Phenomenology: An Introduction

 

 

Introduction

A research strategy provides the overall direction of the research. Deciding between theoretical or empirical research is an important decision in research strategy. Theoretical research requires intensive textual investigation while empirical research requires primary data collection and use of secondary data. Theoretical research is more intellectually demanding and the risk of failure is greater than empirical work.

In empirical research, there are two research orientations: positivistic and phenomenological. The other categorization of empirical research is quantitative and qualitative.

Phenomenology has origins in social sciences, especially in Psychology, where it has developed into a recognized branch of the discipline.

Phenomenology may be understood as a method for investigating the cognitional structure of experience or as a movement in the history of philosophy. 

When considered as a movement in the history of philosophy, Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) is identified as the founder of phenomenology, and when considered as a method Immanuel Kant  (1724-1804) is identified as the progenitor of phenomenology.


Kant obtained the term from Johann H. Lambert’s 1764 New Organon (Neues Organon).  In a 1770 correspondence with Lambert, the outline of Kant’s appropriation of the term into the Critique of Pure Reason can already be seen. According to Kant,

The most universal laws of sensibility play an unjustifiably large role in metaphysics, where, after all, it is merely concepts and principles of pure reason that are at issue. It seems to me a quite particular, although merely negative science, general phenomenology (phaenomenologia generalis), must precede metaphysics. In it the principles of sensibility, their validity and their limitations, would be determined, so that these principles could not be confusedly applied to objects of pure reason (Kant, 1986, p. 59, translation slightly modified; compare Heidegger, 2005, p. 3).

 “Phenomenology,” for Kant, should be understood as the “science” that studies the aspects universal to human experience.

Husserl is identified as the founder of this movement, the perplexities involved in understanding this movement as unified are discussed below. What is clear is that Husserl’s initial formulation of phenomenology was influenced by Franz Brentano (1838-1917). Not only is Brentano credited with identifying “intentionality” as the mark of the mental, at the University of Vienna “in his lectures on Descriptive Psychology (1889), Brentano employed the phrase ‘descriptive psychology or descriptive phenomenology’ to differentiate” a descriptive science of the mental “from genetic or physiological psychology” (Moran, 2000, p. 8). However, in what will be a central and career-long concern for Husserl, a descriptive phenomenology or psychology must avoid psychologism.

despite differences across human subjects (for example color blindness, mental illness, habitual tendencies) there are objective aspects of the experience of a thing which are universalizable across humans. Hence, phenomenology is not concerned with the non-universalizable.  Psychologism  may be simply understood as the attempt to make objective reality depend upon the psychological features of some subject.

Generally stated, objective aspects of human experience are “psychologized” when “their objective sense, their sense as a species of objects having a peculiar essence, is denied in favor of the subjective mental occurrences, the data in immanent or psychological temporality” (Husserl, 1969, p. 169).

In the second volume of Logical Investigations Husserl identifies the “exclusive concern” of phenomenology as


experiences intuitively seizable and analyzable in the pure generality of their essence, not experiences empirically perceived and treated as real facts, as experiences of human or animal experients in the phenomenal world that we posit as an empirical fact. This phenomenology must bring to pure expression, must describe in terms of their essential concepts and their governing formulae of essence, the essences which directly make themselves known in intuition, and the connections which have their roots purely in such essences. Each such statement of essence is an a priori statement in the highest sense of the word (Husserl, 2001b, p. 86).

Source for the above content
https://www.iep.utm.edu/phen-psy/

Phenomenology – Definitions

Cohen and Manion (1987): ’Phenomenology is a theoretical point of view that advocates the study of direct experience taken at face value; and one which sees behaviour as determined by the phenomena of experience rather than by external, objective and physically described reality.’

Rudestein and Newton (1992):  “Phenomenology attempts to describe and elucidate the meanings of human experience.”

Camus (O’ Brien,1965): “Phenomenology declines to explain the world, it wants to be merely a description of actual experience.” 

Boland (1985): “Phenomenology is a term that carries a great deal of ambiguity along with its sometimes confused and faddish use.”

Phenomenology – Explanation

The central premise is that the researcher should be concerned to understand phenomena in depth and that this understanding should result from attempting to find tentative answers to questions such as ‘What?’  ‘Why?’ and ‘How?’

Phenomenology contends that such understanding is essential and will not come from answering the questions ‘How many?’ or ‘How much?’

Phenomenology assumes that knowledge can be gained by concentrating on phenomena experienced by people.

At the heart of the phenomenology is the relationship between self and society, as expressed in the work of Mead (1934), the originator of phenomenological psychology.

Clegg and Dunkerley (1980) took the position that in research involving people, the variables being manipulated could not be treated as independent of the ‘meaning which individuals assigned to them. This is one of the fundamental assumptions of phenomenological researchers. People have the ability to think, argue, and experience the world of events in idiosyncratic ways. The positivistic research strategy cannot deliver an understanding of these human dimensions.

Resources on the web

Google Books

Logical Investigations, Volume 2

Edmund Husser
Psychology Press, 2001 - Philosophy - 380 pages

Edmund Husserl is the founder of phenomenology and the Logical Investigations is his most famous work. It had a decisive impact on twentieth century philosophy and is one of few works to have influenced both continental and analytic philosophy.
This is the first time both volumes have been available in paperback. They include a new introduction by Dermot Moran, placing the Investigations in historical context and bringing out their contemporary philosophical importance.
These editions include a new preface by Sir Michael Dummett.
https://books.google.co.in/books/about/Logical_Investigations.html?id=FquCVBoVja0C

Husserl: An Analysis of His Phenomenology
Paul Ricoeur
Northwestern University Press, 1967 - Philosophy - 260 pages
Paul Ricoeur was one of the foremost interpreters and translators of Edmund Husserl's philosophy. These nine essays present Ricoeur's interpretation of the most important of Husserl's writings, with emphasis on his philosophy of consciousness rather than his work in logic. In Ricoeur's philosophy, phenomenology and existentialism came of age and these essays provide an introduction to the Husserlian elements which most heavily influenced his own philosophical position.
https://books.google.co.in/books/about/Husserl.html?id=3MacEVF4s-QC


Edmund Husserl: Founder of Phenomenology
Dermot Moran
Polity, 2005 - History - 297 pages
Dermot Moran provides a lucid, engaging, and critical introduction to Edmund Husserl's philosophy, with specific emphasis on his development of phenomenology. This book is a comprehensive guide to Husserl's thought from its origins in nineteenth-century concerns with the nature of scientific knowledge and with psychologism, through his breakthrough discovery of phenomenology and his elucidation of the phenomenological method, to the late analyses of culture and the life-world. Husserl's complex ideas are presented in a clear and expert manner. Individual chapters explore Husserl's key texts including Philosophy of Arithmetic, Logical Investigations, Ideas I, Cartesian Meditations and Crisis of the European Sciences. In addition, Moran offers penetrating criticisms and evaluations of Husserl's achievement, including the contribution of his phenomenology to current philosophical debates concerning consciousness and the mind.
https://books.google.co.in/books/about/Edmund_Husserl.html?id=x88L0oiv3dIC
Edmund Husserl is an invaluable guide to understanding the thought of one of the seminal thinkers of the twentieth century. It will be helpful to students of contemporary philosophy, and to those interested in scientific, literary and cultural studies on the European continent. 

Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology
Edmund Husserl
Routledge, 2012 - Philosophy - 376 pages
With a new foreword by Dermot Moran


'the work here presented seeks to found a new science – though, indeed, the whole course of philosophical development since Descartes has been preparing the way for it – a science covering a new field of experience, exclusively its own, that of "Transcendental Subjectivity"' - Edmund Husserl, from the author's preface to the English Edition
https://books.google.co.in/books/about/Ideas.html?id=3LXz0lZ2fUQC




Phenomenology as Research Method, by Beverley Campbell,
Victoria University of Technology

http://www.staff.vu.edu.au/syed/alrnnv/papers/bev.html

Ehrich, Lisa (2005) "Revisiting phenomenology: its potential for management
research."

In Proceedings Challenges or organisations in global markets, British
Academy of Management Conference, pages pp. 1-13, Said Business School, Oxford
University.

http://eprints.qut.edu.au/2893/1/2893.pdf 

Hawley, Georgina, A phenomenological study of the health-care related spiritual needs of multicultural Western Australians, Ph d thesis, 2002

http://espace.library.curtin.edu.au/R?func=dbin_jump_full&object_id=13369

Unwin, Bren Carolyn, Phenomenology and Landscape Experience: A Critical Appraisal For Contemporary Art Practice

http://hdl.handle.net/2299/2115

My Thesis Prospectus

http://heideggerian.blogspot.com/2008/04/my-thesis-prospectus.html

Durie, Robin, Phenomenology and Deconstruction

http://hdl.handle.net/1842/1799

Marlow, Susan Anne, A Voyage of Grief and Beauty: a Phenomenological Study of the Experience of Supporting a Family Member with an Intellectual Disability Who is Dying in a Community Setting

http://hdl.handle.net/10063/140

Phenomenology as an Educational Research Method--van Manen

http://www.otal.umd.edu/~probinso/Dissertation/methodology/phenomenology.html



Phenomenological approaches: challenges and choices

http://nurseresearcher.rcnpublishing.co.uk/archive/article-phenomenological-approaches-challenges-and-choices

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Interpretation in Phenomenology

Phenomenology, Interpretation, and Community (Google eBook)
Leonore Langsdorf, Stephen H. Watson, E. Marya Bower

SUNY Press, 1996 - Philosophy - 295 pages
Google Book Link with preview facility
http://books.google.co.in/books?id=cVYCcklydYMC

Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant's Critique of Reason
by Martin Heidegger
Google book link
http://books.google.co.in/books?id=hB4XjaGLflMC


The Role and Influence of Interpretation in Hermeneuticphenomenological Research
Currents: New Scholarship in the Human Services, 2008
http://currents.synergiesprairies.ca/currents/index.php/currents/article/view/30/26



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Updated on 16 May 2019,11 July 2013

Moral Epistemology

Moral Epistemology

How is moral knowledge possible? This question is central in moral epistemology.
There are  a cluster of problems in moral epistemology. The most important are the following.

Sociological thinking: The best explanation of the depth of moral disagreements and the social diversity that they reflect is one of two things.

(a) No moral facts exist to be known.
Moral disagreements exemplify merely clashes in moral sensibility rather than differences about matters of fact.

(b) Moral knowledge exists, but moral facts are relative to the social group in which moral sensibility is formed with the result that no moral truths are known to hold universally (Descriptive morality - Morals are made in a society and are binding on members of the society.).

Psychological thinking: Moral judgments are intrinsically motivating. Judgments about matters of fact, on the other hand, are never motivating just in themselves. Since to constitute moral knowledge a moral judgment must be made about some moral fact, moral knowledge is not possible.

Ontological: Moral knowledge is about moral reality. How is that reality constituted? Three general possibilities present themselves.

(a) Moral reality might be theological in nature, pertaining to (say) the will of God.

 (b) It might be a non-natural realm that is neither theological nor natural, but sui generis.

(c) It might be comprehensible as a part of the natural world studied by science.

Each of these possibilities, however, is beset with difficulties.

Evolutionary: Where do human morals come from?

A familiar and widely accepted answer is that human morals are in essence, despite their modern variations, Darwinian adaptations. As such morals are about survival and reproduction and have nothing to do with moral truth.

While the intuitive, emotional basis of moral judgments was useful to our ancestors, this basis is out-dated and unreliable in modern industrial society and thus current moral thought in such society, which inevitably embeds this basis, is without rational foundation.

Methodological: Traditionally philosophers have sought to explain the possibility of knowledge by appeal to at least some principles that can be grasped and defended a priori and thus independently of natural science. A new and revolutionary epistemology introduced by Quine seeks to explain the possibility of knowledge through science itself. “Naturalized epistemology” has been immensely popular since its inception in the 1960s, largely because it promises to make epistemology consistent with a scientific world-view.

At the same time the new methodology appears to make it more difficult to explain the possibility of moral knowledge. Two allied methodologies that seek to find moral truth in a reflective equilibrium of judgments or in applications of rational choice theory are much less restrictive but open to the objection that they are morally conservative. A recent methodology allied to naturalized epistemology is pragmatic naturalism. Taking its inspiration from examples of transforming the moral status quo, it is less vulnerable to the charge of moral conservatism. However, by understanding moral knowledge as mainly a matter of knowing how to live well interdependently with others by resolving issues collectively as they arise, this methodology may not offer a conception of moral truth appropriate to genuine moral knowledge.

Moral: Feminists among others are often critical of traditional epistemologies as well as the innovative recent methodologies on the moral ground that the standards found there are unjustly biased against women and other marginalized groups. For example, feminists often reject the standard of impartiality contained in these forms of epistemology because it renders invisible important knowledge possessed by women and thereby contributes to their oppression.

If, for reasons to be given, the criticism has merit, then it presents an apparent paradox within feminist moral epistemology, since it appears to reject the ideal of impartiality on the ground that it is not itself impartial.

The Marxist complaint that the standard of impartiality is unjustly biased against the working class because it renders invisible their exploitation gives rise to the same contradiction. Resolution of the paradox is important for both evaluating such criticisms and understanding in general how to evaluate moral criticisms of epistemic standards.

About the entry in the Plato Encyclopedia

First, the entry ignores global skepticism, which doubts the possibility of anyone's having any knowledge at all.

Second, in keeping with the last restriction, the entry takes for granted that our capacity to have other kinds of knowledge is not in question. Indeed, the six problems above arise in part because of the implications of having other kinds of knowledge.

Third, the entry assumes that moral knowledge entails (roughly) justified true moral belief. An expressivist may invoke a deflationary conception of truth to support the idea that we can speak of justified moral beliefs that are “true” — without implying that justified moral beliefs accurately represent moral reality. Moral justification is discussed below, however, only as it pertains to putatively reliable representations of moral reality.

Fourth, many important epistemological issues arise in the context of considering specific normative theories or types of normative theory. (Can virtue ethics explain how we can know what course of action is morally acceptable for a situation demanding the exercise of conflicting virtues?) The focus in this entry is on issues that are special to moral epistemology. 

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-epistemology/