Thomas Jefferson, by Charles Wilson Peale. Our education system is currently in crisis. It is no secret that American children are at best average when compared to children from other countries (see, e.g., this Huffington Post article), and our adults fare very poorly on tests of math, science, history, and general knowledge. This has serious… Read more »
Paper cutting by Bettina von Arnim. Saybrook faculty members Drs. Magnus Englander, Susi Ferrarello, and Marc Applebaum collaborated in presenting a panel, “Phenomenological Research: Philosophy and Psychology in Dialogue” at the 32nd annual International Human Science Research Conference in Aalborg, Denmark in August 2013. Englander’s presented his reflections as a qualitative psychological researcher on philosophical… Read more »
Photo by Adam Jones adamjones.freeservers.com. The way we creatively embody and express the traditions we inherit, whether philosophical or psychological, is inevitably shaped by our own history, background, and values. In my case, before I began my study of phenomenology, I had already worked as a teacher and counselor. I’ve been a teacher of one… Read more »
Yannis Toussulis I conducted this interview with Yannis Toussulis about the role that phenomenology, both descriptive and hermeneutic, plays in clinical practice. It is the first in a series of conversations sponsored by PhenomenologyBlog. Yannis Toussulis received his PhD in Psychology from Saybrook Graduate School in 1995. His dissertation, supervised by Amedeo Giorgi, was entitled… Read more »
Ramapo College Jitendranath Mohanty is one of the preeminent living phenomenological philosophers, an expert in Husserl’s phenomenology. He studied and taught in Germany, France, and the US with key people in the tradition including Hans Georg Gadamer, Paul Ricoeur, Hanna Arendt, Aron Gurwitsch, and Alfred Schutz. Amedeo Giorgi is one of the pioneers of qualitative… Read more »
Merleau-Ponty (1993) wrote, “For the speaker no less than for the listener, language is definitely something other than a technique for ciphering or deciphering ready-made significations” (p. 80). He is ever insistent that being-in-the-world is an embodied event, an ongoing discovery, and he relentlessly examines the ways in which experiences are given to us, prior… Read more »
Edmund Husserl I love Teo and Febbraro’s (2002) pointed observation that “Psychology’s history can be studied as a history of fads” (p. 458). Teo (1996) has written that psychologists “have tended to value meta-theoretical constructions from outside their discipline more than those from inside their disciplines,” with the popularity of these constructions shifting as one… Read more »
Reading J. N. Mohanty’s essay “Husserl’s Concept of Intentionality” in Analecta Husserliana I (1971), the following passage, discussing the Logische Untersuchungen, stood out to me: The static analysis lays bare the structure of what is called an intentional act whereby the word ‘act’ has to be taken not in its ordinary usage as meaning an… Read more »
Maurice Merleau-Ponty Since Husserl, phenomenological philosophers have dialogued with the empirical sciences in an attempt to contribute to a more complete human science—a science that speaks to the fullness of being human. The job of our philosophers, in this context, is to invite an opening up of an epistemological conversation that renews the sciences’ exploration… Read more »
The students who put this question to me are usually taking their first course in phenomenological or hermeneutic (narrative) research. And in a way, I feel for them, because many of them didn’t expect to be facing something called “epistemology,” and bumping into any number of arcane Greek terms that seem to bear no relationship… Read more »
