Subjectivity and the First-Person Perspective

Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology, 2012

Phenomenology has remained a sheltering place for those who would seek to understand not only their own “first person” experiences but also the first person experiences of others. Recent publications by renowned scholars within the field have clarified and extended our possibilities of access to “first person” experience by means of perception (Lingis, 2007) and reflection (Zahavi, 2005). Teaching phenomenology remains a challenge, however, because one must find ways of communicating to the student how to embody it as a process rather than simply to learn about it as a content area. Another challenge issues from the fact that most writings on applied phenomenology emphasize individual subjectivity as the central focus, while offering only indirect access to the subjectivity of others (for example, by way of analyzing written descriptions provided by the individual under study). While one finds in the literature of psychotherapy plentiful elucidations of the “we-experience” within which therapists form impressions of their clients’ experience, there is still need for a more thoughtful clarification of our rather special personal modes of access to the experience of others in everyday life. This paper will present “second person perspectivity” as a mode of resonating with the expressions of others and will describe class activities that can bring students closer to a lived understanding of what it means to be doing phenomenology in the face of the other.

Phenomenology, Organisation, and Technology, 2008

There is no unique and definitive definition of phenomenology. It is rather a method and an experience always open and always renewing itself. Phenomenology involves a change in the “sense of the world”: everything acquires its sense and value only when it becomes the content of the lived experience of the subject correlated to his intentional acts. This is the main thesis of the phenomenological method aiming at overcoming the traditional opposition between rationalism and empiricism. Starting from Husserl, the father of this approach, the history of phenomenology undertook different and unexpected developments which in some cases were rather far away from Husserl’s original thought. In the U.K. attention has been given to an analytical-epistemological phenomenology focused on the relationship between intentionality and logical semantics. In France it is mainly an anthropological-existential phenomenology. In Germany an hermeneutic phenomenology was developed, mainly by Heidegger and Gadamer. Regardless of these raw distinctions, a big question is so far unresolved: how to reconcile the phenomenological/existential stance claiming for the irreducibility of each lived experience and the scientific paradigm? Is it possible to imagine brain mechanisms and physiological systems explaining the endless mysteries and manifold paradoxes of the human being?Phenomenology claims that a human being can never be considered as an object, as if he was a natural thing; rather the task is to understand him as the focus of a relationship linking subjective attitudes to the objects showed by the experience. In this sense, an important contribution was Merleau-Ponty’s view that man is not something psychic joined to an organism, but a sort of fluctuation of the existence that sometimes is a bodily one, sometimes refers to personal acts. Consequently, he proposes to reinstate in the existence both its “physiological” and “psychic” sides both being intentionally oriented towards a world.

The Routledge Companion to Phenomenology. Edited by Sebastian Luft, Soren Overgaard Published September 29th 2011 by Routledge – 720 pages, 2011

2016

Methods of Analysis, 2021

In many ways, phenomenological analysis is the epitome of analysis, with its procedure of “eidetic reduction.” Hence, it is not clear why Merleau-Ponty (1956) thought otherwise, stressing that phenomenology “is a question of description, and not of explanation or analysis” (p. 60). Certainly for phenomenologists, “the world is there before any analysis,” but he insists that “the relation with the world as it utters itself indefatigably in us is nothing which can be rendered clearer by analysis” (pp. 61, 67). Perhaps Merleau-Ponty was over-reacting to the fabrication of an analytic-continental divide in philosophy during the 1950s and 1960s. After all, phenomenology was considered to be constituent to “continental philosophy.” The truth is that Husserl, who passed away in 1938, would never have juxtaposed phenomenology against “analytic philosophy.”

Consciousness Inside and Out: Phenomenology, Neuroscience, and the Nature of Experience, 2013

Ruth Millikan argues that there is no "legitimate phenomenology of experience": that there is no method-not even a fallible or partially reliable one-for accurately describing our experiences in the first-person. The reason is that there is no method for checking that the ideas we think we have about experience are about anything at all. Like phlogiston, there may be no such things as the properties we take experience to have.

I argue for the legitimacy of an approach to the philosophy of consciousness I call "analytic phenomenology," by contrasting it with other views with respect to what I see as a basic issue—namely, the use of first-person reflection. Specifically, I take as foils Daniel Dennett’s self-styled “hetero”-phenomenology and Eric Schwitzgebel’s skepticism about introspection.

Continental Philosophy Review, 2021

Phenomenology + Pedagogy

What follows may prove to be a discussion at cross-purposes and so in the end more of a monologue than a genuine contribution to communal self-understanding. Osborne invites us to share in a "dialogue" on "the relation between research practice and phenomenological metatheory" (in press, p. 2),' and having been concerned with aspects of this issue myself(cf. Burch, 1989, 1990, in press), Tam happy to join in. Yet I come to the topic from the other direction to Osborne, that is, not as a prac tioner in a specific domain of human science research confronted with therapeutic exigencies, fending off positivist critics, and looking to phe nomenolo for "metatheoretical" support and methodological guidance, but as one confirmed in the broad tradition of philosophical discourse with its own inherited concerns, rules of propriety, and pretensions to totality, who approaches human science research specifically as a topic of philosophy. Whether this difference in orientation precludes a genuine common ground remains to be seen. One can only ever properly speak from the place where one is at, and leave others to do likewise, which at any rate is a precondition of genuine dialogue. "I speak according to my best lights principally before myself," Husserl writes, "but in that man ner also before others" (1970, p. 18).

2020

I distinguish between naïve phenomenology and really existing phenomenology, a distinction that is too often ignored. As a consequence, the weaknesses inherent in naïve phenomenology are mistakenly attributed to phenomenology. I argue that the critics of naïve phenomenology have unwittingly adopted a number of precisely those weaknesses they wish to point out. More precisely, I shall argue that Dennett's criticism of the naïve or auto-phenomenological conception of subjectivity fails to provide a better understanding of the intended phenomenon. Key words naïve phenomenology . Husserlian phenomenology . introspection . subjectivity . heterophenomenology Naïve phenomenology Consider a philosophical position, naïve phenomenology, described by the following set of claims. Consciousness is subjective. It involves the first-person point of view. Because consciousness is subjective it cannot be studied from an objective, scientific and third-person point of view. Standard empirical sc...

Phenomenology + Pedagogy

Synthese, 2017

In this essay I address the question, " What is the subject matter of phenomenological research? " I argue that in spite of the increasing popularity of phenomenology, the answers to this question have been brief and cursory. As a result, contemporary phenomenologists lack a clear framework within which to articulate the aims and results of their research, and cannot easily engage each other in constructive and critical discourse. Examining the literature on phenomenology's identity, I show how the question of phenomenology's subject matter has been systematically neglected. It has been overshadowed by an unending concern with phenomenology's methodological identity. However, an examination of recent contributions to this literature reveals that a concern with articulating phenomenology's subject matter has gradually increased, although such articulations remain preliminary. In light of this, I delineate, define, and illustrate three layers of phenomenological research, which I term " existentials, " " modes, " and " prejudices. " While the delineation of these layers is drawn primarily from classical phenomenological texts, they are defined and illustrated through the use of more contemporary literature. Following the articulation of this subject matter, I briefly consider some of the debates—both foundational and applied—that can be facilitated by the adoption of this framework.

The Reach of Reflection: Issues for Phenomenology’s Second Century, 2001

In this chapter I argue that the two modernist traditions of phenomenology and analytic philosophy stem from common roots. Both began with the same conception of philosophy as an a priori descriptive discipline and both rejected absolute idealism and psychologism. Analytic philosophy, however, in the main, especially under the influence of Quine, has been drawn toward J1atllralism, whereas Husserl's critique of naturalism has meant that phenomenology has moved in an anti-naturalistic and in fact explicitly transcendental direction. Husserl's wide-ranging critique of naturalism has particular relevance for analytic philosophy seeking to overcome a reductive scientism, and conversely, recent developments in the philosophy of mind and in the cognitive sciences could provide much material for phenomenologists who want to follow Husserl's program of identifying the ABC of consciousness. In tlle 21" century, the two main streams of contemporary thought could again merge into a single tradition.