The following questions are designed to facilitate discussion and may also be appropriate as paper topics.
one Husserl and the project of pure phenomenology
- How and why does Husserl argue against naturalism? What is the relation between his arguments against a naturalistic conception of logic and his conception of phenomenology? Why does he think that the phenomena of phenomenology cannot be understood as natural entities, akin to material objects?
- In what way(s) is phenomenology for Husserl a transcendental investigation? What kinds of questions does phenomenology consider, and why does Husserl think that the natural attitude, including the natural sciences, is unable to answer those sorts of questions?
- What is the phenomenological reduction? How does it work and why does Husserl think it is necessary for phenomenology? What, according to Husserl, does the phenomenological reduction reveal?
- Consider your own perceptual experience, a particular episode of visual or auditory experience, and try to describe it using Husserl's structural concepts, such as retention and protention, horizon and synthesis, noesis and noema. How might one argue that these structures are essential to your experience being what it is?
- What is the eidetic reduction? How does it work? How is it different from the phenomenological reduction? Why is the eidetic reduction essential to Husserl's overall project of transcendental phenomenology?
two Heidegger and the existential turn
- What is the "question of being", and how is it related to phenomenology? Why does Heidegger say that "only as phenomenology, is ontology possible"?
- Heidegger's phenomenology is a phenomenology of everydayness. Why does he think that phenomenology must proceed in this manner? How accurate or compelling do you find his descriptions of our everyday activity to be? In what ways, if any, do you find his descriptions to be problematic? Is there anything Heidegger seems to be ignoring or omitting that would raise difficulties for his account?
- A principal feature of Husserl's phenomenology is its concern with intentionality: all consciousness is consciousness of something. In what ways, and to what extent, does Heidegger share this concern? That is, in what ways is his account of Dasein's "everydayness" an account of the notion of intentionality, and in what ways, if any, is Heidegger's account transcendental in the way that Husserl's is? If Heidegger is interested in intentionality, does that mean that he too is primarily concerned with consciousness?
- Heidegger says that Dasein, that is, the kind of beings we are, is a being "for which, in its being, that being is an issue". What is the significance of this definition with respect to Heidegger's phenomenology, that is, what sort of phenomena crucially depend on, or hang together with, the idea that we are beings whose way of being is something we can confront and determine? Could there be a phenomenology of a being whose own being was not an issue for it? Could such a being "have" a world in Heidegger's sense of "world"?
- What role does the notion of death play in Heidegger's project in Being and Time? What are some of the peculiarities involved in thinking about death, especially when it comes to thinking about one's own? Why, for Heidegger, is death so important for Dasein's realization of its "authenticity"? Could a being who was immortal, that is, a being for whom death was not an issue or a possibility, be authentic in Heidegger's sense?
three Sartre and subjectivity
- In The Transcendence of the Ego, Sartre's principal aim is to demonstrate that "first-degree consciousness" lacks an ego, and the principal way in which he demonstrates this is via phenomenological description. What sorts of issues arise in trying to describe first-degree consciousness? Why, for example, is Husserl's method of reflection problematic? What does Sartre propose instead of reflection? How does one know when one has given an adequate description of non-reflective consciousness?
- What does Sartre mean when he says in The Transcendence of the Ego that "the ego is by nature fugitive"? How does this claim affect our understanding of the relationship between consciousness and the ego? What is the significance of this claim for comparing Sartre's phenomenology to Husserl's? What consequences does this claim have for the nature and possibility of self-knowledge, that is, in what sense is there a self to be known, and what can be known about "it"?
- A central concept of Being and Nothingness is that of bad faith. What is bad faith, and why is it significant? That is, what does a consideration of bad faith show about the structure of consciousness (or about the kind of beings we are)?
- In Being and Nothingness, Sartre claims that human beings are a combination of "facticity" and "transcendence". What does Sartre mean in claiming this, and how is this claim related to the idea that human beings are conscious?
four Merleau-Ponty and the phenomenology of embodiment
- A central concept in Husserl's phenomenology is the phenomenological reduction. How is this notion developed in Merleau-Ponty? How does his conception of a reduction compare with Husserl's? In what ways is Merleau-Ponty's "return to phenomena" a continuation of Husserls original project and in what ways is it a departure?
- What does Merleau-Ponty mean when he claims that "an impression can never by itself be associated with another impression"? How does he argue for this claim? What is the significance of this claim within his attempt to overcome "traditional prejudices" in the domain of perception?
- How does Merleau-Ponty argue against the idea that all perceptual experience involves judgement?
- Why do Husserl and Merleau-Ponty think that the body cannot be regarded as just one more object among others? What is it about the experience of the body that sets it apart, categorically, from the experience of objects?
- In Part I of Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty devotes considerable attention to the case of Schneider, a veteran of the First World War with a curious set of impairments. What conclusions does Merleau-Ponty draw from the case of Schneider? How does he use Schneider to criticize both empiricism and intellectualism?
- What does Merleau-Ponty mean by "motor intentionality"? In what sense is it, as Merleau-Ponty claims, "basic intentionality", that is, what does he mean in claiming that "consciousness is in the first place not a matter of 'I think that' but of 'I can'"?
five Problems and prospects: phenomenology and its critics
- What is the problem of other minds? How does the problem arise in phenomenology and how is the problem treated in the conceptions of phenomenology we have explored in Chapters 1-4?
- What is wrong with the notion of totality, understood as the goal or purpose of intellectual enquiry? What gets ignored or effaced in the quest for totalization? Why does Levinas think that phenomenology exemplifies Western philosophy's striving for totality?
- What is the significance of Levinas's notion of "the face" for phenomenology? In what sense is his account of "the other" phenomenological? In what ways does it constitute a critique of phenomenology?
- How does Derrida criticize the notion of presence? What is the significance of his criticisms for Husserl's conception of phenomenology? More specifically, if Derrida is right, how must we alter our conception of consciousness, and so the project of describing its content and articulating its structure?
- What does Derrida mean in claiming that "a sign is never an event, if by event we mean an irreplaceable and irreversible empirical particular"? What is the significance of this claim in his overall argument against Husserl?
- What is heterophenomenology, according to Dennett, and why does he think it is superior to the more traditional forms of phenomenology (or Phenomenology)? What sorts of problems beset phenomenology and why does Dennett think these problems cannot be overcome?
- What is the Multiple Drafts model of consciousness and why does Dennett think it is superior to more traditional conceptions of consciousness?
- How might Husserl and other members of the phenomenological tradition respond to the various criticisms raised by Levinas, Derrida and Dennett?