Phenomenology

Hey Veeky Forums, what's a good introduction to Phenomenology?

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plato.stanford.edu/entries/phenomenology/
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start with the Greeks

Maps of Meaning

try Chuck Taylor

For general non-pleb introduction to Hegel, second on Charles Taylor.

husserl

>he doesn't want to watch 200 hours of Sadler

I'm subbed to his YouTube but I didn't think he'd have a series dedicated just for Phenomenology in general. I know about his Hegel series but I was looking for an introduction to the field in general.

Hegelian Phenomenology and Husserlian/Heideggerian Phenomenology are really two separate fields, however related in spirit.

Hegel's Phenomenology is not Husserl's phenomenology. The two are as different as scholastic and Fregean logic.

The best introduction to Husserlian phenomenology is, oddly, probably Hubert Dreyfus' 2005 Berkeley lecture course on Heidegger's Being & Time, and possibly his other one on Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception. These will introduce the core concepts and "way of seeing" or "investigating" that characterizes phenomenology in the Husserlian sense, though they both move beyond (or away from) Husserl in many ways.

You can then go back to Husserl's middle and later works (Logical Investigations, Ideas I/II, and later), and more easily understand how that basic technique of phenomenological investigation, with its core concepts like the epoche, developed. It's just harder to read Husserl before Heidegger because Husserl's work was always a work-in-progress, with his middle and later work succeeding, integrating, and overturning their early counterparts in various ways. Heidegger's fundamental ontology is a good starting point because it synthesises these, and (depending on your perspective) crucially moves beyond them in ways Husserl didn't anticipate.

But at that point, you will be able to make your own decisions about whether that commonly held opinion is true. Husserl is making a pretty big comeback, but Merleau-Ponty's star is also rising fast these days. Heidegger is a bit more worn-out.

For Hegel, Charles Taylor's book is an essential starting point as others have said. Also look into Pippin and Houlgate as representatives of the two different modern takes on Hegel. Hegel's system is much more difficult to understand in a rounded way than Husserl's phenomenology and its successors - the reason they are so successful is because they WORK so damn well, whereas Hegel requires taking apart piece by piece with various conflicting commentaries just to understand whether you even care about reading him seriously.

Try Dermot Moran or Spiegelberg.

My advice: Do the Dreyfus Berkeley course(s) like I said, but read Moran's chapters on Heidegger (NOT on Husserl yet, unless you really want to).

Once you understand what phenomenology is, it really all falls into place.

>thots
What's up with all these kekistani memers trying to get into Hegel and Kant now? Was it just because of that Kantbot Drumpf German Idealism vid?

Me

Annoys me but atleast they picked the worst possible spot. Hopefully it turns them off it forever

Thank you user!

I saw that image on this board dumbass, nothing to do with kekistan, whatever the fuck that even is.

hermetic writing

thot detected

No prob. Take my advice with a grain of salt though. I just give it because when I was trying to learn Husserl, I got really sick of reading fifty primers on him that all danced around complex/core issues, out of fear that the reader wouldn't be able to understand them. The result was that I would get scattered bits and pieces of "I guess this is what Husserl thinks?? Why though?" with nothing systematic and no underlying unity, and definitely not the real underlying gestalt of phenomenology (which is REALLY simple when you realize what it is, in hindsight).

Heidegger takes that core gestalt of Husserl and packages it into a single book (hell, into the first third), which has decisively influence the entire subsequent century. More people go to Husserl through Heidegger than the reverse. So when you take Dreyfus' course on Heidegger, you are at least going to get that gestalt, assuming you can follow the course. Whereas, again, I read a dozen books and articles on Husserl and never got him, but now I can read Husserl obviously see how his work was developing, exploring, and nuancing that gestalt.

The syllabus is easily available from Berkeley's site and archive.org has all the mp3s I think.

plato.stanford.edu/entries/phenomenology/

Hegel by Frederick C. Beiser
The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Phenomenology

>Hegel: A Very Short Introduction
is apparently good

Phenomenology.

I din't know that guy and I see he has two books on Hegel. Which of them are you talking about? "Hegel" or "Hegel and modern society"?

Peter Singer kind of sucks with his introductory works on Hegel, he says you have to dive into the philosophy of history first.

I can only speak for the first book but it's excellent.
Both are probably worth reading as Taylor is probably the leading Hegel scholar in English

Thanks, user.

>Well I said apparently, I haven't read it; it had lots of good reviews.

read gadamer on hegel's logic

can you describe it briefly? i have it but never get around to it

Not digging into you, just letting the thread know it's not that great. I picked up his book "Hegel," which I don't think they print anymore, and it was just a boring biography for the most part.

i'll try go get around to it, if not tonight then tomorrow if the thread is still alive, or i'll start a new one

thanks bro. i'm fuzzy on how hegel's logic was received, and particularly how his architectonic was viewed because he's so fucking impenetrable and confusing. i've heard various vague statements that heidegger/gadamer misunderstand him or skew him or only cherry-pick one part essentially because "man i ain't got time to propose a systematic interpretation of hegel, fuck that"

like, with kant, you know where you disagree or agree with him because his conceptual architectonic and tacit assumptions are easy to read. heidegger's phenomenology of kant's kritik can be read alongside conventional kant scholarship. but with hegel i can't even tell which variant of "wrong/partial readings of hegel" heidegger is representing.

i just want a decent hermeneutic reconstruction of the historical a priori of hegel's thought, i'm thinking maybe beiser will give me this?

bump

I think Besier probably provides the best work to date regarding Hegel's development and his adjustments made to terminology, as Hegel rather freely drew from his predecessors, theology, the science of the day, and the arts.
Two cases where Beiser provides excellent illustration are (i) the differences between how Kant employs thesis/antithesis (which is closest to Hegel's usage), Fichte's
own thesis/antithesis/synthesis (which is regarding change) and Hegel's own thesis/antithesis/synthesis - which are generally used as shorthand for the moment of understanding,
negative rationality and positive rationality. (ii) Spirit, as a Hegelian concept, was adapted from Christian ethics of Love in Hegel's early years, and also around this time you can see
an immature master-slave dialectic formulation which is linked to his concept of love, though something Beiser doesn't really mention is the similarity it shares with both Plato and Aristotle's
treatment of friendship, but I suppose that is fine considering how he treats it on it's own terms and historical moment.
There is also Hegel's view of organic nature or organismic (taken from Schelling), but I don't feel like discussing it more that just saying that at the time it gelled well with the leading thought in the natural sciences.

I haven't too carefully read Heidegger or Gadamer's treatment of Hegel, but I would imagine they would likely gloss over certain parts as being absurd and simply wrong from square one in their view, insofar as them not sharing
Hegel's faith in an infinite absolute, teleology and near, if not full blown, (critical) rationalism. This of course proves an issue when Hegel's system seeps into nearly everything he said, his notion of Right is based on his Aristotelian
metaphysics, freedom is based on Spirit, his historicism based on the notion of the Absolute or Divine Idea, and so on. After his epoch, Hegel is often rendered as a sort of social philosopher and less so of a head-in-the-clouds
metaphysician, valued for his dialectic but not so much for the fruits he produced with it (of course, it should be noted he came up with most of his ideas prior to developing the dialectic, which can be interpreted a few ways).
While he certainly did not take it for granted, Hegel was more confident in systemic thought, and ontological correspondence than those who followed him.

Beiser provides a fairly measured approach and treats Hegel and his contemporaries on their own terms, though he makes no bones about the 'fate' of Hegel's ultimate project. I don't think you would go wrong with him if you are looking
for a roadmap of the sometimes carelessly thrown about jargon.

Not him but are you saying you should start with Husserl or that you should start with Heidegger?

I'm only just beginning philosophy and not sure if you should typically read from most recent existing works backwards, or go forwards chronologically.

If you're talking about Husserl's phenomenology, then I'd recommend Xavier Zubiri's "Cinco Lecciones de Filosofia", in which he introduces the general spirit and objects of the philosophy of Aristotle, Kant, Comte, Husserl, Dilthey and Heidegger.

Zubiri was one of Husserl's students,
as well as Heidegger's, being him the responsible for Heidegger giving up on the second part of Sein und Zeit. And he is a monster philosopher himself.

I'd also recommend, and this one goes much more deeply, Leszek Kolakowski's "Husserl and the Search for Certitude" and Olavo de Carvalho's "Husserl Contra o Psicologismo", but it's in portuguese.

Now, reading the Cambridge Companion also never hurts.