Dear Maxine and Colleagues, thank you for your responses and agile responses in the second week of the schedule. I wish to announce that we are about closing the session on Maxine's theme soon and move to the next presenter, Louis H. Kauffman with the following annotations as follows. ____________________________________________________________
On Tue, Mar 1, 2016 at 12:01 AM, Maxine Sheets-Johnstone <m...@uoregon.edu> wrote: > To FIS Colleagues, > > There are common threads running through communications from Mark, Loet, > Jerry, and Marcus that I would like to address. I thank them for their > concerns and the issues they raise. I thank Plamen too for his response, > specifically for upholding the value of phenomenology, though disagreeing > with him in his giving prominence to Merleau-Ponty as a phenomenologist. I > would like to comment on that point of disagreement first. > I am glad abou this disagreement, Maxine, since it demonstrates again what is phenomenology all about. (Fortunately I was not the author of the extended special issue CFP. It was one of my-coeditors.) Diverging opinions are something normal in the humanity disciplines. They are not trimmed into searching the absolute truth or measuring and mapping the real world outside, but instead into explaining the diverse nuances of the inner self, which is of course very subjective and therefore ignored by science. However without this differences and subjectivity we would not be human beings at all. As a matter of fact scientists are also a subclass of this group and when doing research they cannot completely escape subjectivity. This is so to say, the other side of the Moon and the "whole truth" we are trying to see with one eye, but alas.... Therefore, I can understand both sides, the defenders of the novelty role of Merleau-Ponty for philosophy and the opponents. Each side can certainly deliver its pro and contra arguments. I think that even if Merleau-Ponty may not be seen as phenomenologists by some members of this group, his works on the ontology of the flesh, on the phenomenology and primacy of perception, the visible and invisible, etc. can be classified as such according to Stanford's Encyclopedia of Philosophy http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/self-consciousness-phenomenological/. Of course, he might be categorized to be just an interesting author like J. Anker Larson or Leo Tolstoi or even a journalist for the lack of a phenomenological methodology. But he certainly was a reformer, an unusual one. So, just as in many other fields of humanities we are allowed to maintain different opinions about him. Closing all this I wish to cordially thank Maxine and you all for your participation, questions, responses and opinions in this first session. I do hope that Maxine was able to obtain some iteresting feedback from the FIS community that can become a gain for her research, and vice versa, that the FIS members were able to learn somenthing new and different from Maxine that will extend the horizon of their research. All this is about beginning and maintaining a dialogue between the different camps of scientists and philosophers targeting mutual understanding (at least to a certain degree) with the purpose to advance research on both sides. I hope you have enjoyed the discourse. Please send me your questions directly, if any. I am going to hand-over to Pedro who will introduce the next presenter. With best wishes, Plamen
_______________________________________________ Fis mailing list Fis@listas.unizar.es http://listas.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
