Phenomenological Approaches to Consciousness

I will address a general question raised by Daniel Dennett regarding the efficacy of Husserl’s phenomenological approach to the science of consciousness. That is, Husserl attempts to establish a new science of consciousness and experience, but Dennett sees this as an entirely first-person approach with no recourse to verification beyond mere introspection and therefore ineffective as a legitimate science—it can tell us nothing of consciousness. Dennett offers a defense of the traditional scientific third-person approach, in contrast to what he argues is Husserl’s “autophenomenology”. I will respond to Dennett through Dan Zahavi who accuses Dennett of misconstruing Husserl’s method as entirely an introspective enterprise. With the help of Zahavi’s understanding of Husserl’s intersubjectivity, I will assess whether the notions of inner and outer are appropriate to describe what Husserl is attempting in his “new science”, and whether “introspection” is really what Husserl has in mind while in the phenomenological attitude.

Everything around seems phenomenal and appears driven by a conscious experience. Everything is an experience and for the experiencer appears eternally phenomenal and subjective. The conscious 'How' can be easily explained by the many reductive based advances in science and other disciplines, but the conscious 'Why' persists as phenomenal. The 'How' however can be reduced only to a precise limit i.e. the limits of scientific exploration, beyond which it persists to be phenomenal. This paper is an inter-disciplinary understanding of how science and phenomenology can complement each other to help decipher and conform to the hypothetical approach, that everything around is phenomenal.

Phenomenology is the study of structures of consciousness as experienced from the firstperson point of view. The central structure of an experience is its intentionality, its being directed toward something, as it is an experience of or about some object. An experience is directed toward an object by virtue of its content or meaning (which represents the object) together with appropriate enabling conditions. Phenomenology as a discipline is distinct from but related to other key disciplines in philosophy, such as ontology, epistemology, logic, and ethics. Phenomenology has been practiced in various guises for centuries, but it came into its own in the early 20th century in the works of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and others. Phenomenological issues of intentionality, consciousness, qualia, and first-person perspective have been prominent in recent philosophy of mind.  1. What is Phenomenology?  2. The Discipline of Phenomenology  3. From Phenomena to Phenomenology

Andrea Staiti (Editor). Commentary on Husserl's "Ideas I", pp. 95-118

[Section II, Chapter 2, ‘Consciousness and Natural Actuality.’] In the paragraphs immediately following the introduction of the method of phenomenological epoché (§§34-46) in Ideas, rather than applying this new method, Husserl provides a series of psychological descriptions on the basis of psychological reflection. This is surprising for at least two reasons. First, since Husserl has already distinguished phenomenology from psychology (both empirical and eidetic), it is not clear why he would engage in psychological reflection and description at this point in the book. Further, the psychological descriptions that Husserl provides in these paragraphs are of consciousness — specifically, of our consciousness of something. But, as Husserl indicates at several points in the first book of Ideas, and as he more fully develops in the 1912 pencil manuscript of the second book of Ideas, the object of psychology is, strictly speaking, not consciousness but the soul (Seele) considered as reality (Realität). In this chapter, I first develop how these two interpretative difficulties can be overcome if we consider the overall aim of the second chapter — namely, to establish that consciousness has its own kind of being and hence essence. Then, I elucidate how exactly Husserl establishes this in this chapter and show how it entails a radical rethinking of the distinction between and relation of consciousness and world.

APLIKOVANÁ PSYCHOLOGIE/APPLIED PSYCHOLOGY, 2017

René Descartes in his Meditations on the first philosophy pointed out that our inner being and consciousness are given to us in a more immediate and certain way than the existence of nature. The gap between the soul and the world, however, could not be bridged by Descartes otherwise than through the so-called psychophysical dualism. The primary holding and evaluation of the “psychical” as independent of the physical environment – i.e. from the aspect of Husserl’s phenomenology persistence in a transcendental attitude, during the development of modern philosophy turned out to be increasingly untenable. The soul, objectively understood, came to be described in the same objective-exact way as nature and the road to empirical psychology became wide open. Husserl’s inclination toward the so-called pure psychology, even when supported by transcendental subjectivity, provided a stimulus to the development of a wide phenomenological stream, which tried to find the legitimacy of its claims in a return to the original meeting of man and things within the pre-scientific natural world.

Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy

This review covers the metaphysical and methodological problems associated with a study of consciousness while adequately distinguishing between the two. We explicated the primary tool required for an articulate and genuine description of experience. It has also shown how contemporary specialists have attempted to deal with both the metaphysical and methodological problems. Lastly, we properly situated the classical theorists in relation to the current practitioners in order to specify the role of phenomenology within the realm of cognitive science.

The topic of this paper is phenomenology. How should we think of phenomenologythe discipline or activity of investigating experience itselfif phenomenology is to be a genuine source of knowledge? This is related to the question whether phenomenology can make a contribution to the empirical study of human or animal experience. My own view is that it can. But only if we make a fresh start in understanding what phenomenology is and can be.

Angelaki, 2005