Husserls phenomenology;
Husserl was influenced my the lectures of Franz Brentano,
who sought to relate philosophy of mind to contemporary experimental enquiry.
The data of consciousness comes in two kinds of phenomena;
Mental – thoughts characterised by having content or immanent objects. Physical
– colours and smells.
Husserl continually focused on mathematics – philosophy of
arithmetic sought to explain our numerical concepts by identifying the mental
acts that were their psychological origin.
This led him to several conclusions – zero an one are not
numbers – which meant that he had to make a distinction between the arithmetic
of small and large numbers. With out minds eye we only see tiny groups, so only
a small part of arithmetic can rest on an intuitive basis. Once we move to
large numbers we move away from intuition into a symbolic realm.
Frege complained it contained confusion between imagination
and thought. Those mental events are subject matter of psychology, which is
private, and could not be the foundation of a public science.
Husserl then abandoned his early psychologism.
Logical investigations;
Logic cannot be derived from psychology; any attempt to do
so must involve a vicious circle since it will have to appeal to logic in the
course of deduction and therefore maintaining separation of logic and
psychology.
Husserl followed continental tradition and saw the
psychological side as a philosophy’s rightful home, stepping away from Frege.
Husserl took over from Bentano and the notion of
intentionality – the idea that what is characteristic of mental phenomena, as opposed to physical phenomena, is that
they are directed to objects.
Husserl believed there were two essential parts to a
thought; it should have content and it should have a possessor – an act of mine
with a particular matter – its ntetional object.
Its was believed that concepts are logical investigations
defined on the basis of psychological items. He proceeded to go further an draw
a line between psychology and epistemology – reinvented as a discipline of
phenomenology.
The aim of phenomenology was to study the data of
consciousness without references to anything that consciousness might tell us,
or might no about the extra-mental world.
The phenomenologist should make a close study of the
psychological phenomena and place in brackets the work of extra-mental objects.
Phenomenological reduction;
Husserl did not assert in ideas that there are no realities
other than phenomena; he left it open to the possibility that there is a world
of non-phenomenal, because he believed we have infallible immediate knowledge
of objects of our own consciousness. While we only have inferential and
conjectural information about the external world.
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The existentialism, of Heidegger;
Heidegger believed that Phenomenology was too half-hearted
and aimed to examine the data of consciousness but employed the ideas of ‘subject’,
‘object’, ‘act’ and ‘content.’ Which are not discovered in consciousness, but
earlier philosophy.
Husserl accepted framework of Descartes – two correlative
realms consciousness and reality. Consciousness was the focus for
phenomenology. Heidegger maintained that phenomenology was to study the subject
of being. The experience that leads us to contrast these as two polar opposites
is the primary phenomenon to be examined.
Heidegger set himself the task of inventing a pristine
vocabulary that would enable us to philosophize in the nude – influenced by
ideas of the pre-Socratic.
Dasein – is a kind of capable asking philosophical questions
and sounds suspiciously like Cartesian ego, but Descartes’ ego was a thinking
thing. Thinking is only a part of Daseins being. It is a caring and thinking
thing.
Only if I care about the world, will I ask questions to give
answers in a form of knowledge claims.
Dasein uses primitive tools to be fully engrossed in a task,
it is ‘ready to hand. The spatiality of the world depends on whether something
is ready to hand or not.
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