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Wittgenstein: Phenomenologist.

A Compressed Genealogy of Phenomenology — Part III

The Phenomenology of Logic: Wittgenstein, Husserl, and the Experience of Necessity

We were supposed to leave Husserl this week and move on to Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty.

Naturally, we are not doing that.

Before leaving Husserl, we need one strange detour through Wittgenstein, because logic itself contains a phenomenological problem.

Anyone who has worked through a truth table, a derivation, or a quantified formula has experienced the thrill of infinite pervasion that comes with intensional poverty. Content and range are inversely proportional. Sometimes this is felt. When it is, the structures of logic become mystically appealing. This is why some people become logicians.

Look at “For all x.” It appears cheap and tiny—yet it ranges over an infinite field. A tautology barely says anything, yet nothing can touch it. A contradiction also has felt force—that of logical impossibility.

That is the problem for this session: what exactly is the experience of logical necessity?

[This is just a blurb! More later today …]

METHOD

• TBA [see above]
• As always, summaries, notes, event chatlogs, episode transcripts, timelines, tables, observations, and downloadable PDFs for all the episodes we cover can be found here: THORR (The High Ontology Reading Room)

ABOUT PROFESSOR TAUBENECK

Professor Taubeneck is professor of German and Philosophy at UBC, first translator of Hegel’s Encyclopedia into English, and SADHO CΦO. Most impressively, he has also been wrestling with the core texts of 20-cent. phenomenology and existentialism for over 30 years, and has worked and collaborated with Gadamer, Derrida, and Rorty.

View all of our coming episodes here.

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Mission: Clarity.

A Compressed Genealogy of Phenomenology — Part II

Last time, I got overwhelmed by the size of the thing I had accidentally opened. What started as a manageable history of phenomenology became Aristotle-to-the-present, plus a database, plus a mindmap, plus my attempt to explain why the map was not the map I actually wanted.

This session we will go cleanly and with a clear plan.

We will follow just one thread: Aristotle, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Husserl.

Aristotle makes the appearing world the object of investigation: perception, form, imagination, and ways of intelligibility. Descartes wants existence that has been certainty-vetted, which makes the known retreat into the power of think-acting. The outer known is known by subjective proxies, and this is the crisis of representationalism. How do I know my thought actually [reaches? emulates? is?] the thing? Hume makes sense stuff our only acquaintance. If we limit our having to our actual getting, experience is originally and for-us really a passing plurality of impressions, ideas, associations, habits, and a few kinds of invented relation that provide certainty and necessity. Kant’s solution makes certain ways of unity—space, time, judgment, synthesis—necessary for being a functioning knower. Showing up as knowable means that lots of vetting has already occurred.

This time, we will see how Husserl inherits this history and what he does with it, which is describe, with amazing care, the acts and structures that make the object-experience a presence-experience for the subject—how an object becomes present as meant, known, doubted, remembered, imagined, or judged.

The goal this time is to make the sequence intelligible and usable.

METHOD

• TBA by this evening!
• As always, summaries, notes, event chatlogs, episode transcripts, timelines, tables, observations, and downloadable PDFs for all the episodes we cover can be found here: THORR (The High Ontology Reading Room)

ABOUT PROFESSOR TAUBENECK

Professor Taubeneck is professor of German and Philosophy at UBC, first translator of Hegel’s Encyclopedia into English, and SADHO CΦO. Most impressively, he has also been wrestling with the core texts of 20-cent. phenomenology and existentialism for over 30 years, and has worked and collaborated with Gadamer, Derrida, and Rorty.

View all of our coming episodes here.

[JOIN HERE]

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Phenomenology: A Genealogy

From Kant to 6:00 AM This Morning: A Compressed Genealogy of Phenomenology

For our next session, we will attempt something absurdly ambitious: a comprehensive synoptic map of phenomenology from Kant through Husserl through Derrida and up to today.

The method of presentation will be genealogical for a small set of primary concepts. What happens to each of these concepts as it migrates from one philosophical system into another?

• Does the concept keep its meaning, change its meaning, get rebuilt under the same name, or survive only as a word attached to a different concept?
• Does it keep the same rank in the system, gain rank, lose rank, become central, move to another position, or become stricter, heavier, and more absolute?
• Does it move from one domain to another: from logic to history, from epistemology to ethics, from ontology to social relation, from formal structure to lived embodiment, from ordinary description to transcendental condition?
• Does it become phenomenological: no longer treated as a doctrine about things, but as a description of how things are given in experience?
• Does it become ethical: no longer treated as a neutral structure of cognition, being, or method, but as a claim made on the subject?
• Does it become interpersonal: no longer centered on subject-object relation, but on self-other relation?
• Does the later thinker accept the source, revise it, extend it, radicalize it, reverse it, use it against itself, attack it, reject it, or leave it aside?
• Does the inheritance occur at the level of topic, method, or whole-system architecture?
• Is the source a real ancestor, a corrected ancestor, an inverted ancestor, an adversary, or merely a neighboring contrast case?

What we coulda done

We could have presented a History of Phenomenology using timeline or mind-map of linked names, book titles, terms (concepts), and principles (sentences). That still would have been the best Meetup event on the History of Phenomenology, especially if there have never been any.

What we’re gonna do instead

But we’re doing things the hard way (for us)—which is the super-great way for you: We will treat the history it as an geneologico-historical transformation network, or what contemporary Analytic philosophers call a MUTANT—a Map of Uptake, Transformation, Appropriation, Negation, and Transposition.

You will see, hear, and taste …

Kant on the conditions of object-experience; Hegel on mediation, negation, and history; Husserl on intentionality and givenness; Scheler on value, personhood, and affective disclosure; Heidegger on being-in-the-world and temporality; Rosenzweig on revelation, speech, and the break with totality; Buber on I–Thou encounter; Levinas on responsibility before the Other; Derrida on trace, difference, writing, and inheritance; and then the 6:00 AM guys and girls.

Don’t worry—Prof. Steven Taubeneck will be aboard with us to help keep us in line and on target.

Better METHOD ingredients will appear below over the next few days as the main MUTANT gives birth to little sub-MUTANT children, aka partial diagrams. Stay tuned.

METHOD

• TBA [see above]
• As always, summaries, notes, event chatlogs, episode transcripts, timelines, tables, observations, and downloadable PDFs for all the episodes we cover can be found here: THORR (The High Ontology Reading Room)

ABOUT PROFESSOR TAUBENECK

Professor Taubeneck is professor of German and Philosophy at UBC, first translator of Hegel’s Encyclopedia into English, and SADHO CΦO. Most impressively, he has also been wrestling with the core texts of 20-cent. phenomenology and existentialism for over 30 years, and has worked and collaborated with Gadamer, Derrida, and Rorty.

View all of our coming episodes here.

[JOIN HERE]