Interviewer Robert Harrison starts the discussion expressing the excitement of applied, humanistic phenomenology, i.e. as it was used by existentialists like Sartre. Sheehan says that while there's not much in the way of modern, creative phenomenology going on now, there are plenty of philosophers who use Husserl and Heidegger as a launching point for their own (apparently not phenomenological) philosophies, and that in particular you can't understand Heidegger unless you understand him as a phenomenologist, as opposed to someone just concerned with ontology, i.e. metaphysics, which is what you might think given his discussions of the ancient Greeks and his emphasis on "Being."
Here's a little quiz for you to see if you got it: What does it mean to say that what Aristotle is to Plato, Heidegger is to Husserl?
Here's the Entitled Opinions home page.
-Mark Linsenmayer
thanks for this link, lots of interesting stuff there including an interview with Nehamas whose book The Art of Living: Socratic Reflections from Plato to Foucault might be of interest to folks here.
thanks for sharing this discussion. Entitled opinions usually produces quality discussions on philosophical topics. I especially enjoy the episode on Heidegger from a few years back. PEL should consider doing an episode on Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics.
or one could ask who is Aristotle to Heidegger:
http://www.personal.psu.edu/cpl2/blogs/digitaldialogue/2010/06/digital-dialogue-34-heidegger-on-aristotle.html#idc-container
pardon the play on words, this is a good series of interviews/dialogues from a Dean and philo prof @ PSU.
his talk with John Lysaker on Emerson and Self-Culture might be of particular interest in these parts.
http://www.personal.psu.edu/cpl2/blogs/digitaldialogue/2009/11/digital-dialogue-16-emerson-and-self-culture.html
I forget who it was but somebody described Husserl as the last of the great Cartesians. This episode really helped me appreciate the meaning of that description. Husserl’s quest for certainty, for scientific, mathematical and logical certainty seems so unreasonable, so far-fetched and hyper-rationalistic. Or is it just me?
If you’ll forgive the expression, that sort of tight-assed philosophizing sits (with sphincter clenched) in stark contrast to William James’s style, who is said to be something like an American phenomenologist. The point of his pragmatism, in fact, was “to loosen up our theories,” to treat our philosophies as hypotheses, as projects for further work and NOT as “intellectual resting places”.
Husserl and James can both wear the label (phenomenologist) in some sense, but temperamentally and stylistically they are quite the odd couple.
Thanks, Mark.
there is some argument about whether phenomenology is properly understood as being a matter of a subject (say 1st person experience of phenomena) or a method, but it would be good to remember the historical context of these writers and especially the respective state of the sciences of their times, James was actually quite taken with the newly developing sciences of his day (much like his philosophical mentor Peirce) and while he was unlikely to adopt any one method as necessary he was not opposed to rigor. It’s very hard to do much work with James apart from waxing philosophical while husserlian inspired phenomenology is alive and well in fields like neurophenomenology:
http://www.ummoss.org/
Well, yes, James was a scientist (Earned a Harvard degree in Medicine and wrote a a textbook on psychology) before he was a philosopher. But in the latter role his central aim was to push back against what he called “logic-chopping” or “vicious abstractionism”. As the James scholar Charlene Seigfried puts it, intellectualism “became vicious already with Socrates and Plato, who deified conceptualization and denigrated the ever-changing flow of experience, thus forgetting and falsifying the origin of concepts as humanly constructed extracts from the temporal flux.” And it is James’s emphasis on the immediate flux of experience that makes him a kind of phenomenologist.
I’m pretty sure that your last point – that it’s hard to do anything with James’s work these days – is not quite true. Eugene Taylor, for example, thinks James was about 150 years ahead of his time, that we are still catching up with him. Scholars like Taylor tend to take things in a different direction, however. Rather than a neurological approach (James was opposed to that sort of thing, calling it “medical materialism”), they tend to be Buddhism as a form of psychology. James used to bring guest lecturers to Harvard and as one of the Buddhist lecturers was leaving the hall afterward James stopped him and said, basically, “wow, you’re a much better psychologist than I’ll ever be!” One scholar, David Scott, even went to far as to say that the original Buddha was a pragmatist and a radical empiricist, which are James’s two main doctrines. So there is quite a lot being done with James and there is no reason to think that’s going to end anytime soon. If Taylor is right, most of the work to be done is still ahead.
concerns about misplaced concreteness (reification) are not contrary to disciplined methodologies, the pragmatist tenant of fallibilism was deeply informed by experimental methods/theories.
I’m afraid I have never heard of Taylor so maybe you could tell me what part of James approach he is using that isn’t already found in Buddhist sources or say Schelling.
http://www.cspeirce.com/menu/library/aboutcsp/callaway/schelling.htm
its been a while i think since anynoe read this, but if anynoe does read this thread ever again and can answer my question, it would be greatly appreciated. i adore R.A.W., but am having trouble understanding or imagining an un-objective world. i would like to, but, se la vie. my question how is the absence of an objective world not solopsistic? if we are all generators of individual reality tunnels, does nothing exist outside of our nervous system?
not quite sure what you asking but for phenomenologies there is of course a world/environs outside of our bodies but we given that don’t have unmediated access to it (don’t have an objective/God’s-eye perspective) this raises questions of how best to try and gain a clearer understanding of our first person experiences of being-in-the-world-of-objects and various methods/disciplines have been developed to try and get a better grasp of our situations.