Why social scientists still need phenomenology

Thesis Eleven 168 (1):37-54 (2022)
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Abstract

Pierre Bourdieu famously dismissed phenomenology as offering anything useful to a critical science of society – even as he drew heavily upon its themes in his own work. This paper makes a case for why Bourdieu’s judgement should not be the last word on phenomenology. To do so it first reanimates phenomenology’s evocative language and concepts to illustrate their continuing centrality to social scientists’ ambitions to apprehend human engagement with the world. Part II shows how two crucial insights of phenomenology, its discovery of both the natural attitude and of the phenomenological epoche, allow an account of perception properly responsive to its intertwined personal and collective aspects. Contra Bourdieu, the paper’s third section asserts that phenomenology’s substantive socio-cultural analysis simultaneously entails methodological consequences for the social scientist, reversing their suspension of disbelief vis-à-vis the life-worlds of interlocutors and inaugurating the suspension of belief vis-à-vis their own natural attitudes.

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Christopher Houston
Santa Monica Community College

Citations of this work

Antropología fenomenológica y giro ontológico.Julián García Labrador - 2023 - Human Review. International Humanities Review / Revista Internacional de Humanidades 16 (1):95-113.

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References found in this work

Phenomenology of Perception.Aron Gurwitsch, M. Merleau-Ponty & Colin Smith - 1964 - Philosophical Review 73 (3):417.
The poetics of space.Gaston Bachelard - 1994 - Boston: Beacon Press. Edited by M. Jolas.
Embodiment as a Paradigm for Anthropology.Thomas J. Csordas - 1990 - Ethos: Journal of the Society for Psychological Anthropology 18 (1):5-47.

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