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II EVALUATIONS OF MEDIEVAL CULTURE

The Renaissance View of the Middle Ages

"Medieval" conveys contempt; to say that some arrangement is "medieval" is to express emphatic disapproval. "Medieval" was a term of disparagement from the beginning. It was invented in the 15th century by the Italian humanists, who believed they were bringing about a rebirth (renascentia) of the ancient and better culture of the Greeks and Romans after a "middle" or intervening period of barbarism, the dark age. According to the humanists the ancient Roman Empire had been destroyed by barbarian invaders such as the Goths and Vandals. The humanists called the culture of the middle ages "Gothic" to suggest its barbarian origin. As indicated above, more recent historians have found two earlier "renaissances", the Carolingian renaissance and the renaissance of the twelfth century; the "dark age" has now shrunk to the period between the "barbarian invasions" and the ninth century.

The "humanists" were so called because of their study of literae humaniores, "more humane literature", the studia humanitatis ("of humanity"). Humanitas was an ancient Roman term with various meanings, including "mental cultivation befitting a man, liberal education, good breeding, elegance of manners or language, refinement" (Lewis and Short, Latin Dictionary). "Befitting a man", suggests a human being fully developed as a human being should be. The other terms the dictionary uses - "liberal" (i.e. appropriate to liber, a free man, as distinct from a slave), "good breeding", "elegance", "refinement" - suggest that the ideal human being is an upper-class gentleman, witty, urbane, at ease, self-confident, a good conversationalist. Nothing laboured, pedantic, technical, incompatible with leisure, fitted this ideal. The literae humaniores therefore did not include the technical treatises of Aristotle, mathematics, astronomy, law or architecture, but only genres that a gentleman might practice: speeches, dialogues, letters, essays, histories, poetry, drama. In recommending the literae humaniores the humanists means to contrast their own gentlemanly studies with the laborious and technical studies of "the schools" (i.e. the universities) fit only for pedants and plebeians - law, medicine, theology and especially Aristotelian philosophy and science. Philosophy was of course a study for gentlemen, but the humanists thought it should be carried on in relaxed style in dialogues, essays or letters, not in laborious "scholastic" genres such as the treatise, disputed question or commentary on a text. The humanists' philosophers were Plato, Cicero and Seneca, not Aristotle.

It is easy to sympathise with some of the points the humanists were making: that education should develop the "humanity" of students, that it should not be excessively specialised or vocational, that educated people should be able to discuss in a relaxed and interesting way a wide range of subjects. On the other hand there are some subjects that cannot be pursued properly except in a technical way. The success of the humanist movement was a set-back to philosophy, mathematics and science (which had begun to develop in the late medieval schools of philosophy).



In fact, the humanists themselves had a vocational interest. They or their pupils sought employment with the Italian cities, and later with other governments, as secretaries and ambassadors; they could write letters, write speeches, converse and were better trained for such things than the graduates of the universities. On one view their campaign against the education of the schools was an attempt to make obsolete and unfashionable the "product" sold in this labour market by the established "firms".

In another view the contest between humanists and scholastics was another phase of the battle that had been going on since Plato's time between philosophy and rhetoric. In his dialogues Gorgias and Phaedrus Plato had criticised the rhetoricians as being concerned not with truth but with persuasion. His contemporary, Isocrates, had in opposition maintained that the study of the art of making speeches should be at the centre of education. Plato himself, and later Aristotle and Cicero, had suggested that the true rhetorician will try to persuade bearers to the truth and must therefore be a student of the truth. But still there remains a contrast between seeking truth for the sake of knowledge and understanding and seeking truth so as to be more persuasive: for that purpose verisimilitude is better than truth. In the ancient world the rhetorical education prevailed. In Plato's Academy and in Aristotle's school, the Lyceum, philosophy, mathematics and science were cultivated together. But during the Hellenistic period most of the schools taught mainly rhetoric and other subjects useful to a speechmaker (including some parts of philosophy). The exception was Alexandria, where all branches of philosophy, mathematics and science were still cultivated. In Hellenistic Rome education was rhetorical, and Latin literature did not include any counterparts of the difficult treatises studied in Alexandria. At the beginning of the medieval period Boethius first translated into Latin some of the treatises of the Alexandrian schools, thereby providing medieval Latins with a basis from which they could appropriate the rest of the philosophical and scientific heritage of the Greeks in the twelfth century when it became available to them from Muslim sources.

The renaissance humanists, then, were reviving the rhetorical culture of ancient Rome, studying Latin works written then and the Greek writings that Cicero and his contemporaries would have read, in opposition to the more technical Greek writings, oriented to understanding rather than to persuasion, which had meanwhile become in translation the basis of education in the medieval universities.

Against some prejudices remaining from the humanist campaign:

The Renaissance of the 15th century did not for the first time revive the whole of Greek and Latin culture. Rather, it transferred interest from the philosophical-scientific culture that had been revived three hundred years earlier to the literary and rhetorical culture which had been revived earlier still in the "Carolingian renaissance" and then displaced during the renaissance of the twelfth century.

For most branches of technical philosophy the 15th century Renaissance was a set-back. The gentlemanly genres - dialogue, letter, essay - imposed by the humanists were less suited to rigorous thinking than were the scholastic genres of question, treatise and commentary.

The Renaissance did not stimulate the development of science; rather it transferred attention from science to literature and may even have been a setback for science. [Note 5]

Medieval Europe was not closed against influence from non-Christian authors. Muslim and ancient Greek philosophy and science were taken up with enthusiasm.

Medieval culture was not entirely religious and otherworldly. The universities were business enterprises responding mainly to secular interest in philosophy, medicine and law with theology a comparatively minor subject.

The influence of Aristotle's authority over the Scholastics was greatly exaggerated by their humanist critics. Aristotle's books were at first opposed by the Church but became university set books because of student demand. It was always understood that much of Aristotle's philosophy was at odds with Christianity. And as we will see, medieval philosophy was much influenced by neo-Platonism.

The Enlightenment

The Renaissance humanists spoke of their age of light succeeding a dark age. The metaphor was taken up again, especially in France, from the late 17th through the 18th century, the Age of Enlightenment. The "enlightenment" movement was directed especially against the Catholic Church and was concerned especially with religious tolerance and other aspects of what is now called liberalism. (Key events in the late 17th century were the revocation of the Edict of Nantes and the repression of Huguenot (Calvinist) churches in France, and the victorious war fought by the Protestant powers of northern Europe led by William of Orange against France - a conflict still remembered in northern Ireland.) The philosophes denounced the religious intolerance of the Catholic Church as medieval and Gothic, reminiscent of the medieval Inquisition.

Did freedom of thought exist in the middle ages? Unless it did, at least in some measure, genuine philosophy can hardly have existed. The answer seems to be that although in the middle ages freedom of thought was not acknowledged as a right, it did exist in some measure, at least in the universities, even in the faculty of theology. To elaborate: (1) Theologians and canon lawyers held that Christian belief was for every human being a duty, though failure to believe (like failure in other duties) might be excused by invincible ignorance. However, the excuse of ignorance could not be available to anyone who had once believed: to abandon the Christian faith after believing it was held to be always wrong and, if persisted in, deserving of punishment. On the other hand, (2) it was held that no one who was not a Christian could rightly be coerced into belief. But (3) non-Christians could not be allowed to try to convert Christians, and (4) could not be allowed to practice their religion in public. On these points see Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 2-2, q. 10 and q. 11.

Point (1) implies that heretics - that is, persons who had once been Catholics but have abandoned part or all of the Christian faith - should be punished. But it was held that to be a heretic it was not enough to believe a heresy (i.e. a doctrine inconsistent with Catholic faith); it was necessary also to be "pertinacious", i.e. not willing to be corrected. A Catholic who adopted an heretical opinion but would abandon it if he or she realised it was heretical was not a heretic. This made freedom of thought possible within limits: although no Catholic could examine Catholic belief to decide whether it was true, it was permissible to think about and discuss questions to which some answers might be heretical without fear of becoming a heretic: it was enough to be ready to be corrected. It became customary for authors to make "protestations" of readiness to be corrected. [Note 6]

Although it was not permissible for Christians to examine the Christian faith and decide that it was not true, it was permissible to construct argumentsaddressed to non-believers to show that Christian belief, or some part of it, was true, and it was also permissible to criticise and refute such arguments. The obligation was to believe, not to have arguments. Christianity (like Judaism and Islam) claimed to be based on revelations from God: that is, adherents believed that God sent messengers (e.g. the prophets, Jesus) to tell mankind things they could not have discovered by unaided natural reasoning - the "gospel" (good news). Many theologians held that there were good reasons for believing these messengers, and that it was possible, once the message was believed, to achieve by reflection some understanding of its content - perfect understanding only in the next life, but some understanding even in this life. But no one was obliged to have good reasons for believing or to attain any particular level of understanding. The obligation was to believe the message. A Christian could therefore say, without falling into heresy or unbelief, that some argument offered to support or explain Christian belief was unsound. [Note 7] Thus there was freedom to criticise such arguments as long as it was not inferred from the failure of some argument that the Christian faith was not true.

Freedom of thought was also helped by the fact that philosophy was recognised as a distinct discipline. The Arts schools taught philosophy and not religion. The text books were written by philosophers who had not been Christians. Theologians were Arts graduates and their writings in theology were full of philosophy (in fact much of the most interesting philosophy in the middle ages is to be found in theological works, such as Thomas Aquinas's Summa theologiae), but they knew which arguments were based on Christian revelation and which were based on "natural reason". Christian writers sometimes wrote books in which the arguments were deliberately restricted to those that natural reason could supply: for instance, Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy, Saint Anselm's Monologion, [Note 8] Proslogion and Cur deus homo, [Note 9] and the first three books of Thomas Aquinas's Summa contra gentiles. [Note 10] The distinctness of philosophy as a discipline did not mean that there were two truths; the conclusions of philosophy were expected to be consistent with the truths of religion. But there was no objection to saying: "This is what philosophical reason seems to establish, though it can't be true since it contradicts the faith"; Ockham and other 14th century writers sometimes write like this.

Finally, the teaching methods in the schools and some of the content of the textbooks encouraged the practice of looking for and trying to answer objections, including objections to things held by faith. In the schools one of the main exercises was disputation, the "question"; some of the students would be given the task of defending some proposition, others the task of objecting to it; after some debate the master would give his answer and reply to the objections that had been brought against it. In preparation for the role of "opponent" senior students would gather a repertory of objections, the stronger the better. Aristotle's works suggest by example and precept [Note 11] that opposing views should be carefully examined.

In the arguments for and against in the first part of a "question" there are many quotations from "authorities", that is writers who were well regarded in the schools; often the authorities are put in opposition to one another. However the decision of the question was not by authority, except on points of faith where the bible and Church councils were decisive authorities (but not Church fathers or other theologians - see Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, part 1, q. 1, art. 8, ad 2). Thomas Aquinas says that authority does not prove demonstratively but forms an opinion through belief (Quodlibet 3, art. 31, ad 1). He says that in disputations in the schools, of which the purpose is to achieve understanding, arguments must be used that get at the root of the truth and show how it is true; if the master "determines" the question merely by authorities the hearer can be certain that the conclusion is correct, but gains no knowledge or understanding and goes empty away (Quodlibet 4, art. 18). Thomas Aquinas's teacher, Albert, in reference to a text from Hilary (one of the Church fathers), wrote: "Some say that Hilary retracted these words . . . But since we have not seen his book of Retractations, it is therefore necessary to bring force to bear (vim facere) on his words in three places . . ." (In 3 Sent., d. 15, a. 10). It was usually possible to adapt an authority to what the writer regarded as the truth. (The texts above are quoted, and the whole issue discussed, in M.D. Chenu, Toward Understanding St. Thomas (Chicago, 1964), chapter 4.)

The nineteenth century

Until the late 17th century higher education in Europe included study of philosophical writings in the medieval tradition, but during the 18th century knowledge of medieval thought became uncommon because medieval culture was regarded with so much contempt. [Note 12] In the 19th century, however, a revival of interest took place. This is explained partly by the revival at that time of the Christian churches, including the Catholic Church; Catholics began to take pride in their medieval heritage, including scholasticism. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, during what was called the "modernist" crisis, Church authorities made the doctrine of Thomas Aquinas the basis of instruction in seminaries to prevent too much compromise with modern philosophical thought. This Catholic revival of interest led to great advances in knowledge of medieval thought, though there was some distortion due to modern religious preoccupations.

A second cause of renewed historical interest in medieval thought was the change of attitudes to history associated with the Saint-Simonian movement in France and Hegelianism in Germany. Under the influence of these movements, historians no longer measured earlier cultures against their own and pronounced them defective where they were different; instead, they tried to see each "period" as an organic whole and as a necessary stage in the development of human history. They therefore tried to understand medieval thought "from within", so to speak, and without being in too much hurry to pass judgment on detached bits of it.

The twentieth century

During this century the revival of interest has continued. Religious reasons for interest in medieval thought have perhaps become less influential. A lot is now known about a large number of medieval writers and about the currents of opinion and controversies of those times. It now seems that there is as much value in the study of medieval philosophy as there is in the study of Greek philosophy. And my approach in this course will be the same as it would be in a course on Greek philosophy: we will read and analyse a selection of texts with the purpose of understanding and evaluating the arguments, without being in any hurry to draw general conclusions, either about the spirit of medieval philosophy or about the philosophical issues with which the texts are concerned.

Reference conventions

References to Plato - e.g. Republic 595a - are by title of dialogue and "Stephanus number" (corresponding to the pages and subdivisions of pages ("a", "b" etc.) of the sixteenth century edition of Plato by Etienne (Stephanus)) - in the example to the text corresponding to Etienne's page 595, subdivision a. Stephanus numbers will be found down the side (or across the top) of modern translations.

References to Aristotle - e.g. Physics VIII.6, 259 a4 - are by title, "book" and chapter, and the "Bekker number" found in the margin of modern translations - in the example to the text corresponding to page 259, left hand column, line 4, in book VIII chapter 6 of Aristotle's Physics in the edition of Immanuel Bekker (Berlin, 1831).

The Bible is referred to by "book", chapter and verse (usually separated by a colon, sometimes by a full stop; sometimes the chapter is in small Roman numerals). Thus 1 Cor. 13:4 (or 1 Cor. xiii.4) is the fourth verse of chapter 13 of the first book called Corinthians. It reads: "Love is patient and kind; love is not jealous or boastful". A list of the books of the bible is usually found in the front of the volume.

Other ancient authors are usually referred to by title, "book" (a subdivision of what we would call a book, i.e. the work) and chapter. Often there are two overlapping chapter divisions, long and short: the long chapter is referred to by small Roman numeral and the short by Arabic numeral. Thus Augustine, Confessions VII.xii.18 refers to book VII chapter xii or (in the other chapter division) chapter 18. Note also: "ff" means "following"; "cf." means "compare"; "viz." means "namely".

Go to Medieval Philosophy

 

- ontology

 

The concept of ontology is generally thought to have originated in early Greece and occupied Plato and Aristotle. Since the word is of Greek origin its current meaning and application are certainly sourced from Greek culture. Aristotle described ontology as "the science of being qua being". The word 'qua' means 'in the capacity of'. According to this theory, then, ontology is the science of being inasmuch as it is being, or the study of beings insofar as they exist. Take anything you can find in the world, and look at it, not as a puppy or a slice of pizza or a folding chair or a president, but just as something that is. More precisely, ontology concerns determining what categories of being are fundamental and asks whether, and in what sense, the items in those categories can be said to "be".

Prior to Greek philosophy these questions were debated in ancient India by many philosophers and thinkers. The names of a few of these have come down to us today. The most notable secular philosophers are Raja (King) Janaka and Rajamuni (Royal Sage) Kapila. Kapila's Samkhya philosophy asked and answers many ontological questions posed by the Greek philosophers. The most distinguishing fact concerning Kapila's ontology is that it is entirely secular in nature.

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Subject, relationship, object

"What exists", "What is", "What am I", "What is describing this to me", all exemplify questions about being, and highlight the most basic problems in ontology: finding a subject, a relationship, and an object to talk about. During the Enlightenment the view of René Descartes that "cogito ergo sum" ("I think therefore I am") had generally prevailed, although Descartes himself did not believe the question worthy of any deep investigation. However, Descartes was very religious in his philosophy, and indeed argued that "cogito ergo sum" proved the existence of God. Later theorists would note the existence of the "Cartesian Other" — asking "who is reading that sentence about thinking and being?" — and generally concluded that it must be God.

This answer, however, became increasingly unsatisfactory in the 20th century as the philosophy of mathematics and the philosophy of science and even particle physics explored some of the most fundamental barriers to knowledge about being. Sociological theorists, most notably George Herbert Mead and Erving Goffman, saw the Cartesian Other as a "Generalized Other," the imaginary audience that individuals use when thinking about the self. The Cartesian Other was also used by Freud, who saw the superego as an abstract regulatory force.

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Body and environment

Schools of subjectivism, objectivism and relativism existed at various times in the 20th century, and the postmodernists and body philosophers tried to reframe all these questions in terms of bodies taking some specific action in an environment. This relied to a great degree on insights derived from scientific research into animals taking instinctive action in natural and artificial settings — as studied by biology, ecology, and cognitive science.

The processes by which bodies related to environments became of great concern, and the idea of being itself became difficult to really define. What did people mean when they said "A is B", "A must be B", "A was B"...? Some linguists advocated dropping the verb "to be" from the English language, leaving "E Prime", supposedly less prone to bad abstractions. Others, mostly philosophers, tried to dig into the word and its usage. Heidegger attempted to distinguish being and existence.

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Being

Existentialism regards being as a fundamental central concept. It is anything that can be said to 'be' in various senses of the word 'be'. The verb to be has many different meanings and can therefore be rather ambiguous. Because "to be" has so many different meanings, there are, accordingly, many different ways of being.

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Social science

Social scientists adopt one of four main ontological approaches: realism (the idea that facts are out there just waiting to be discovered), empiricism (the idea that we can observe the world and evaluate those observations in relation to facts), positivism (which focuses on the observations themselves, attentive more to claims about facts than to facts themselves), and post-modernism (which holds that facts are fluid and elusive, so that we should focus only on our observational claims).

 

- Ontology in philosophy

 

Ontology in philosophy

`Ontology' is originally a technical word of the philosophical jargon, which is now become extremely trendy in AI. If we date the beginning of Western philosophy with Socrates, then ontology is a comparatively new term for a very old set of problems: those concerned with being and existence. Traditionally, the questions on being were to be answered by metaphysics, a discipline which goes back to Aristotle and refers to fourteen treatises dealing with what he called `first philosophy' or `theology'.

Aristotle singled out three main tasks for metaphysics: the discovery of the first principles and causes of reality, the study of being qua being, and the study of the divine, named after Aquinas prima philosophia, metaphysica and theologia respectively. At the end of the seventeenth century Wolff divided metaphysica into metaphysica generalis and metaphysica specialis. Metaphysica generalis was also called ontologia and was meant to investigate the most general concepts of being, while metaphysica specialis was in its turn divided into the three branches of rational theology (the study of God), rational psychology (the study of the soul) and rational cosmology (the study of the body).

Contemporary ontology has its root in Wolff's general metaphysics. However its modern shape is due to the works of Meinong and Husserl. In particular, Husserl's Third Logical Investigation, On the theory of parts and wholes, set the basis for the development of ontology as a rigorous discipline dealing with such concepts as: object, state of affairs, property, genus, species, identity, unity, plurality, number, relation, connection, causation, series, part, whole, dependence, existence, magnitude, boundary, manifold, set, class, etc. Those categories where called by Husserl formal to emphasise the fact that they pertain to the mere form of a being, in contrast to its material realisation, and their investigation was named formal ontology. The counterpart of formal ontology is material ontology: there are many different material ontologies, also called regional ontologies, which investigate the most general concepts peculiar to the different regions of reality. For example, a standard approach would distinguish between spatio-temporally extended things, organic or living entities, minds and cultural objects; the regional ontology of extended things would then deal with the concepts of space, time, causation, movement, and so on. Even though contemporary ontology is often defined as ``the study of being in so far as this is shared in common by all entities, both material and immaterial'' , thus giving the impression that only formal ontology in the husserlian sense is nowadays alive as a research subject, most of the investigations carried out in philosophy of mind and ethics are often cast as debates about the ontological status of such things as pains, sensations of colour, qualia and particular instances of actions. This means that a great effort is also put in achieving well-established material ontologies.

A further noteworthy distinction is the one between descriptive metaphysics and revisionist metaphysics, made by P. F. Strawson in Individuals. The aim of descriptive metaphysics is to elucidate ``the actual structure of our thought about the world'', while revisionist metaphysics claims that our ordinary view of the world is seriously misleading and should be replaced by a radically different one. The opposition between descriptive and revisionist metaphysics shows that an ontology can in principle play two very different roles: on the one hand it can be the result of a process of categorization, thus functioning as an a posteriori account of what there is; on the other hand it can be the general scheme according to which what is there must be organized, thus functioning as an a priori model. In the first case the ontology plays a descriptive role, while in the second it plays a normative role.

Moreover, the `actual structure of our thoughts' actually may vary: most of the time we ascribe different views of the world to different people, for example belonging to different cultures, and the same can be said of different animals. To take into account those differences, descriptive metaphysics should develop into some sort of comparative descriptive metaphysics, and then part of the theoretical problem would be that of recognising and understanding what has to be considered common structure after all.

 

- ontology

 

Ontology is the theory of objects and their ties. The unfolding of ontology provides criteria for distinguishing various types of objects (concrete and abstract, existent and non-existent, real and ideal, independent and dependent) and their ties (relations, dependences and predication).

Contemporary ontology is developed from both philosophers and scientists working in Artificial Intelligence, data-bases theory and natural language processing. We may therefore distinguish ontology as conceptual analysis from ontology as technology. This site is primarily devoted to ontology's contemporary developments, with a secondary focus on its historical development.
The "Table of Formal and Descriptive Ontologists" below (section 2) traces the main intellectual links from the major ontologists of the 19th Century (Bernard Bolzano, Franz Brentano, and Gottlob Frege) to contemporary thinkers; detailed information (bibliographies, abstract of relevant publications, and links to other resources available on the Net) for all the thinkers mentioned in the table will be added in future; less informative links will be improved and substituted by new pages.
Attention will be paid to the relations between ontology, semantics and semiotics, in particular to the theories of predication and reference.
The section "Notes on the history of ontology" will contain historical information, abstracts of relevant works, and bibliographies on traditional topics and past thinkers.
An important feature of this site will be a bibliography about ontology, ontologists and related topics that have not yet been covered in such detail; bibliographical entries will not only include the most important books, but also a selection of articles from about one hundred philosophical reviews.
In order to permit greater understanding of the texts, many relevant entries will be completed with the abstract or brief citations (for some books the index will also be included).
The completion of this job will require many months, because the total amount of entries planned will be approximately 10.000 (more than 5.300 already available) in the following languages, in decreasing order of frequency: English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Latin; the bibliographies will be constantly updated, and new abstracts of existing entries will be added.
I wish to apologize to readers of other languages, not included only because of my foreign language limitations (my mother tongue is Italian), but I hope that students and researchers will find sufficient material for a more thorough study and will enjoy discovering many philosophical treasures, some little known, but in no way less important.
Updated statistics of the site will provide a clear idea of its degree of success; the "What's new" section, placed at the top of this page, will provide a synthesis of the new material. Feedback, criticisms, and suggestions are most welcome.

 

- Phenomenology

 

Husserl and the origin of Phenomenology

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. 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 "aboutness", describes the basic structure of consciousness. Every mental phenomenon or psychological act is directed at an object — the intentional object. Every belief, desire, etc. has an object to which it refers: the believed, the desired. The property of being intentional, of having an intentional object, is the key feature which distinguishes mental/psychical phenomena from physical phenomena (objects), because physical phenomena lack intentionality altogether. Intentionality is the key concept by means of which phenomenological philosophy attempts to overcome the subject/object dichotomy prevalent in modern philosophy.

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Precursors and influences

Skepticism (for the concept of the epoché)

Descartes (Methodological doubt, ego cogito)

British empiricism (Locke, Hume, Berkeley, Mill)

Immanuel Kant and neokantianism (for Husserl's transcendental turn)

Franz Brentano (for the concept of intentionality and the method of descriptive psychology)

Carl Stumpf (psychological analysis, influenced Husserl's early works)

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Phenomenology in the first edition of the Logische Untersuchungen (1900/1901)

In the Logical Investigations his first major work, still under the influence of Brentano, Husserl still conceives of phenomenology as descriptive psychology. Husserl analyzes the intentional structures of mental acts and how they are directed at both real and ideal objects. The Logical Investigations begin with a devastating critique of psychologism i.e. the attempt to subsume the a priori validity of the laws of logic into psychology. Husserl establishes a separate field for research in logic, philosophy and phenomenology, independently from the empirical sciences.

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Transcendental phenomenology after the Ideen (1913)

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).

"noetic" refers to the act of consciousness (believing, willing, hating and loving ...)

"noematic" refers to the object or content (noema) which appears in the noetic acts (respectively the believed, wanted, hated and loved ...).

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. German 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

Realist phenomenology

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, and Nicolai Hartmann.

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Existential phenomenology

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 and 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.

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Heidegger's "phenomenology" and differences with Husserl

While Husserl thought philosophy to be a scientific discipline that had to be founded on a phenomenology understood as epistemology, Heidegger radically changed this view.

Heidegger himself phrases their differences this way:

For Husserl the phenomenological reduction is the method of leading phenomenological vision from the natural attitude of the human being whose life is involved in the world of things and persons back to the transcendental life of consciousness and its noetic-noematic experiences, in which objects are constituted as correlates of consciousness. For us phenomenological reduction means leading phenomenological vision back from the apprehension of a being, whatever may be the character of that apprehension, to the understanding of the being of this being (projecting upon the way it is unconcealed).

According to Heidegger philosophy was not at all a scientific discipline, but more fundamental than science itself. Therefore, instead of taking phenomenology as prima philosophia or foundational discipline, he took it as a metaphysical ontology: "being is the proper and sole theme of philosophy". 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".

(NB: Heidegger quotations are taken from The Basic Problems of Phenomenology (1954), published by Indiana University Press, 1975. Introduction, p. 1 - 23 reproduced at www.marxists.org.)

Existential phenomenologists include: Martin Heidegger (1889 - 1976), Hannah Arendt (19061975), Emmanuel Levinas (1906 - 1995), Gabriel Marcel, Jean-Paul Sartre (1905 - 1980), and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1907 - 1960).

Criticisms of phenomenology

Daniel Dennett has criticized phenomenology on the basis that its explicitly first-person approach is incompatible with the scientific third-person approach, going so far as to coin the term autophenomenology to emphasize this aspect and to contrast it with his own alternative, which he calls heterophenomenology.

 


Date: 2015-01-02; view: 734


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THE MIDDLE AGES. | Pragmatism
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