david m said: ...Husserl makes a call of back to experience like Dewey, although he rebuilds a sort of Cartesianism again.
dmb says: I had the impression that Husserl's phenomenology was something like an attempt to get at pure experience, an impression I believe you gave me. Last semester when I finally encountered Husserl I was totally baffled. To me, it looked weird and wrong and didn't seem to resemble pure experience at all. I was told that Husserl was interested in finding essences this way. As usual, I kept thinking "what the heck is an essence" and "when did anybody ever find such a thing"? Now I understand what had me so confused. As Raymond Boisvert says in his "John Dewey's Logic as a Theory of Knowing", "Within the bifurcated world of modernity, 'subjects', often thought of as primarily 'minds' (Descartes) or 'rational essences' (Kant), are in search of knowledge about 'objects'. This view of things gave rise to the naively optimistic delusion that at some point the objects will be completely understood. Frege and Husserl were simply following the tradition of Descartes and Kant when they fastened onto the necessary deduction of absolutely certain truths as the exemplary activity of human cognition." david m said: ...European philosophy has more doubts about traditional science than the American pragmatists as they see science as full of aspects of SOM such as determinism, absolute-laws, reductionism. dmb says: Both James and Dewey rejected determinism, absolutism and reductionism but managed to do so without rejecting science too. In fact, Dewey's method of inquiry doesn't set up a brand new idea so much as it identifies the patterns of inquiry that already demonstrate a reasonable level of success. In particular, he points out that everday, common sense inquiry and scientific inquiry both exhibit the same basic pattern and so he develops that pattern into a more coherent general picture of what works and then also puts it all in terms that reject SOM and traditional empiricism. (Which makes sense because everyday life and science both rest on learning from experience.) Its a beautiful thing. Hildebrand put the pattern up on the board and we students during the discussion saw it as a pattern that reflects the working of all sorts of things. I saw the hero's journey in it, for example. Another guy said he saw software development in it. I didn't really get that simply because I know nothing at all about software development, but it made me wonder how many other things could this pattern be mapped onto. Anyway, its one thing to reject SOM and scientific materialism and quite another to reject these fruitful methods on inquiry, both of which, after all, have produced real changes in the world. Big time. I would also point out, as Boisvert did at the end of that essay, that the difference between Husserl's approach and Dewey's approach has profound political implications. The beleif in certainty is anti-democratic, authoritarian and elitist. Not co-incidentally, Husserl has since been revealed as an anti-Semitic, racist, authoritarian asshole while Dewey's ideas have only fostered democratic and egalitarian values. For this reason, I have serious doubt about Heidegger. He was a fascist, as we all know by now, and it seems all his best ideas were just Taoism is German. (See "Heidegger's Hidden Sources"). _________________________________________________________________ Peek-a-boo FREE Tricks & Treats for You! http://www.reallivemoms.com?ocid=TXT_TAGHM&loc=us Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
