Phenomenology
BY: AMY WRENN, MARISSA MADRIGAL, BEAU HINDMAN
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.
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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.
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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
Husserl‟s 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.
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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.
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Nakhnikian described “Husserl‟s 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.
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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.