2/16/2023

Discuss in the breakout room (12 minutes):

• What was the documentary about?
• What do you stay wondering after the
documentary?

10.15-11.40 Lecture 7: Phenomenology: Introduction and Methodologies

12.00-13.15 Lecture 8: Phenomenology of Consciousness and Perception
Prerecorded Lecture 9: Phenomenology of Embodiment and Action

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Dr. Hanna Poikonen

ETH Zurich

• Mainly known for his work in philosophy of psychology, especially for having introduced the
notion of intentionality to contemporary philosophy.
• He made important contributions to many fields in philosophy, especially to the philosophy of
mind, metaphysics and ontology, ethics, logic, the history of philosophy, and philosophical
theology.
• Due to his introspectionist approach of describing consciousness from a first-person point of
view, on one hand, and his rigorous style as well as his contention that philosophy should be
done with exact methods like the natural sciences, on the other, Brentano is often considered a
forerunner of both the phenomenological movement and the tradition of analytic philosophy.
• Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (1874) was a large-scale work on the foundations of
psychology.

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• The principal founder of phenomenology—and thus one of the most influential philosophers of
the 20th century.
• He has made important contributions to almost all areas of philosophy and anticipated central
ideas of its neighboring disciplines such as linguistics, sociology and cognitive psychology.
• “Back to the things themselves”: Phenomenology should base its considerations on the way
things are experienced rather than on various extraneous concerns which may obscure or
distort what is to be understood.
• Phenomenology is not interested in an analysis of the psychophysical constitution of the human
being, nor in an empirical investigation of consciousness.
• Phenomenology is interested in an understanding of what intrinsically and, in principle,
characterizes perceptions, judgements, feelings and so on.
• His first phenomenological work was published in two volumes, titled Logical Investigations
(1900/01).

• A German philosopher whose work is perhaps most readily associated with

phenomenology and existentialism, although his thinking should be identified as part of
such philosophical movements only with extreme care and qualification.
• His ideas have exerted a seminal influence on the development of contemporary
European philosophy.
• They have also had an impact far beyond philosophy, for example in architectural theory,
literary criticism, theology, psychotherapy and cognitive science.
• His Being and Time (1927) was dedicated to Husserl, “in friendship and admiration”.

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• A French philosopher and public intellectual and the leading academic proponent of
existentialism and phenomenology in post-war France.
• Best known for his original and influential work on embodiment, perception, and
ontology.
• He also made important contributions to the philosophy of art, history, language, nature,
and politics.
• He played a central role in the dissemination of phenomenology, which he sought to
integrate with Gestalt psychology, psychoanalysis, Marxism, and Saussurian linguistics.
• Two major theoretical texts during his lifetime: The Structure of Behavior (1942) and
Phenomenology of Perception (1945)

• Sartre was much more than just a traditional academic philosopher, however, and this begins to
explain his renown. He also wrote highly influential works of literature, inflected by
philosophical concerns
• Being and Nothingness (1943) covers many of the most important insights of his most famous
philosophical book.
• Imaginary (1940) constitutes one of the most rigorous and fruitful developments of his
Husserl-inspired phenomenological investigations.
• Along with The Emotions: Outline of a Theory (1939), Sartre presented this study of
imagination as an essay in phenomenological psychology, which drew on his lifetime interest in
psychological studies and brought to completion the research on imagination he had undertaken
since the very beginning of his philosophical career.

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• Shaun Gallagher, Dan Zahavi, Edward Casey among others.

• Phenomenology includes diverse set of approaches.

• It pays attention to the phenomenon under study, the experience.
• Preoccupation with the metaphysical issues tend to degenerate into highly technical and
abstract discussions that lose touch with the real subject matter: the conscious mind.
• Phenomenology contemplates questions like: How is perception of my car structured so
that it delivers a meaningful experience of the world?
• Without denying that brain processes contribute causally to perception, such processes
do not manifest themselves in the perceiver’s experience.

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• Phenomenologist and psychologist are trying to give account to the same experience.
• However, they take different approaches, as different questions and look for different kind of answers.
• Phenomenology stays with the experience by taking the first-person approach, the perspective of the
experiencing subject.
• Phenomenologist is concerned to understand, for example, perception in terms of the meaning it has for
the subject, the intentional structure of the experience.
• Phenomenological account of experience, for example perception, is something quite different from a
psychophysical or neuroscientific account.
• Phenomenology is concerned with attaining an understanding and proper description of the experiential
structure of our mental/embodied life.
• It does not attempt to develop naturalistic explanation of consciousness, nor does it seek to uncover its
biological genesis, neurological basis, psychological motivation, or the like.

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• Intentionality means that all consciousness (all perceptions, imaginings, judgements etc.) is
about or of something.
• Experience is never an isolated or elemental process; it always involves a reference to the world
(understood as physical but also social and cultural world).
• Conscious life is not a mixture if internal sensations and feeling states.
• For example, perceptual experience is embedded in contexts that are pragmatic, social and
cultural and the semantic work (the formation of perceptual meaning) is facilitated by the
objects, arrangements, and events that I encounter.
• A certain contextual background: A car that I can drive to go where I need to go, or which I need
to sell, or something not working properly.
• The situated nature of perceptual experience: Given the design of the car, the shape of my body
and its action possibilities, and the state of the environment, the car is drivable and I perceive
it as such.

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• The phenomenal state of the perceiver.

• Qualitative or phenomenal features of experience.
• The phenomenal features of experience are not divorced from the intentional features:
What is it like to stand around and admire my new car, or to stand around and see my car
smashed by another car?

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• Contextual background: Meaning of the object to me.

• Spatial aspects: My embodied position and temporal synthesis.
• Gestalt features: I focus on one element of the experience at time and leave others to
the periphery.
• These structures relate to the world in which the perceiver is situated.
• When a subject attends to experience, the phenomenologist does not get locked up in an
experience that is purely subjective or detached from the world:
• Not purely subjective phenomenon but as it is lived through by a perceiver who is in the
world, as an embodied agent with motivations and purposes.

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There can be no science of consciousness if

i) consciousness is intrinsically first person, if
ii) science only accepts third-person data, and if
iii) any attempt to explain something that is first-person in third-person terms distorts or
fails to capture what it tries to explain.

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”Introspective observation is what we have to rely on first and foremost and always. The word
introspection need hardly to be defined – it means, of course, looking into our own minds and
reporting what we there discover” – William James, 1890
• On a very basic level, one might argue that all reports (for example, reporting when a light is
switched on) given by subjects, even if directly about the world, are in some sense, indirectly,
about their own cognitive (mental, emotional, and experiential) states.
• In regard of perceiving the world, the perceiver does not have to introspect for perceptual
representations in their mind (e.g. when asked whether it is raining outside).
• Perceiving the world can be first-person, pre-reflective reports expressive of experience.
• Introspection as a matter of reflective consciousness: the second-order introspective cognition
that takes my own experience as an object rather than focusing on the light, the weather or on
the question asked.

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• “What is it like to experience the light coming on?”

• Heterophenomenology: Strict third-person methodology in studying consciousness
meaning that the scientist’s only access to the phenomenological realm will be via the
observation and interpretation of publicly observable data.
• Accessing consciousness from outside and focusing on the mental life of others as it is
publicly manifested.
• The reports are the data, they are not reports of data.

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• Merleau-Ponty criticized the one-sided focus of science on what is available from the
third-person perspective as naive and dishonest since the scientific practice constantly
presupposes the scientist’s first-personal and pre-scientific experience of the world.
• The so-called third-person objective accounts are accomplished and generated by a
community of conscious subjects.
• There is no pure third-person perspective, as there is no view from nowhere.

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• Phenomenology is an account of subjective experience rather than subjective account of

experience.
• Concerns on the epistemological difficulties connected with any first-person approach to
data generation.
• The concept of data: extracted from the physical world by technical measuring devices,
extracted with intersubjective procedures and takes place within a scientific community.
• Phenomenological disputes are philosophical disputes, not disagreements about what
someone is introspecting.

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• Although phenomenology is interested in how things are presented to the subject in

experience, it is a metaphysical fallacy to locate the phenomenal realm within the mind,
and to suggest that the way to access and describe it is by turning the gaze inwards.
• Heidegger denies that the relation between human existence and the world can be
grasped with the concepts “inner” and “outer”.
• Merleau-Ponty suggests in this context that it is impossible to draw a line between inner
and outer.
• The major figures of phenomenological tradition deny that they engage in some kind of
introspection and that the method they employ is a method of introspection.

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• What is a phenomenon?
• Immediate givenness of the object, how it appears to us, and how it apparently is.
• The reality of the object is not to be located behind its appearance, as if the appearance would
somehow hide the real object (phenomenon as a smokescreen).
• Husserl: The task of phenomenology is to provide a new epistemological foundation of science.
• Later, he modified his statement as rather thank focusing exclusively on the objects of
knowledge, we should also describe and analyze the experiential dimension in order to disclose
the cognitive contribution of the knowing subject.
• According to him, the natural attitude (a strict and objectively valid knowledge) needs to be
contrasted with philosophical attitude, which critically questions the very foundation of
experience and scientific thought.

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• The technical term created by Husserl for the process of suspension of our natural realistic inclination.
• The purpose of epoché is not to doubt, neglect, abandon, or exclude reality from consideration.
• Rather, the aim is to suspend or neutralize a certain dogmatic attitude toward reality.
• Thereby, we are allowed to focus more narrowly and directly on reality just as it is given – how it makes its
appearance to us in experience.
• Epoché entails a change of attitude toward reality, and not exclusion of reality.
• The only thing that is excluded as a result of the epoché is a certain naivete of simply taking the world for
granted, thereby ignoring the contribution of consciousness.
• A new reflective attitude: the significance of the world we live in and its manifestation for consciousness.
• Consciousness is inextricably involved in the way in which the world appears meaningful.
• Phenomenology makes a distinction between the subject conceived as an object within the world and the subject
conceived as a subject for the world.

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• Phenomenologists argue that a view from nowhere is unattainable, just as they would deny that it is possible to
look at our experiences sideways to see whether they match with a reality.
• The aim of the phenomenological reduction is to analyze the correlational interdependence between specific
structures of subjectivity and specific modes of appearance of givenness.
• The epoché and reduction can be seen as two closely linked elements of a philosophical reflection, the purpose of
which is to liberate us from a natural(istic) dogmatism and to make us aware of our own constitutive (i.e.,
cognitive, meaning-disclosing) contribution.
• Through phenomenological attitude, we are not primarily interested in what things are – in their weight, size,
chemical composition, and so on – but rather in how they appear and thus as correlates of our experience.
• If we want to understand how physical objects, mathematical models, chemical processes, social relations, or
cultural artefacts can appear as they do, with the meaning they have, then we also need to examine the
experiencing subject to whom they appear.
• Being-in-the-world: phenomenology is not just about consciousness, as if consciousness could be considered in
isolation from everything else in our lives.

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• Phenomenology is not interested in how particular events and life episodes are
experienced by particular individuals but in the essential structures characterizing our
experiences, their correlates, and the connections between the two (necessary and
invariant features and properties).
• Eidos, the essence of things (Plato), e.g. what make s a book a book.
• The same kind of eidetic analysis for the acts of cognition: perception, memory, face-
recognition, decision-making, social perception etc.
• The phenomenological investigation of these highly complex topics involves demanding
analyses that, in many cases, are defeasible.

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• Is concerned with replication and the degree to which the discovered structures are
universal or at least shareable.
• We can and we should compare our phenomenological accounts with those of others.

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1) The epoché or the suspension of the natural attitude.

2) The phenomenological reduction, which attends to the correlation between the object
of experience and the experience itself.
3) The eidetic variation, which keys in on the essential or invariant aspects of this
correlation.
4) Intersubjective corroboration, replicability and universality of the discovered
structures.

Phenomenology offers detailed analyses of various aspects of consciousness, including

perception, imagination, embodiment, memory, self-experience and temporality.

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• One reason why phenomenology can make a contribution to the investigation of the
cognitive mechanisms involved in various experiences is that it offers conceptual tools
and descriptive distinctions (e.g. between consciousness and pre-reflective
consciousness; between the body-as-subject (Leib) and body-as-object (Körper) –
distinctions that allow for a better grasp of the topic under investigation.
• Phenomenological methods: epoché, phenomenological reduction, eidetic variation,
intersubjective verification.
• Phenomenology has had an influence on empirical science and the world beyond academic
philosophy.

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