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This article is about the philosophical movement. For other uses, see Phenomenology (disambiguation).
Phenomenology has at least three main meanings in philosophical history: one in the writings of G.W.F. Hegel, another in the writings of Edmund Husserl in 1920, and a third, deriving from Husserl\'s work, in the writings of his former research assistant Martin Heidegger in 1927:
The difference in approach between Husserl and Heidegger influenced the development of existential phenomenology and existentialism in France, as is seen in the work of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Munich phenomenologists (Johannes Daubert, Adolf Reinach, Alexander Pfänder in Germany and Alfred Schütz in Austria), and Paul Ricoeur have all been influenced. Readings of Husserl and Heidegger have also been crucial elements of the philosophies of Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler.
Although the term "phenomenology" was used occasionally in the history of philosophy before Husserl, modern use ties it more explicitly to his particular method. Following is a list of thinkers in rough chronological order who used the term "phenomenology" in a variety of ways, with brief comments on their contributions:Partially based on Schuhmann, Karl (2004), ""Phänomenologie": Eine Begriffsgeschichtilche Reflexion", in Leijenhorst, Cees & Steenbakkers, Piet, Karl Schuhmann. Selected Papers on Phenomenology, Dordrecht / Boston / London: Kluwer, pp. 1-33
Later usage is mostly based on or (critically) related to Husserl\'s introduction and use of the term. This branch of philosophy differs from others in that it tends to be more "descriptive" than "prescriptive".
Husserl derived many important concepts that are central to phenomenology from the works and lectures of his teachers, the philosophers and psychologists Franz Brentano and Carl Stumpf.Rollinger, Robin (1999), Husserl\'s Position in the School of Brentano, Dordrecht / Boston / London: Kluwer An important element of phenomenology that Husserl borrowed from Brentano was intentionality, the notion that the main characteristic of consciousness is that it is always intentional. Intentionality, which could be summarised as the "directedness" or "aboutness" of mental acts, describes the basic structure of consciousness. Every mental act is directed at or contains an object — the so-called intentional object. Every belief, desire, etc. has an object to which it refers, i.e. the believed, the desired. The property of being intentional, of having an intentional object, is the key feature which distinguishes mental/psychological phenomena from physical phenomena (objects), because physical phenomena lack intentionality altogether. Intentionality is the key concept by means of which phenomenology attempts to overcome the subject/object dichotomy prevalent in modern philosophy.
In the first edition of the Logical Investigations, still under the influence of Brentano, Husserl describes his position as "descriptive psychology". Husserl analyzes the intentional structures of mental acts and how they are directed at both real and ideal objects. The first volume of the Logical Investigations, the Prolegomena to Pure Logic, begins with a devastating critique of psychologism, i.e., the attempt to subsume the a priori validity of the laws of logic under psychology. Husserl establishes a separate field for research in logic, philosophy and phenomenology, independently from the empirical sciences.On the Logical Investigations, see Zahavi, Dan & Stjernfelt, Frederik, 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
Some years after the publication of the Logical Investigations, Husserl made some key elaborations which led him to the distinction between the act of consciousness (noesis) and the phenomena at which it is directed (the noemata).
What we observe is not the object as it is in itself, but how and inasmuch it is given in the intentional acts. Knowledge of essences would only be possible by "bracketing" all assumptions about the existence of an external world and the inessential (subjective) aspects of how the object is concretely given to us. This procedure Husserl called epoché.
Husserl in a later period concentrated more on the ideal, essential structures of consciousness. As he wanted to exclude any hypothesis on the existence of external objects, he introduced the method of phenomenological reduction to eliminate them. What was left over was the pure transcendental ego, as opposed to the concrete empirical ego. Now (transcendental) phenomenology is the study of the essential structures that are left in pure consciousness: this amounts in practice to the study of the noemata and the relations among them. The philosopher Theodor Adorno criticised Husserl\'s concept of phenomenological epistemology in his metacritique "Against Epistemology", which is anti-foundationalist in its stance.
Transcendental phenomenologists include: Oskar Becker, Aron Gurwitsch and Alfred Schutz.
After Husserl\'s publication of the Ideen in 1913, many phenomenologists took a critical stance towards his new theories. Especially the members of the Munich group distanced themselves from his new transcendental phenomenology and preferred the earlier realist phenomenology of the first edition of the Logical Investigations.
Realist phenomenologists include: Adolf Reinach, Alexander Pfänder, Johannnes Daubert, Max Scheler, Roman Ingarden, Nicolai Hartmann, and Hans Köchler.
Existential phenomenology differs from transcendental phenomenology by its rejection of the transcendental ego. Merleau-Ponty objects to the ego\'s transcendence of the world, which for Husserl leaves the world spread out and completely transparent before the conscious. Heidegger thinks of conscious being as always already in the world. Transcendence is maintained in existential phenomenology to the extent that the method of phenomenology must take a presuppositionless starting point - transcending claims about the world arising from, for example, natural or scientific attitudes or theories of the ontological nature of the world.
While Husserl thought philosophy to be a scientific discipline that had to be founded on a phenomenology understood as epistemology, Heidegger held a radically different view. Heidegger himself phrases their differences this way:
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... this means that philosophy is not a science of beings but of being.". 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".
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. I have attempted to respond to the request for clarification of Heidegger\'s distinction between being and Being. My info source was http://www.uni.edu/boedeker/NNhHeidegger2.doc. It was not copied and pasted but rephrased for copyright reasons.
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).
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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.
The film Dark Star (1974) includes a scene where an astronaut tries to teach a malfunctioning sentient bomb phenomenology in order to prevent it from detonating., <http://www2.english.uiuc.edu/cybercinema/bomb20.htm>. Retrieved on 23 November 2007
Shepard Fairey\'s Andre the Giant Has a Posse sticker campaign has been self-described as an "experiment in phenomenology."OBEY Manifesto, Shepard Fairey, 1990.
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