Abstract
The preceding account of the Phenomenological Movement could easily have given the impression that all there is to phenomenology is its history as expressed in the multifarious and fluid ideas of sundry phenomenologists. Such an impression contains even a considerable amount of truth. Phenomenology’ not only shows vast differences in its manifestations, but it has served as a tool for extremely divergent enterprises. Besides, this impression may be highly salutary in counteracting the widespread tendency to treat phenomenology as a closeknit school and to judge it by the deeds, or more frequently misdeeds, of some of its more peripheral figures. But this situation offers no excuse for dodging the persistent question of the more systematically-minded reader: What, after all this, is phenomenology? While our long story contains plenty of reasons why a meaningful answer cannot be given in one brief sentence, it calls all the more for a determined effort to satisfy a legitimate and even welcome demand for enlightenment and clarification. Even if there were as many phénoménologies as phenomenologists, there should be at least a common core in all of them to justify the use of the common label.
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Notes
Max Sender’s posthumous papers include a suggestive phenomenological study on effecting (wirken) in his fragment on “Phänomenologie und Kausalerkenntnis”; G. W. X, 475–92. Considerable groundwork for a phenomenological approach is available in works that do not use the label, such as
C. D. Broad, Scientific Thought. London: Kegan Paul, 1927, pp. 162–6.
G. F. Stout, Mind and Matter. New York: Macmillan, 1931, pp. 15–20 and Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume XIV (1935), 54–58.
A. C. Benjamin, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science. New York: Macmillan, 1937, pp. 323–331.
Wolfgang Köhler, whose The Place of Value in a World of Facts (New York: Liveright, 1938) is based upon a partial phenomenology, gives elements of a “phenomenology of force” under this very name (pp. 341 ff.).
On the historical misunderstandings of this principle see W. M. Thorburn, “The Myth of Occam’s Razor” in Mind XXVII (1918), 345–353.
For an original and perceptive phenomenological study of the cause-effect relation see Maurice Mandelbaum, The Anatomy of Historical Knowledge. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977, Part II.
See, e.g., his account in Carl Murchison, ed., History of Psychology in Autobiography IV (Clark University Press, 1940), pp. 228 ff. and La Perception de la causalité, Louvain, Publications Universitaires, 1946
also Jean Piaget’s “The Child’s Idea of Force” (for whom force is defined as “alive, efficient, substantial”) in The Child’s Conception of Physical Causality (1930), Chapter V.
For a discussion of the epistemological problems connected with the “Subjectivity” of phenomenology, see my paper “How Subjective is Phenomenology?”, Doing Phenomenology, pp. 72–79.
“By analysis they (the analytic philosophers) meant something which, whatever precise description of it they chose, at least involved the attempt to rewrite in different and in some way more appropriate terms those statements which they found philosophically puzzling” (J. O. Urmson, Philosophical Analysis. Oxford: Clarendon, 1956, p. vii).
Ibid., pp. 146–162.
“The Puzzle of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s ‘Phänomenologie’ (1929-?)” (1968), now, with Supplement 1979, in The Context of the Phenomenological Movement, pp. 202–228.
“A Plea for Excuses”, Philosophical Papers, 1961, p. 130.
See Harold Durfee, ed.,Linguistic Analysis and Phenomenology. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976.
Of particular interest is J. S. Mill’s chapter in his System of Logic Book IV Ch. 1 (Of Observation and Description). See also E. Husserl, Ideas, §§ 73–75, and S. H. Toulmin and K. Baier, “On Describing,” Mind 61 (1952), 13–38.
Scientific Thought, p. 163 f.
Mind and Matter, Chapter II.
An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, Section VII, Part II.
“De primae philosophiae emendatione” (Opera, ed. Gerhardt IV, 649). - His continuation, however (“It includes effort and thus passes into operation of itself, requiring no aids, but only the removal of hindrance”), is phenomenologically much more dubious.
W. E. Johnson’s substantially identical conception of “intuitive induction” (Logic, Part II, Chapter VIII) was not made public until 1922.
See my “Epoche und Reduktion bei Pfänder und Husserl” in Pfänder-Studien, ed. H. Spiegelberg und E. Ave-Lallemant. English version as “Is the Phenomenological Reduction indispensable? Husserl’s and Pfändern Replies” (1973), now, with Supplement 1979, in The Context of the Phenomenological Movement, pp. 62–82.
For a lucid critical discussion see Harald Delius, “Descriptive Interpretation,” PPR XIII (1953), 305–323.
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Spiegelberg, H. (1994). The Essentials of the Phenomenological Method. In: The Phenomenological Movement. Phaenomenologica, vol 5/6. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-7491-3_17
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