Husserl’s Phenomenological Discovery of the Natural Attitude

Keyword(s):  
2016 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 277-295
Author(s):  
Andrea Staiti

In this paper I argue that in Husserl’sIdeas I(1913) there is a seeming contradiction between the characterization of pure consciousness as theresidueof the performance of the phenomenological reduction and the claim that in the natural attitude consciousness is taken to be an entity is the world. This creates a puzzle regarding the positional status of consciousness in the natural attitude. After reviewing some possible options to solve this puzzle in the existing literature, I claim that the positional status of conscious experiences in the natural attitude is best characterized asunsettled. The act thatsettlesthe positional status of conscious experiences (i.e. our manifoldErlebnisse) is reflection. In reflection, experiences are posited as beings, either in a psychological or in a phenomenological key. I conclude by arguing that the problem of positing is of paramount importance to understand correctly Husserl’s claim that phenomenology isvoraussetzungslos.


Thesis Eleven ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 072551362110643
Author(s):  
Christopher Houston

Pierre Bourdieu famously dismissed phenomenology as offering anything useful to a critical science of society – even as he drew heavily upon its themes in his own work. This paper makes a case for why Bourdieu’s judgement should not be the last word on phenomenology. To do so it first reanimates phenomenology’s evocative language and concepts to illustrate their continuing centrality to social scientists’ ambitions to apprehend human engagement with the world. Part II shows how two crucial insights of phenomenology, its discovery of both the natural attitude and of the phenomenological epoche, allow an account of perception properly responsive to its intertwined personal and collective aspects. Contra Bourdieu, the paper’s third section asserts that phenomenology’s substantive socio-cultural analysis simultaneously entails methodological consequences for the social scientist, reversing their suspension of disbelief vis-à-vis the life-worlds of interlocutors and inaugurating the suspension of belief vis-à-vis their own natural attitudes.


2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-19
Author(s):  
Juha Himanka

Husserl claimed that reduction is the true starting point of phenomenological research, but to figure out how this deed should actually be accomplished has turned out to be a very challenging task. In this study, I explicate how Husserl accomplished reduction during his series of lectures entitled The Idea of Phenomenology. He does not state it explicitly, but what actually happened on the last day of the lectures can be seen as consistent with his descriptions of reduction as an act. Understood in this way, reduction is the model of how to do philosophy. The result of Husserl’s reduction is the correlation between appearance and “that which appears” or, to use Husserl’s later terminology, between noēsis and noēma. When this correlation is understood as an outcome of reduction and not as a result of an analysis, we, asreaders of Husserl, will be in a better position to avoid natural attitude in our interpretations.


1983 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Norman Bryson
Keyword(s):  

1983 ◽  
pp. 1-12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Norman Bryson
Keyword(s):  

1986 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 117-131 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary B. Harris

In order to test conflicting hypotheses about the effects of coeducational versus single-sex schooling, 538 first-term Australian university students who had attended single sex or coeducational high schools were compared on a number of variables relating to sex roles. Those from the two types of schools did not differ significantly on the Australian Sex Roles Inventory or on a measure of nontraditional attitudes towards sex roles, although males and females differed in predictable ways. Most subjects, particularly those from coeducational schools, felt that coeducational schools are preferable and lead to a more natural attitude towards the opposite sex. Subjects from coeducational rather than single-sex schools said that they had more opposite-sex friends in high school and were more likely to feel that their school helped rather than hindered their everyday relations with the opposite sex and their chances for a happy marriage. However subjects did not feel that boys and girls learn or behave better in coeducational schools, and there were no differences in the percentages of subjects from the two types of schools who reported having had sexual intercourse or been in love while in high school. The single-sex schools attended tended to differ from the coeducational ones in being smaller, more urban, and more likely to be selective, which made comparisons difficult to interpret. Nevertheless it seems reasonable to conclude that coeducational schooling, at least for this selective sample, may have some advantages in fostering interactions with the opposite sex.


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