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Created: August 3, 2003
Latest Update: August 3, 2003
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu

Robert Sokolowski's Introduction to Phenomenology

Site Copyright: Jeanne Curran and Susan R. Takata and Individual Authors, August 2003.
"Fair use" encouraged.

Sokolowski, Robert. Introduction to Phenomenology Paragraphs for interpretation:

I define phenomenology by ocating it within our present historical situation. Modern philosophy has two major elements, political philosophy and epistemology, and phenomenology explicitly addresses only the latter. However, because it considers human reason as ordered toward reason and truth, phenomenology can also address in an indirect way modern issues in political theory. If human beings are specified by the ability to be truthful, then politics and citizenship take on a distinctive sense.

In considering reason as teleologically geared toward truth, phenomenology resembles Thomistic philosophy, which represents a pre-modern understanding of being and the mind, but it differes from Thomism in that it does not approach philosophy from within biblical revelation. . . .

"In phenomenology, "intending" means the conscious relationship we have to an object." at p. 8.

In the Cartesian, Hobbesian, and Lockean traditions, which dominate our culture, we are told that when we are conscious we are primarily aware of ourselves and our own ideas. Consciousness is taken to be like a bubble or an enclosed cabinet; the mind comes in a box. Impressions and concepts occur in this enclosed space, in this circle of ideas and experiences, and our awareness is directed toward them, not directly toward the things "outside."

More soon . . .