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MOVING TO FRONT FROM YESTERDAY–SOME INTERESTING COMMENTS, INCLUDING FROM PROF. KELLY
Back in 2008. How do things look today?
Broadly, things look good (with a few important caveats – see below)
Kelly was certainly right that it is in philosophy of mind that interest in phenomenology and phenomenological questions finds its natural home – and that trend to a large extent, has continued. The last decade or so has seen a steady increase in top-quality philosophy of mind to more or less extent informed by the ideas/work of the Classical Phenomenologists and methods consonant with those employed by the likes of Husserl, Heidegger, Stein, Sartre, etc (see e.g., Siegel; Schellenberg, Kriegel; Joel Smith; some of Peacocke's work on the first-person; Montague; Chudnoff etc).
There are a few caveats however. It would be misleading to characterise the majority of work in the philosophy of mind which concerns itself with, say, the 'phenomenology of perception' or the 'phenonmenology of emotion', as informed by the methodological strictures of Husserlian phenomenology (much less Heideggerian phenomenology). This has benifits and pitfalls. On the positive side, a lot of detailed phenomenological analysis (often analysis of the intentionality of the relevant experiences), can be offered, engaged with, and critiqued, without being hamstrung or marred in the kinds of 'disputes about method' that to my mind characterise a large chunk of historical phenomenology (along with commentary on it).
Contrastingly, without a good sense of why, for example, Husserl adopts the methods he does, what he takes the motivation for them to be, and what (most importantly) is gained in phenomenological analysis by adopting those methods (or methods sufficiently similar to them), the relevant 'analyses' (such as they are) can become unanchored or divorced from a substantive sense of what 'doing phenomenology' actually involves. The latter point is most evident is the reasonably wide-spread idea that 'doing phenomenology' is little more than describing some target experience from the first-person perspective (perhaps with a view to its distinctiveness). It is in this vein that one can seemingly offer a phenomenology of just about anything (e.g., a phenomenology of sport, a phenomenology of train travel). And on the flip side offering 'the phenomenology' of some target experience, as if it merely one consideration in the mix, certainly would strike Husserl et al as constituting a fundamental misunderstanding of what phenomenology is supposed to be doing.
So overall: a mixed bag perhaps.
I largely agree with Jonathan Mitchell's assessment. I would add that a lot of the phenomenological reflection in the analytic tradition makes the assumption, which I find problematic, that "experiences" are given items whose structure can be analyzed, via introspection, in a quasi-scientific way so as to tell for and against various philosophical positions. (To be clear, I have absolutely done work that has this character.) Some of this kind of thing is okay, but the confidence that we can in general say what is the "phenomenal character" of this or that experience, or even that this experience differs from that one in some elementary respect that our phenomenology needs to account for, seems to me to be ungrounded, and not a good basis for theorizing about perception, consciousness, agency, etc. I suspect, though, that I'm very much in the minority here.
Just to extend the comments of Jonathan Mitchell and John Schwenkler in the obvious way: the assumption that "experiences" can be analyzed by introspection is definitely not a part of traditional phenomenology. There is a strong distinction, even in Husserl's early work, between introspection and phenomenological reflection. This distinction got developed even further as the practice of phenomenology progressed. Indeed, one of the most interesting aspects of the transition from transcendental to hermeneutic phenomenology, it seems to me, is precisely the discussion over what method will put us in the best relation to the phenomena, and what relation to the phenomena we achieve when that method is employed. The hermeneutic phenomenologists, like Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and even Sartre to some extent, believed that we are not so constituted as to be capable of adopting a perspective with respect to our own experiences that allows us to describe them objectively. The "quasi-scientific" introspection of experience that John Schwenkler objects against in the contemporary analytic tradition was rejected tout court by the hermeneutic tradition. As Merleau-Ponty said, "The most important lesson of the phenomenological reduction is that it can never be completed."
Another way of saying this is that traditional phenomenology is not so much about introspection as it is about the limits of introspection. When Husserl began to develop the method, one obvious application of his view was against the sense-datum theorists. They certainly believed in introspection, but they failed to recognize what Husserl called its "horizonal" structure: the fact that there are always aspects of what we find in our experience that extend beyond what we can see in our introspection of it. To the extent that contemporary analytic philosophy misses this feature of the phenomena, if it does, perhaps it is time for a phenomenological correction.
I largely concur with the posts above. Also, they have led me to believe that (the quality of) my writing sample is NOT the reason why I was rejected from almost every single PhD program I applied to this season.
I'm not familiar with phenomenology in the 20th century continental tradition, so I hope this isn't too far afield of what's been said here. I read Hegel as maintaining that, to use Sean Kelly's terminology, we can at least occasionally come to some kind of describable objective perspective over our own experiences. At the same time, setting aside questions about absolute knowing, I read him as agreeing that the phenomenological process opens us up into indefinitely new states and activities. Something like this seems to be at work in Peirce's phaneroscopy as well, but I'm not very confident about what's going on in that part of Peirce. Hegel and Peirce are also systematic, and present themselves as scientific (after a fashion), in a way that I take John Schwenkler to be objecting to, at least as that aspiration presents itself in contemporary analytic circles.
I don't know enough about the contemporary landscape in phenomenology to determine where the Hegel-cum-Peirce lineage of the phenomenological tradition sits. But if Kelley (p.2 of his essay) is right that the Husserlian method precludes making a linguistic turn to the study of the use of language, it is worth noting, as Robert Brandom has been pointing out for years, that in the Phenomenology of Spirit (section 652) Hegel refers to language (Sprache) as the determinate being (Dasein) of Spirit.
On another front, there does seem to be a place where the systematic and scientific study of the experience of consciousness (to adapt one of Hegel's terms) is making progress: in the literature on shared intentionality in philosophy and the cognitive sciences. On the side of philosophy, I'm thinking of Margaret Gilbert's work on the way our joint commitments lay out the lattices through which our capacities for love and patriotism flourish, or some of the work of Pirmin Stekeler-Weithofer or Hans Bernhard Schmid on the phenomenology of shared intentionality. In a related area, Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi are pursuing a phenomenological study of shared intentionality in tandem with work in cognitive science, and a similar project is underway in the work of Cathy Legg and Joshua Black, who draw on the work of Peirce.
On the side of cognitive science, there's been a wellspring of research into the shared intentional background of the distinctively human form of life in the last two decades, from social and dialogical theories of reasoning and argumentation like that of Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber, to the genetic assimilationist accounts of human culture and language given by Daniel Dor and Eva Jablonka, to the research program centered around Michael Tomasello and his colleagues' work on the ontogeny and phylogeny of shared intentionality and norm psychology in human beings. It seems to me that you can't make any progress in this kind of research, whether in the design of experimental protocols or the interpretation of data, except insofar as you are systematically placing yourself into the views of other people and reflecting on how that collective activity shapes so much of who we are and what we do.
Having become somewhat familiar with both the philosophical and scientific literatures over the last few years, it is difficult not to think that Hegel was more-or-less right about some of his foundational commitments concerning the nature of spirit as a thing we collectively create and are created by. That speaks volumes about the significance of this sort of phenomenological pursuit.
It also suggests, as Hegel and Peirce each maintained, that this research will be of use to the practicing scientist. And there are a number of philosophers working at the categorial critique of the cognitive sciences – often with at least some influence from Wilfrid Sellars, a figure who carried views from Hegel and Peirce into the 20th century, and who developed a phenomenological approach to perception that, as Carl Sachs has shown, was substantially influenced by then-contemporary cognitive science (or "cybernetic theory"). Here I'm thinking of research from philosophers like Catarina Dutilh Novaes, Ladislav Koreň, Jaroslav Peregrin, Joseph Rouse, and Glenda Satne.
From this vantage, there seems to be a thriving research program rooted in a phenomenological study of human consciousness that's been tended through two centuries. But to my knowledge, there is not much crossover or interaction between the Husserlian and Hegelian-cum-Peircean tradition I've sketched here. Perhaps that will change as more cross-pollination takes place across these literatures.
To clarify, my objection is not to a scientific approach to philosophy as such, but to the role that "phenomenological" evidence, grounded in introspection, frequently plays in (to name a few culprits) the literature on the contents of perception, the "sense of agency", cognitive phenomenology, and so on. I agree with Sean Kelly that this approach marks a break with the best of the phenomenological tradition, including the parts of it that conceived of its work as a kind of science.
I'm not a philosopher but in reading quickly through this thread I was interested in Prof Kelly's comment about the limits of introspection (though my knowledge of the relevant philosophical literatures is doubtless not deep enough to place it in proper context). Behaviorist psychologists –I'm thinking specifically of Skinner– also talk about the limits of introspection, from a different angle, but I'm wondering if any philosophers read Skinner's non-technical books (e.g., About Behaviorism or the off-puttingly-titled Beyond Freedom and Dignity). I've always thought of phenomenology and Skinnerian behaviorism as having nothing in common, inasmuch as Skinner was critical of "mentalistic" approaches and v skeptical about
the concept of "mind," but I'm wondering whether there might be some under-the-surface points of connection.
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