological Approaches to Physics
In this paper I will interpret and discuss Husserl's approach to exact sciences focusing especially on Ideas I (1913), Formal and Transcendental Logic (1929), and Crisis (the 1930s). This development shows that: 1) Husserl's phenomenology is primarily a method (rather than a metaphysical thesis); 2) the method is context-dependent and hence it is not tied to any particular philosophical approach to mathematics or physics; 3) it emphasizes practice in a manner that anticipates more recent philosophical analyses of the scientific practice; and finally 4) its aim is to reveal the metaphysical commitments of scientists, rather than to formulate an argument for any particular metaphysical position. All this conforms to the views of contemporary naturalists in philosophy of science. They hold that philosophers should approach sciences as they are, and hence take the scientific practices as the starting point of the philosophical investigations (as opposed to earlier a priori reflection of what sciences should be like). Accordingly, the paper argues that Husserl's approach anticipates the naturalistic turn in philosophy of science: he did not engage in building models about what science should be like, instead he described the scientific practice and the normative goals that guide it. However, the task of transcendental phenomenology is to provide a critique of scientific practice as it is. Looked at from the Husserlian point of view, this is what contemporary naturalists are missing, and hence their approach remains philosophically naïve. The paper thus argues that phenomenology provides tools that allow naturalist philosophers of science to make their approach critical and critically philosophical, while retaining the basic naturalist commitments not to accept appeals to the mysterious and to approach sciences as they are.
Phenomenological responses to Gestalt-psychology
Psychology and Philosophy: Inquiries into the Soul from Late Scholasticism to Contemporary Thought, eds. Sara Heinämaa and Martina Reuter, pp.264–284, 2009
This chapter studies the reception that Gestalt psychological theories were given by phenomenologists in Germany and France in the first half of the twentieth century. The aim is to study, in particular, the reactions of two phenomenologists, Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The chapter focuses on these two thinkers in order to explicate the main idea of the phenomenological-transcendental critique of psychological theories. The interpretative claim is that Merleau-Ponty followed Husserl in defining phenomenological philosophy by its radical task in providing a transcendental basis for all experience and knowledge. He thus came to argue that psychological theories, Gestalt theories included, must be submitted to a phenomenological- transcendental critique. Despite their apparent differences, Merleau-Ponty and Husserl agreed that no empirical or wordly knowledge – psychological, anthropological or natural scientific – can overrule philosophical reflections in the grounding of the positive sciences. Before entering into Gestalt-theoretical and phenomenological sources, the chapter briefly discusses the historical relations between the two fields of research. The connections are to be found in common conceptions of parts and wholes, both approaches being influenced by Brentano’s distinctions between different kinds of parts. The disparity concerns the role of consciousness in the institution and establishment of meaning.
HUSSERL AND THE ARTICLE OF ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA (1927): PROJECT OF PHENOMENOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY
The aim of this paper is the analysis of Edmund Husserl’s article in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, published in 1927, explaining the project of a phenomenological psychology. Between the years 1926 until 1928, Husserl makes important developments concerning the topic of Phenomenology and phenomenological psychology, presenting the projectof a phenomenological psychology in works like “Phenomenological Psychology” (1925), “Article for the Encyclopaedia Britannica” (1927), “Amsterdam Lectures” (1928), and “The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology” (1954). Husserl sought to establish a strict philosophy and, at the same time formulated a rational and pure psychology, namely, a phenomenological psychology inside the philosophical phenomenology. In addition to an introduction to the Phenomenology, Husserl contrast in the Article, the a prioripure psychology as the methodical foundation whereupon may in principle rise a scientifically rigorous empirical psychology, then it’s necessary to go to the proper philosophical phenomenology, understanding it in the face of psychology to genuinely think about the project that Husserl proposed. So, the importance of this study starts from the need to retake what is a truly phenomenological psychology.Keywords: Psychology; phenomenology; philosophy.
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.
The Idea of Rigorous Science in Husserl’s Phenomenology and its Relevance for the other Sciences
Proceedings of the International Conference “Humanities and Social Sciences Today. Classical and Contemporary Issues” – Philosophy and Other Humanities: Mihai-Dan Chiţoiu, Ioan-Alexandru Tofan (Editors), 2015
In this paper I intend to grapple with the idea of philosophy as rigorous science from the point of view of Husserl’s phenomenology in order to show that this idea may have an important contribution to the way in which the scientific character of sciences in general, and of human and social sciences in particular, is being conceived. As rigorous science, phenomenology emphasizes and investigates the a priori context of other sciences. In this way, it plays a vital role in the development of every particular eidetic upon which any sciences rely. This eidetic (or the eidetic layer of any mature science) embraces the goal and strives to reach the objective of determining the valid sense of the fundamental notions used by the scientist in his research, without, nevertheless, stirring a radical questioning of this sense and of the ultimate validity of these notions. To define them requires passing from the usual level of inquiring of that particular science (the processes of dealing with facts and experiments) to the level (or meta-level) of a radical reflection on the sense or the meaning of the basic notions of the science in question (its own foundations). Philosophy as rigorous science connects the researcher’s assertions not only to the empirical state of affairs envisaged by his work, but, moreover and in a fundamental way, to their noematic content, to their intrinsic intentional meaning. Therefore, the idea of rigorous science elaborated in Husserl’s phenomenology is heavy with the potential of clarifying the foundations and stakes of the research undertaken by the other sciences.
In this paper I present and assess Husserl's arguments against epistomological and psychological naturalism in his essay Philosophy as a Rigorous Science. I show that his critique is directed against positions that are generally more extreme than most currently debated variants of naturalism. However, Husserl has interesting thoughts to contribute to philosophy today. First, he shows that there is an important connection between naturalism in epistemology (which in his view amounts to the position that the validity of logic can be reduced to the validity natural laws of thinking) and naturalism in psychology (which in his view amounts to the position that all psychic occurrences are merely parallel accompaniments of physiological occurrences.) Second, he shows that a strong version of epistemological naturalism is self-undermining and fails to translate the cogency of logic in psychological terms. Third, and most importantly for current debates, he attacks Cartesianism as a form of psychological naturalism because of its construal of the psyche as a substance. Against this position, Husserl defends the necessity to formulate new epistemic aims for the investigation of consciousness. He contends that what is most interesting about consciousness is not its empirical fact but its transcendental function of granting cognitive access to all kinds of objects (both empirical and ideal). The study of this function requires a specific method (eidetics) that cannot be conflated with empirical methods. I conclude that Husserl's analyses offer much-needed insight into the fabric of consciousness and compelling arguments against unwarranted metaphysical speculations about the relationship between mind and body.
Philosophy, Phenomenology, Sciences: Essays in Commemoration of Edmund Husserl.
This volume brings together essays by leading phenomenologists and Husserl scholars in which they engage with the legacy of Edmund Husserl’s philosophy. It is a broad anthology addressing many major topics in phenomenology and philosophy in general, including articles on phenomenological method; investigations in anthropology, ethics, and theology; highly specialized research into typically Husserlian topics such as perception, image consciousness, reality, and ideality; as well as investigations into the complex relation between pure phenomenology, phenomenological psychology, and cognitive science. TABLE OF CONTENTS: Preface by U. Melle PART I The Nature and Method of Phenomenology 1 Husserl on First Philosophy by R. Sokolowski 2 Le sens de la phénoménologie by M. Richir 3 Transzendentale Phänomenologie? by R. Bernet 4 Husserl and the ‘absolute’ by D. Zahavi 5 Husserls Beweis für den transzendentalen Idealismus by U. Melle 6 Phenomenology as First Philosophy: A Prehistory by S. Luft 7 Der methodologische Transzendentalismus der Phänomenologie by L. Tengelyi PART II Phenomenology and the Sciences 8 Husserl contra Carnap : la démarcation des sciences by D. Pradelle 9 Phänomenologische Methoden und empirische Erkenntnisse by D. Lohmar 10 Descriptive Psychology and Natural Sciences: Husserl’s early Criticism of Brentano by D. Fisette 11 Mathesis universalis et géométrie : Husserl et Grassmann by V. Gérard III Phenomenology and Consciousness 12 Tamino’s Eyes, Pamina’s Gaze: Husserl’s Phenomenology of Image-Consciousness Refashioned by N. de Warren 13 Towards a Phenomenological Account of Personal Identity by H. Jacobs 14 Husserl’s Subjectivism: The “thoroughly peculiar ‘forms’” of Consciousness and the Philosophy of Mind by S. Crowell 15 “So You Want to Naturalize Consciousness?” “Why, why not?” – “But How?” Husserl meeting some offspring by E. Marbach 16 Philosophy and ‘Experience’: A Conflict of Interests? by F. Mattens PART IV Phenomenology and Practical Philosophy 17 Self-Responsibility and Eudaimonia by J. Drummond 18 Möglichkeiten und Grenzen einer phänomenologischen Theorie des Handelns: Überlegungen zu Davidson und Husserl by K. Mertens 19 Husserl und das Faktum der praktischen Vernunft:Anstoß und Herausforderung einer phänomenologischen Ethik der Person by S. Loidolt 20 Erde und Leib: Ort der Ökologie nach Husserl by H.R. Sepp PART V Reality and Ideality 21 The Universal as “What is in Common”: Comments on the Proton-Pseudos in Husserl’s Doctrine of the Intuition of Essence by R. Sowa 22 Die Kulturbedeutung der Intentionalität: Zu Husserls Wirklichkeitsbegriff by E.W. Orth 23 La partition du réel : Remarques sur l’eidos, la phantasia, l’effondrement du monde et l’être absolu de la conscience by C. Majolino 24 Husserl’s Mereological Argument for Intentional Constitution by A. Serrano de Haro 25 Phenomenology in a different voice: Husserl and Nishida in the 1930s by T. Sakakibara 26 Thinking about Non-Existence by L. Alweiss 27 Gott in Edmund Husserls Phänomenologie by K. Held"