Abstract
In this paper I contrast Husserlian transcendental eidetic phenomenology with some other views of what phenomenology is supposed to be and argue that, as eidetic, it does not admit of being ‘naturalized’ in accordance with standard accounts of naturalization. The paper indicates what some of the eidetic results in phenomenology are and it links these to the employment of reason in philosophical investigation, as distinct from introspection, emotion or empirical observation. Eidetic phenomenology, unlike cognitive science, should issue in a ‘logic’ of consciousness. Instead of being derived from empirical investigations its results should consist of high-level background conditions that are necessary for cognitive science to be possible in the first place. To negate these conditions is to be faced with certain types of ‘material’ contradictions. Some analogies with science – mathematical science – are used to develop the argument.
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Notes
A statement with this degree of specificity, given the generalizations possible, would typically not be regarded as a ‘theorem’ proper in mathematics, but what we want to emphasize is the mode of thinking that issues in proof. This is a version of a simple but instructive example, chosen especially for philosophers with little background in mathematics, due to Robert Tragesser (unpublished), who presents it as the ‘Firefly Theorem’ in his paper “Studying Mathematical Proof: Some Phenomenological Considerations Toward the Creation of a General Theory of Proof”. Tragesser’s interesting paper focuses on mathematics, but not on findings in eidetic transcendental phenomenology or on how, as eidetic, it is analogous to mathematics. Thanks to Robert for letting me use his example.
We should also note that some idealities are obtained by ‘idealization’, such as the objects of Euclidean geometry which are idealized points, lines, planes, triangles, spheres and such, but that not all idealities involve ‘idealization’ in this sense. What Husserl calls ‘morphological essences’ (see below) are idealities that do not involve this kind of idealization.
In Ideas I sections 71–75 Husserl discusses some of the ways in which mathematics differs from the eidetics of mental phenomena.
Husserl contrasts transcendental logic with formal logic in many places in his writings. See, for example, Husserl 1969. In Husserl 1982, formal ontology is distinguished from regional ontologies and phenomenology itself is referred to as a regional ontology pertaining to consciousness. Although I do not have space here to go into all of the details involved in this distinction, a number of the relevant points will emerge in the argument below.
See Smith and McIntyre 1982, Chapter 1, section 2, for good discussions on the perspectival and conception-dependent nature of consciousness. This book also contains excellent material on the noema and the notion of horizon.
With Thomas Bever in the psychology department at Columbia University
Owen Flanagan (Flanagan 1992) provides a description of such an experiment, which I am partially following here, but his comments about ‘phenomenology’ display the pattern of much of recent analytic philosophy of mind in using the term to refer to introspection or first-person reports which are, of course, often unreliable. This usage completely ignores the Husserlian idea of phenomenology.
Tieszen 2011 contains an extended response.
See, e.g., Chapter 1 of Tieszen 2005.
As Petitot puts it, the naturalization of phenomenology can be reduced to implementing algorithms that are based on ‘geometrical descriptive eidetics’ (Petitot 1999, p. 330) Elsewhere in the paper (p. 331) he says he will adopt the strategy that ‘every concept is the name of an unknown algorithm’. Coming from Petitot, this is somewhat puzzling because he has also written in a Husserlian vein on what he calls ‘transcendental platonism’. It is puzzling because one might think the platonism, with its abstract objects or concepts, could not be fully captured in algorithms. Otherwise, the platonism would be eliminable. On the whole, however, I find Petitot’s work on morphological eidetics quite interesting and important.
For much more detail see Tieszen 2011, especially Chapter 8.
I thank Peter Hadreas, Anand Vaidya, and two anonymous referees for Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences for comments on an earlier version of this paper.
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Tieszen, R. Eidetic results in transcendental phenomenology: Against naturalization. Phenom Cogn Sci 15, 489–515 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-015-9428-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-015-9428-9