INTRODUCTION TO PHENOMENOLOGY

This book is an introduction to phenomenology, a movement which, in many ways, typifies the course of European philosophy in the twentieth century. Writing at the close of this era, the extent of this contribution can now be more clearly articulated, appreciated, and, inevitably, criticised. Phenomenology was announced by Edmund Husserl in 1900–1901 as a bold, radically new way of doing philosophy, an attempt to bring philosophy back from abstract metaphysical speculation wrapped up in pseudo-problems, in order to come into contact with the matters themselves, with concrete living experience. As Husserl originally envisaged it, phenomenology had much in common with William James’ radical empiricism, but more than anything else it was stimulated by Franz Brentano’s ground-breaking work in descriptive psychology, the a priori science of the acts and contents of consciousness. Somewhat later, Husserl came to realise the connection between his conception of phenomenology and Descartes’s project of providing a secure edifice for knowledge. Husserl eventually came to see that his own project had much in common with Neo-Kantianism, and thus his phenomenology became a form of transcendental idealism. But his studies of consciousness also led him to pursue investigations into our awareness of time, and history, which led to his development of the concept  of the life-world, and to investigations of the evolution of culture reminiscent of Hegel’s phenomenology of spirit.