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The critique of pure phenomenology

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Abstract

The topic of this paper is phenomenology. How should we think of phenomenology – the discipline or activity of investigating experience itself – if phenomenology is to be a genuine source of knowledge? This is related to the question whether phenomenology can make a contribution to the empirical study of human or animal experience. My own view is that it can. But only if we make a fresh start in understanding what phenomenology is and can be.

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Notes

  1. Consider, for example, Chalmers (2006), who proposes that color phenomenology is ‘primitivist’ (in the sense of Campbell). And he seems to think that this can be settled independently of settling the question of the nature of color.

  2. Dan Zahavi reminds me that there is a third position hereabouts as well. According to ‘transcendentalists,’ experience does not belong to the causal nexus because experience is something that we must presuppose in any attempt to investigate causal relations themselves. Such a conception of experience as transcendental does not treat experience as autonomous in the way I have been criticizing, for on such a conception, experience is not thought of as free-standing in relation to nature, even if it is not taken itself to be an element in the natural order. I am somewhat skeptical of this idea, but I do not discuss it further in what follows.

  3. Here I mean to be referring to ideas about discriminability and the classification of experience into kinds of Mike Martin. See Martin (2004).

  4. Here I rely on Zahavi (2004), as well as on contributions to this special issue by Marbach, Zahavi and Drummond.

  5. This is related to a broader issue in the theory of intentionality. The fact that my thinking about a particular subject (experience, Zeus) reflects my ideas of the subject does not entail that what I am thinking about is my idea. A fortiori, it doesn’t follow that I need to introspect in order to get clear about what I am thinking about.

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to James Genone, Farid Masrour, Eric Schwitzgebel, Charles Siewert, Evan Thompson and Dan Zahavi for helpful critical discussion.

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Correspondence to Alva Noë.

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Noë, A. The critique of pure phenomenology. Phenom Cogn Sci 6, 231–245 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-006-9043-x

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