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Created: May 1, 2003
Latest Update: May 1, 2003
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu

Index on Phenomenology

Definitions of Phenomenology:

• Defintion in fairly readable language. Distinguishes between Kant's, Husserl's, and modern definitions. From Phenomenology Online. Monday, July 21, 2003.

• Definition of hermeneutic phenomenology in accessible language. From Phenomenology Online. Monday, July 21, 2003.

  Phenomenology Online: Compiled by Dr, Max van Manen. University of Alberta, Canada.

  Phenomenology and Cognitive Science:

• Online papers on consciousness Compiled by David Chambers, Director. University of Arizona, the Center for consciousness Studies.

  • What is Phenomenology? Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology.

    "The phenomenological movement began with Husserl's Logische Untersuchungen (1900-1901). This work is most famous for its attack on psychologism, which is the attempt to absorb logic into empirical psychology. Besides logic, this work reflects interest in mathematics, language, perception, and various types of re-presentation (e.g., expectation, imagination, and memory), and also describes how ideal objects might be made evident and known.

    "Because of its reflective, evidential, and descriptive approach to both encounterings and objects as encountered, the beginning of phenomenology is sometimes characterized as "descriptive phenomenology." . . . Realistic phenomenology emphasizes the search for the universal essences of various sorts of matters, including human actions, motives, and selves. . . . .

    "Constitutive phenomenology's founding text is Husserl's Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie I of 1913. This work extends Husserl's scope to include philosophy of the natural sciences, . . .

    "Existential phenomenology is often traced back to Martin Heidegger's Sein und Zeit of 1927, the project of which was actually to use an analysis of human being as a means to fundamental ontology that went beyond the regional ontologies described by Husserl.

    "Hannah Arendt, influenced by Karl Jaspers (as was Heidegger), seems to have been the first existential phenomenologist after Heidegger. It is also arguable that existentialist phenomenology appeared in Japan with Miki Kyoshi and Kuki Shuzou's early work in the late twenties. However, this third period of the movement took place chiefly in France. The early Emmanuel Levinas interpreted Husserl and Heidegger together and helped introduce phenomenology into France. This period included Gabriel Marcel and was led in the 1940s and 1950s by Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Jean-Paul Sartre.

    "This . . . tendency is concerned with topics such as action, conflict, desire, finitude, oppression, and death. Arendt contributed to political theory and the problematics of ethnicity, Beauvoir raised the issue of gender and old age, Merleau-Ponty creatively appropriated Gestalt psychology in his description of perception and the lived body, and Sartre focused on freedom and literature.

    "Existential phenomenology has recently been continued by such figures as John Compton, Michel Henry, Maurice Natanson, and Bernhard Waldenfels. . . .

    " Hermeneutical phenomenology chiefly stems from the method set forth in Heidegger's Sein und Zeit, according to which human existence is interpretative. The first manifestation of this fourth tendency is Hans-Georg Gadamer's Platons dialektische Ethik (1931), and it reemerged after Germany's National-Socialist period with his Wahrheit und Methode (1960). Other leaders include Paul Ricoeur, Patrick Heelan, Don Ihde, Graeme Nicholson, Joseph J. Kockelmans, Calvin O. Schrag, Gianni Vattimo, and Carlo Sini.

    "The issues addressed in hermeneutical phenomenology include simply all of those that were added to the agenda in the previous tendencies and stages. What is different is the emphasis on hermeneutics or the method of interpretation. This tendency has also included much scholarship on the history of philosophy and has had extensive influence on the human sciences.

    "While realistic and constitutive phenomenology arose and first flourished in Germany before and after World War I and existential phenomenology spread out from France after World War II, hermeneutical phenomenology appears to have been most actively pursued in the United States during the 1970s and 1980s.

  • The Basic Problems of Phenomenology Martin Heidegger. Actual text excerpt on line. Marxists.org.

  • Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences Background.

    "Evan Thompson (Philosophy, York University, Toronto) organized an international and interdisciplinary group of researchers to discuss how various methodologies in phenomenology and cognitive science can address the philosophical issue of intersubjectivity and knowledge of other minds."

  • Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences Neurophenomenology.

    "Neurophenomenology takes seriously the importance of examining experience in first-person descriptions. According to neurophenomenology lived experience and its natural biological basis are linked by mutual constraints provided by their respective descriptions (Varela, 1996)."