Introducing Social/Intersubjective Phenomenology

Sylabus

Introducing Social/Intersubjective Phenomenology - JPB810

Instructor: Prof. Dr Natalia ARTEMENKO (St. Petersburg State University, Russia; Head of the Master's Program of the Russian State Pedagogical University “Phenomenological Philosophy and Contemporary Humanities", Editor-in-chief: «HORIZON. Studies in Phenomenology»)

Guarantor: Dr Janusz Salamon

ETCS: 4 credits Prerequisites: None  

PLACE: Nove Butovice campus (16 PEKARSKA street), for the classroom numbers see BELOW

TIME: 7-10 December 2021:

Tuesday (7.12), 17.00-19.50 (classroom 205)Wednesday (8.12), 18.30-21.20 (classroom 314)Friday (10.12), 12.30-15.20 (classroom 312)   

CONTACTS: N.Artemenko: [e-mail] ; J. Salamon: [e-mail]  

COURSE OUTLINE

Class 1: Phenomenology and twentieth-century European philosophy. What is phenomenology?

Class 2: Franz Brentano: descriptive psychology and intentionality. Brentano and Husserl.

Class 3: Edmund Husserl: founder of phenomenology. Husserl’s Logical Investigations (1900–1901). Husserl’s discovery of the reduction and transcendental phenomenology.

Class 4: Intersubjectivity and the experience of the other (Fremderfahrung). The Crisis of European Sciences: the investigation of the life-world.

Class 5: Martin Heidegger’s transformation of phenomenology. Heidegger’s Being and Time.

Class 6: Maurice Merleau-Ponty: the phenomenology of perception. The body as expression.  

COURSE DESRIPTION AND OBJECTIVES

The term «phenomenology» was first mentioned in New Organon (1764) by Johann Heinrich Lambert as the name of his «doctrine of appearances». Immanuel Kant in a letter to Lambert wrote about «phaenomenologia generalis» as a propaedeutic discipline of metaphysics. In philosophy of Johann Gottlieb Fichte phenomenology acquired the features of the doctrine of the existence of consciousness and its facts. Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) by G. W. F. Hegel was the deployment of the dialectical process of self-development of the spirit, which coincides with its system of self-knowledge and the ascent to the absolute knowledge in the concept. The independent importance the term «phenomenology» assumed in the twentieth century as a symbol of one of the leading areas of modern philosophical thought. By 1889 Franz Brentano used the term to characterize what he called «descriptive psychology». From there Edmund Husserl took up the term for his new science of consciousness, and the rest is history. Phenomenology was launched by Edmund Husserl in his Logical Investigations (1900-1901).

Phenomenology (is derived from the Greek «phainomenon», meaning «appearance»)  is, on the one hand, the designation of a philosophical movement, which originated in the early twentieth century and formed the landscape of the philosophy of the twentieth century, and on the other – the kind of practice of understanding, which tries to penetrate to the roots of human experience and knowledge. Phenomenological practice finds its application not only in philosophy but also in psychology, psychiatry, sociology, historical science, and other disciplines.

The phenomenological movement from the very beginning wasn’t uniform and differed much in the understanding of possible ways of the developing of phenomenology. Heidegger, one of the most capable of Husserl's students, departed from phenomenology of consciousness and developed in Being and Time the fundamental ontology as phenomenology of human Dasein. Heidegger, and independently from him also Shpet, created the hermeneutic phenomenology. Scheler elected anthropology, ethics and religion as the research issues of the phenomenological study, R. Ingarden – aesthetics. A. Schutz developed phenomenological sociology. In the field of phenomenological psychology the most important work was made by Jean-Pierre Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. Phenomenology has had a significant impact on modern philosophical currents such as existentialism, hermeneutics, structuralism and personalism, as well as on the development of psychiatry in the twentieth century. Conductors of this influence became Karl Jaspers, Ludwig Binswanger and Medard Boss.

As a century-old, world-wide, still growing and increasingly multidisciplinary movement, phenomenology is arguably the central movement in twentieth-century philosophy, and its vitality and momentum should carry it far into the twenty-first century.

The course is intended to introduce to students the history of the formation of the phenomenological philosophy and its subsequent development up to the present time. The views of the main representatives of this trend, as well as the basic concepts which are necessary for any phenomenological research, are considered in the course. This plan allows students, on the one hand, to grasp the basic settings of the phenomenological methodology, on the other hand – to see the perspective of the application of this methodology to the various specific areas of scientific knowledge, above all, socio-humanitarian.

We will pay special attention to the problem of the Other, social communication, intersubjectivity. Husserl was solving the problem of intersubjectivity by disclosing the genesis of "the Self" (as occurring in a pair with "the Other"). The importance of discovering the solution to the problem of intersubjectivity cannot be overestimated, due to the fact that phenomenology, aiming at being a science, i.e. the intersubjective knowledge, claims universal apodictic evidence, the one that can be reproduced at any time and by any subject, and, therefore, the very status  of its research depends on finding the solution to the problem of intersubjectivity within the very phenomenology, as such.  

COURSE READINGS

All readings will be available in electronic format available for download from the course website (in the SIS). Principal readings will be drawn from the following books:

Spiegelberg, Herbert. The Context of the Phenomenological Movement. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1981.

Spiegelberg, Herbert, with Karl Schuhmann. The Phenomenological Movement. A Historical Introduction, 3rd edition. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1994.

Cobb-Stevens, Richard. “The Beginnings of Phenomenology: Husserl and his Predecessors”, in Twentieth-Century Continental Philosophy. Routledge History of Philosophy, Vol. VIII. Ed. R.Kearney. London: Routledge, 1994. pp. 5–37.

Zahavi, Dan. Phenomenology: The Basics. Routledge, 2019. (NB!!!!)

Zahavi, Dan. The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Phenomenology, 2012.

Zahavi, Dan. The Oxford Handbook of the History of Phenomenology, 2018.

Franz Brentano: descriptive psychology and intentionality. Brentano and Husserl

Franz Brentano, Deskriptive Psychologie, ed. R.Chisholm and W.Baumgartner (Hamburg: Meiner, 1982), trans. B.Müller, Descriptive Psychology (London: Routledge, 1995)

Franz Brentano, Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt (Hamburg: Meiner, 1973), 3 vols, trans. A.C.Rancurello, D.B.Terrell, and L.L.McAlister, Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, 2nd edition, with new introduction by Peter Simons (London: Routledge, 1995). (esp. Book II).

Rollinger, Robin. Husserl’s Position in the School of Brentano. Utrecht: Dept of Philosophy, Utrecht University, 1996

McAlister, Linda L. Ed. The Philosophy of Franz Brentano. London: Duckworth, 1976.  

Edmund Husserl: founder of phenomenology. Husserl’s Logical Investigations (1900–1901). Husserl’s discovery of the reduction and transcendental phenomenology.

Edmund Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, erster Band, Prolegomena zur reinen Logik, Text der 1. und der 2. Auflage, hrsg. E.Holenstein, Husserliana XVIII (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1975), and Logische Untersuchungen, zweiter Band, Untersuchungen zur Phänomenologie und Theorie der Erkenntnis, in zwei Bänden, hrsg. Ursula Panzer, Husserliana XIX (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1984),  trans. J.N.Findlay, Logical Investigations, 2 vols (New York: Humanities Press, 1970), Vol. 1.

E. Husserl, Ideas pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book, trans. F.Kersten (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1983). (esp. §§ 1-10, 24-38, 47-50, 56-62).

Husserl, Edmund. The Idea of Phenomenology. Trans. W.P.Alston and G. Nakhnikian. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1964.

Bernet, Rudolf, Iso Kern, and Eduard Marbach. An Introduction to Husserlian Phenomenology. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993.  

Intersubjectivity and the experience of the other (Fremderfahrung). The Crisis of European Sciences: the investigation of the life-world.

Edmund Husserl, Cartesianische Medi