Soviet Cultural Psychology CB: >>So, phenomenology is psychology. Sounds like quintessential positivism- starting with the individual and trying to derive a fundamental of humans. I see why Husserl is first cousin to the existentialists like Heidegger. They all fall into the bourgeois error of primacy of the individual.<<
You may well be on to something. I think this is why Merleau-Ponty is the greatest heir to Husserl--because M-P could successfully integrate Marxist thinking into phenomenology (or not, depending on your evaluation of M-P, I guess). At least he tried--as did Sartre and de Beauvoir. Husserl is, intellectually thinking, Heidegger's 'FATHER', and Heidegger his wayward son, so to speak. However, I must also point out that Husserl's phenomenology critiqued and rejected the empiro-positivism of his time but also critiqued and rejected types of 'historicism'. Still, Husserl is often quoted as saying something like "We [phenomenologists] are the true positivists." A couple more points. My point about phenomenology and psychology is that, starting with Brentano and a handful of figures associated with him, we get both branches of psychology and branches of philosophy. Husserl goes decidedly in the direction of philosophy, away from psychology, although he was interested in the so-called 'crisis'. As did the relatively but criminally obscure Meinong. However, that doesn't mean he moved away from being interested in 'science', since he wanted to give philosophy a scientific basis (a concern of the positivists and Wittgenstein, as well, and not merely a coincidence). Also I would point out here--because it occurs to me--that much of the modern/post-modern 'science' of linguistics is actually phenomenological in its nature. As is emergent concerns around 'cognition' and 'cognitive science'. And the postmos are falling into the same old traps of the crisis when they want to rely on neuroscience to explain all. At any rate, getting back to phenomenology, it seems to indicate that Husserl's project was decidedly a 'rationalist' one, despite the reputation it gets through the distorting post-modern and post-structuralist filters. In research around 'second language acquisition', however, the projectors have never got past naive positivism and behaviourism. CJ See: http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p_mla_apa_research_citation/0/6/6/5/6/p66560_index.html Abstract: Theoretical approaches to modernity (A.D. 1815 onwards) seem to suffer a twofold fate: (a) partial reconstructions of a "European past" presented as total reconstitutions of the "Global present"; and, (b) the belief that pre-modernity was dominated by a monolithic, intellectually hegemonic philosophy. While positivism characterizes much of the work of 19th century philosophers such as Kant, Comte, Hume, and Saint-Simon, it is generally accepted that Comte first used the word positivism in the place that the history of philosophy has ascribed to it, however, Kant appears to be more precise about philosophy's method, and therefore is used here to illustrate how modernity reaches backwards into Kantian deontological space: a transcendental space that arises out of a reliance on the human senses (as it leaves impresses in the human mind, Vorstellungen). Kant and Husserl, like Plato before them, assumed truth and value were discoverable within human beings. They were interested in the process and method of uncovering such truth and value, and how these equally modern qualities continue to be vigorously present in the positivist and phenomenological traditions. Briefly, positivism describes the nature of the scientific arrangements that were needed to discover knowledge; human beings became the center of the universe, and replaced religion as the focus of cosmological activity. At the center of Comte's arguments (that ran parallel to Kantian notions of time and space) was the search for proof and evidence: the primary logic for the excavation of knowledge. Phenomenology on the other hand did not view knowledge as a process of discovery as the positivists generally claimed. Rather, phenomenology emphasizes the creation of knowledge phenomena per se at historical points in time rather than a process of discovering knowledge as "fixed and immutable assets". http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/455564/Phenomenology/68551/Contrasts-with-related-movements# http://www.scribd.com/doc/13008675/Phenomenology-and-Positivism http://books.google.com/books?id=_JsOAAAAQAAJ&dq=husserl+social+world&source=gbs_navlinks_s _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
