Continental · 1900 – today
Phenomenology
Philosophy should begin by describing experience exactly as it is lived, setting aside assumptions about what lies behind it.
How do things show up for us in experience?
Around 1900, psychology was claiming logic and knowledge as its own territory, and positivists held that only natural science gives truth. Husserl, trained in mathematics and taught by Franz Brentano, wanted a rigorous science of consciousness itself, under the rallying cry “back to the things themselves”.
All consciousness is consciousness of something (intentionality), so mind and world are always given together. If we suspend (“bracket”) the question of whether things exist independently, we can describe the structures through which anything appears at all: perception, time, the body, other people. Those structures come before, and underlie, the theories of science.
- Consciousness is always directed at something.
- Suspend assumptions and describe what appears.
- Lived experience comes before scientific abstraction.
Through Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and Levinas it became the backbone of continental philosophy, and it still informs cognitive science, nursing and studies of embodiment.
Thinkers
1859–1938Edmund HusserlMoravian-born mathematician turned philosopher, founder of phenomenology1889–1976Martin HeideggerGerman philosopher of Being, compromised by his Nazi party membership1908–1961Maurice Merleau-PontyFrench phenomenologist of perception and the lived body1906–1995Emmanuel LevinasLithuanian-born French philosopher of ethics as first philosophyKey texts
Where it came from
Grew out ofScholasticismThrough Franz Brentano, the scholastic idea of the mind’s “intentional” directedness became phenomenology’s starting point.Grew out of
RationalismHusserl recast Descartes’s search for certainty in the thinking subject as a science of consciousness.
What it led to
Carried on byExistentialismSartre and Beauvoir used Husserl’s and Heidegger’s method to describe freedom, anxiety and bad faith; Being and Nothingness is subtitled “an essay on phenomenological ontology”.Carried on by
HermeneuticsHeidegger made understanding a basic way of human existence, and Gadamer and Ricœur built on that.Opposed by
Post-structuralismDerrida’s early work deconstructed Husserl’s reliance on meaning made present in the living voice.Opposed by
Logical positivism (Vienna Circle)Carnap’s 1932 essay on eliminating metaphysics used Heidegger’s “the Nothing itself nothings” as its prime example of a meaningless sentence.Borrowed by
Kyoto SchoolSeveral members studied with Husserl or Heidegger, and Nishitani read Heidegger’s analysis of nothingness alongside Buddhist emptiness.