Phenomenology

By:
DILSHAD HUSSAIN SHAH
Continued.
The sociology of everyday life is a sociological
orientation concerned with:
Experiencing, Understanding ,Describing, Analyzing,
communicating.
With this people interact in concrete situations.
The studies face to face social interactions by
observing and experiencing them in natural
situations, that is, in situations that have not
been scientifically manipulated.


Sociologies of Everyday Life
Phenomenology studies common sense, conscious experience,
and routine daily life.
It can be placed in the category of sociologies of everyday life.
In the article, Sociologies of everyday life, by Jack Douglas
Argues that sociologist have years been rebuilding the
and thus rebuilding the foundation of all theory and
method in the social sciences.
Five major bodies of theoretical ideas found
Symbolic interactionism
Dramaturgical analysis
Labeling theory
Phenomenology and ethnomethodology
existentialism

The Role of Consciousness
There are several difference between phenomenology and
sociology.
Phenomenology relies on reflexive experience as it takes form
in consciousness.
The research assumes intentional consciousness of the
researcher.
Through the techniques of reduction in variation,
phenomenology is able to find the rudimentary structures and
processes of experience.
From this perspective, the researcher takes the perspective of
the other and imposes a sense of order on the environment.
.
Phenomenologist are more concerned
with the way individuals construct in
their own conscious the meanings of
things.
They are characterized as a subjective or
creative sociology because it seeks to
understand the world from the point of
view of the acting subject and not from
the perspective of the scientific
observer.
Meanings come from interacting
through a negotiation in their everyday
lives.
The Phenomenological Approach
Edmund Husserl developed the phenomenological approach.
Designates two things:
A new kind of descriptive method that made a
breakthrough in philosophy at the of the nineteenth
century.
A science which is intended to supply the basic instrument
for a rigorously scientific philosophy and in its consequent
application to make possible a methodological reform of
all the science.
Roots of Phenomenological:
o Entrenched in the German tradition
o Some of the most important intellectual debates taking
place between the world wars.




Continued
The ideas that came under the phenomenology umbrella
Generated in an atmosphere of heightened social conflict and anxiety about
the future.
Husserl wanted to examine the phenomena of conscious and bracket them
in order to test their truth.
Influence by Descartes, Hume, and Kant
Descartes Mediations
Husserls first conceived of the possibility of seeking a universally rational
science of being by turning his theoretical focus on an objective world to a
reflective one.
Descartes argued that the social world exist only in the context of
presentations of experiences of people. He also promoted the idea of
transcendental subjectivity, a philosophy founded through a psychology of
inner experience.
Edmund Husserl
Background
He was sent away to school in Vienna at age 10 to began his German
classical education at a real gymnasium.
Universities attended were Leipzig (math, physics, and philosophy),
Berlin (math), Vienna (doctoral Work)
Father of phenomenology
His ideas were complex and confusing
His work was translated from German to English
He was Jewish, the Jewish population was controlled by marriage
licenses; only 328 Jewish families were allowed in 1787 and stopped in
1849.
Married Malvine Charlotte Steinschneider and had three
children.



.
Held a position of Privatdozent at Halle University.
He accepted a professorship at Freiburg in Breisgau in
1916 and stayed there until retirement in 1928
Calvin O. Schrag wrote in the introduction to The
phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness
Some of the main themes and ideas that emerged
throughout this development were:
A critique of psychololgism
The phenomenological
Eidetic reduction
The phenomenological ego
Transcendental intersubjectivity
Time consciousness
The life world

Phenomenology
Begins with the assumption that every certainty is
questionable.
In Ideem I
Husserl describe phenomenology as a doctrine of
essences and a doctrine concerned with what things are
not with whether they are.
He was not looking to establish absolute presupposition on
which to build a whole system of knowledge. Therefore, he
was not interested in being a system builder.
He was always a beginner, reexamining the foundations of
his investigations, resisting all fixed formulations and final
conclusions.
Philosophy, was never ending pursuit of serious and open-
ended questions, which lead to further questions that may
require a resetting of the original questions.
Continued
Nakhnikian described Husserls phenomenology as an
outgrowth of his attack on psychologism.
Psychologism is a species of the view that
philosophy is reducible to a factual science, in this
case to psychology.
Also is an attempt to reduce the fundamental laws
of logic and mathematics to psychological
generalizations about the way people think; it is a
type of scientific generalization.
Husserl is against biologism and anthropologism as he is
against pschologism.


Continued
In short, phenomenology is not a science of facts, but a
science of essential being, an eidetic science (meaning an
insubstantial empirical science; it is a science that aims at
establishing the knowledge of essence.
Distinguished between facts and essence.
Described sciences of experience as sciences of fact
Facts are determined by acts of cognition which underline human
experiences.
Something is real and thus a fact because it possesses a spatiotemporal
existence, having a particular duration of its own and a real content.