Misplaced Pages

#583416

109-476: The "back to Kant" movement began in the 1860s, as a reaction to the German materialist controversy in the 1850s. In addition to the work of Hermann von Helmholtz and Eduard Zeller , early fruits of the movement were Kuno Fischer 's works on Kant and Friedrich Albert Lange 's History of Materialism ( Geschichte des Materialismus , 1873–75), the latter of which argued that transcendental idealism superseded

218-421: A "third way" that avoids their metaphysical assumptions about an objective, pre-given world. The central contentions of this work are that the body is the locus of engagement with the world, and that the body's modes of engagement are more fundamental than what phenomenology describes as consequent acts of objectification. Merleau-Ponty reinterprets concepts like intentionality, the phenomenological reduction, and

327-540: A 1907 article in The Philosophical Review . In philosophy, "phenomenology" refers to the tradition inaugurated by Edmund Husserl at the beginning of the 20th century. The term, however, had been used in different senses in other philosophy texts since the 18th century. These include those by Johann Heinrich Lambert (1728–1777), Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831), and Carl Stumpf (1848–1936), among others. It was, however,

436-400: A Kantian turn in contemporary analytic philosophy has been taken up by his student Robert Brandom . Brandom's work has transformed Sellars' project to introducing a Hegelian phase in analytic philosophy. In the 1980s, interest in neo-Kantianism has revived in the wake of the work of Gillian Rose , who is a critic of this movement's influence on modern philosophy, and because of its influence on

545-612: A broadly physicalist or scientific materialist framework, producing rival accounts of how best to accommodate the mind , including functionalism , anomalous monism , and identity theory . Scientific materialism is often synonymous with, and has typically been described as, a reductive materialism . In the early 21st century, Paul and Patricia Churchland advocated a radically contrasting position (at least in regard to certain hypotheses): eliminative materialism . Eliminative materialism holds that some mental phenomena simply do not exist at all, and that talk of such phenomena reflects

654-403: A certain way". Phenomenology is a direct reaction to the psychologism and physicalism of Husserl's time. It takes as its point of departure the question of how objectivity is possible at all when the experience of the world and its objects is thoroughly subjective. So far from being a form of subjectivism, phenomenologists argue that the scientific ideal of a purely objective third-person

763-673: A conscious and intelligent Mind. This Mind is the matrix of all matter. James Jeans concurred with Planck, saying, "The Universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine. Mind no longer appears to be an accidental intruder into the realm of matter." In the Critique of Pure Reason , Immanuel Kant argued against materialism in defending his transcendental idealism (as well as offering arguments against subjective idealism and mind–body dualism ). But Kant argues that change and time require an enduring substrate. Phenomenology (philosophy) Phenomenology

872-409: A critical theoretical fold dominated by poststructuralist theories of language and discourse. Scholars such as Mel Y. Chen and Zakiyyah Iman Jackson have critiqued this body of new materialist literature for neglecting to consider the materiality of race and gender in particular. Métis scholar Zoe Todd , as well as Mohawk (Bear Clan, Six Nations) and Anishinaabe scholar Vanessa Watts, query

981-471: A deeper understanding of subjective experience, rather than focusing on behavior . Phenomenology is contrasted with phenomenalism , which reduces mental states and physical objects to complexes of sensations , and with psychologism , which treats logical truths or epistemological principles as the products of human psychology. In particular, transcendental phenomenology , as outlined by Edmund Husserl , aims to arrive at an objective understanding of

1090-408: A man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of

1199-650: A monist ontology, instead espousing the ontological separation of matter and space (i.e. that space is "another kind" of being). Wang Chong (27 – c. 100 AD) was a Chinese thinker of the early Common Era said to be a materialist. Later Indian materialist Jayaraashi Bhatta (6th century) in his work Tattvopaplavasimha ( The Upsetting of All Principles ) refuted the Nyāya Sūtra epistemology. The materialistic Cārvāka philosophy appears to have died out some time after 1400; when Madhavacharya compiled Sarva-darśana-samgraha ( A Digest of All Philosophies ) in

SECTION 10

#1732790244584

1308-426: A new turn in materialism in his 1841 book The Essence of Christianity , which presented a humanist account of religion as the outward projection of man's inward nature. Feuerbach introduced anthropological materialism , a version of materialism that views materialist anthropology as the universal science . Feuerbach's variety of materialism heavily influenced Karl Marx , who in the late 19th century elaborated

1417-506: A revised notion of Judaism , particularly in Cohen's seminal work, one of the few works of the movement available in English translation. The neo-Kantian school was of importance in devising a division of philosophy that has had durable influence well beyond Germany. It made early use of terms such as epistemology and upheld its prominence over ontology . Natorp had a decisive influence on

1526-446: A spurious " folk psychology " and introspection illusion . A materialist of this variety might believe that a concept like "belief" has no basis in fact (e.g. the way folk science speaks of demon-caused illnesses). With reductive materialism at one end of a continuum (our theories will reduce to facts) and eliminative materialism at the other (certain theories will need to be eliminated in light of new facts), revisionary materialism

1635-415: A technical term, which cannot be reduced to a mode of consciousness. From this angle, one's state of mind is an "effect" rather than a determinant of existence, including those aspects of existence of which one is not conscious. By shifting the center of gravity to existence in what he calls fundamental ontology , Heidegger altered the subsequent direction of phenomenology. According to Heidegger, philosophy

1744-408: Is a fantasy and falsity. The perspective and presuppositions of the scientist must be articulated and taken into account in the design of the experiment and the interpretation of its results. Inasmuch as phenomenology is able to accomplish this, it can help to improve the quality of empirical scientific research. In spite of the field's internal diversity, Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi argue that

1853-402: Is a philosophical study and movement largely associated with the early 20th century that seeks to objectively investigate the nature of subjective, conscious experience. It attempts to describe the universal features of consciousness while avoiding assumptions about the external world, aiming to describe phenomena as they appear to the subject , and to explore the meaning and significance of

1962-525: Is a philosophy of materialism from classical antiquity that was a major forerunner of modern science. Though ostensibly a deist , Epicurus affirmed the literal existence of the Greek gods in either some type of celestial "heaven" cognate from which they ruled the universe (if not on a literal Mount Olympus), and his philosophy promulgated atomism , while Platonism taught roughly the opposite, despite Plato's teaching of Zeus as God . Materialism belongs to

2071-406: Is a real part of A's conscious activity – noesis – but gets its sense from the general concept of loving, which has an abstract or ideal meaning, as "loving" has a meaning in the English language independently of what an individual means by the word when they use it. The noematic core as the act's referent or object as it is meant in the act . One element of controversy is whether this noematic object

2180-574: Is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else." Werner Heisenberg wrote: "The ontology of materialism rested upon the illusion that the kind of existence, the direct 'actuality' of the world around us, can be extrapolated into the atomic range. This extrapolation, however, is impossible   ... Atoms are not things." Some 20th-century physicists (e.g., Eugene Wigner and Henry Stapp ), and some modern physicists and science writers (e.g., Stephen Barr , Paul Davies , and John Gribbin ) have argued that materialism

2289-439: Is always the consciousness of something. The word itself should not be confused with the "ordinary" use of the word intentional, but should rather be taken as playing on the etymological roots of the word. Originally, intention referred to a "stretching out" ("in tension," from Latin intendere ), and in this context it refers to consciousness "stretching out" towards its object. However, one should be careful with this image: there

SECTION 20

#1732790244584

2398-657: Is anything particularly "new" about "new materialism", as Indigenous and other animist ontologies have attested to what might be called the "vibrancy of matter" for centuries. Others, such as Thomas Nail , have critiqued "vitalist" versions of new materialism for depoliticizing "flat ontology" and being ahistorical. Quentin Meillassoux proposed speculative materialism , a post-Kantian return to David Hume also based on materialist ideas. The nature and definition of matter —like other key concepts in science and philosophy—have occasioned much debate: One challenge to

2507-405: Is constituted for consciousness in many different ways, through, for instance, perception , memory , signification , and so forth. Throughout these different intentionalities, though they have different structures and different ways of being "about" the object, an object is still constituted as the identical object; consciousness is directed at the same intentional object in direct perception as it

2616-425: Is distributed and society divided into classes or orders is dependent upon what is produced, how it is produced, and how the products are exchanged. From this point of view, the final causes of all social changes and political revolutions are to be sought, not in men's brains, not in men's better insights into eternal truth and justice, but in changes in the modes of production and exchange. They are to be sought, not in

2725-410: Is due to Husserl. Modern scholarship also recognizes the existence of the following varieties: late Heidegger's transcendental hermeneutic phenomenology , Maurice Merleau-Ponty 's embodied phenomenology , Michel Henry 's material phenomenology , Alva Noë 's analytic phenomenology , and J. L. Austin 's linguistic phenomenology . Intentionality refers to the notion that consciousness

2834-416: Is essential is then determined by the imaginative work of eidetic variation , which is a method for clarifying the features of a thing without which it would not be what it is. Husserl concentrated more on the ideal, essential structures of consciousness. As he wanted to exclude any hypothesis on the existence of external objects, he introduced the method of phenomenological reduction to eliminate them. What

2943-471: Is flawed due to certain recent findings in physics, such as quantum mechanics and chaos theory . According to Gribbin and Davies (1991): Then came our Quantum theory, which totally transformed our image of matter. The old assumption that the microscopic world of atoms was simply a scaled-down version of the everyday world had to be abandoned. Newton's deterministic machine was replaced by a shadowy and paradoxical conjunction of waves and particles, governed by

3052-413: Is frequently assimilated to one variety of physicalism or another. Modern philosophical materialists extend the definition of other scientifically observable entities such as energy , forces , and the spacetime continuum ; some philosophers, such as Mary Midgley , suggest that the concept of "matter" is elusive and poorly defined. During the 19th century, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels extended

3161-442: Is in the immediately-following retention of this object and the eventual remembering of it. As envisioned by Husserl, phenomenology is a method of philosophical inquiry that rejects the rationalist bias that has dominated Western thought since Plato in favor of a method of reflective attentiveness that discloses the individual's "lived experience." Loosely rooted in an epistemological device called epoché , Husserl's method entails

3270-476: Is in this realm of phenomenological givenness, Husserl claims, that the search begins for "indubitable evidence that will ultimately serve as the foundation for every scientific discipline." Franz Brentano introduced a distinction between sensory and noetic consciousness : the former describes presentations of sensory objects or intuitions , while the latter describes the thinking of concepts . In Husserl's phenomenology, this pair of terms, derived from

3379-460: Is matter and void, and all phenomena result from different motions and conglomerations of base material particles called atoms (literally "indivisibles"). De Rerum Natura provides mechanistic explanations for phenomena such as erosion, evaporation, wind, and sound. Famous principles like "nothing can touch body but body" first appeared in Lucretius's work. Democritus and Epicurus did not espouse

Neo-Kantianism - Misplaced Pages Continue

3488-436: Is meant to signify the "subjective achievement of truth." This is not an attempt to reduce the objective sort of evidence to subjective "opinion," but rather an attempt to describe the structure of having something present in intuition with the addition of having it present as intelligible : "Evidence is the successful presentation of an intelligible object, the successful presentation of something whose truth becomes manifest in

3597-399: Is missing from the mathematical formalism of our best description of the world. "Materialist" physicalists also believe that the formalism describes fields of insentience. In other words, the intrinsic nature of the physical is non-experiential. Most Hindus and transcendentalists regard all matter as an illusion, or maya , blinding humans from the truth. Transcendental experiences like

3706-409: Is not a relation, but rather an intrinsic feature of intentional acts." This is because there are no independent relata. It is (at least in the first place) a matter of indifference to the phenomenologist whether the intentional object has any existence independent of the act. Intuition in phenomenology refers to cases where the intentional object is directly present to the intentionality at play; if

3815-414: Is not intuited, but still intended, but then emptily . Examples of empty intentions can be signitive intentions – intentions that only imply or refer to their objects. In everyday language, the word evidence is used to signify a special sort of relation between a state of affairs and a proposition: State A is evidence for the proposition "A is true." In phenomenology, however, the concept of evidence

3924-416: Is not some consciousness first that, subsequently, stretches out to its object; rather, consciousness occurs as the simultaneity of a conscious act and its object. Intentionality is often summed up as " aboutness ." Whether this something that consciousness is about is in direct perception or in fantasy is inconsequential to the concept of intentionality itself; whatever consciousness is directed at, that

4033-416: Is observed is not the object as it is in itself, but how and inasmuch it is given in the intentional acts. Knowledge of essences would only be possible by " bracketing " all assumptions about the existence of an external world and the inessential (subjective) aspects of how the object is concretely given to us. This phenomenological reduction is the second stage of Husserl's procedure of epoché . That which

4142-410: Is often associated with reductionism , according to which the objects or phenomena individuated at one level of description, if they are genuine, must be explicable in terms of the objects or phenomena at some other level of description—typically, at a more reduced level. Non-reductive materialism explicitly rejects this notion, taking the material constitution of all particulars to be consistent with

4251-617: Is somewhere in the middle. Contemporary continental philosopher Gilles Deleuze has attempted to rework and strengthen classical materialist ideas. Contemporary theorists such as Manuel DeLanda , working with this reinvigorated materialism, have come to be classified as new materialists . New materialism has become its own subfield, with courses on it at major universities, as well as numerous conferences, edited collections and monographs devoted to it. Jane Bennett 's 2010 book Vibrant Matter has been particularly instrumental in bringing theories of monist ontology and vitalism back into

4360-425: Is the same as the actual object of the act (assuming it exists) or is some kind of ideal object. In phenomenology, empathy refers to the experience of one's own body as another. While people often identify others with their physical bodies, this type of phenomenology requires that they focus on the subjectivity of the other, as well as the intersubjective engagement with them. In Husserl's original account, this

4469-498: Is the theory of chaos, which has recently gained widespread attention. The objections of Davies and Gribbin are shared by proponents of digital physics , who view information rather than matter as fundamental. The physicist and proponent of digital physics John Archibald Wheeler wrote, "all matter and all things physical are information-theoretic in origin and this is a participatory universe." Some founders of quantum theory, such as Max Planck , shared their objections. He wrote: As

Neo-Kantianism - Misplaced Pages Continue

4578-556: Is then applied to the experience of another's body, which, through apperception, is constituted as another subjectivity. One can thus recognise the Other's intentions, emotions, etc. This experience of empathy is important in the phenomenological account of intersubjectivity . In phenomenology, intersubjectivity constitutes objectivity (i.e., what one experiences as objective is experienced as being intersubjectively available – available to all other subjects. This does not imply that objectivity

4687-480: Is what consciousness is conscious of. This means that the object of consciousness does not have to be a physical object apprehended in perception : it can just as well be a fantasy or a memory. Consequently, these "structures" of consciousness, such as perception, memory, fantasy, and so forth, are called intentionalities . The term "intentionality" originated with the Scholastics in the medieval period and

4796-570: The Axial Age ( c.  800–200 BC). In ancient Indian philosophy , materialism developed around 600 BC with the works of Ajita Kesakambali , Payasi , Kanada and the proponents of the Cārvāka school of philosophy. Kanada became one of the early proponents of atomism . The Nyaya – Vaisesika school (c. 600–100 BC) developed one of the earliest forms of atomism (although their proofs of God and their positing that consciousness

4905-505: The Logical Investigations , and some were alienated as a result. This work introduced distinctions between the act of consciousness ( noesis ) and the phenomena at which it is directed (the noemata ). Noetic refers to the intentional act of consciousness (believing, willing, etc.). Noematic refers to the object or content (noema), which appears in the noetic acts (the believed, wanted, hated, loved, etc.). What

5014-494: The categorical imperative . In the analytic tradition, the revival of interest in the work of Kant that has been underway since Peter Strawson 's work The Bounds of Sense (1966) can also be viewed as effectively neo-Kantian, not least due to its continuing emphasis on epistemology at the expense of ontology. Around the same time as Strawson, Wilfrid Sellars also renewed interest in Kant's philosophy. His project of introducing

5123-434: The lived experiences . This approach, while philosophical, has found many applications in qualitative research across different scientific disciplines, especially in the social sciences , humanities , psychology , and cognitive science , but also in fields as diverse as health sciences , architecture , and human-computer interaction , among many others. The application of phenomenology in these fields aims to gain

5232-406: The neurochemistry of the human brain and nervous system , without which they cannot exist. Materialism directly contrasts with monistic idealism , according to which consciousness is the fundamental substance of nature. Materialism is closely related to physicalism —the view that all that exists is ultimately physical. Philosophical physicalism has evolved from materialism with the theories of

5341-696: The town of the same name ), the other prominent representatives of which were Paul Natorp and Ernst Cassirer . Another important group, the Southwest ( German ) School (also known as the Heidelberg School or Baden School , centered in Heidelberg , Baden in Southwest Germany ) included Wilhelm Windelband , Heinrich Rickert and Ernst Troeltsch . The Marburg School emphasized epistemology and philosophical logic , whereas

5450-439: The 14th century, he had no Cārvāka (or Lokāyata) text to quote from or refer to. In early 12th-century al-Andalus , Arabian philosopher Ibn Tufail ( a.k.a.  Abubacer) discussed materialism in his philosophical novel , Hayy ibn Yaqdhan ( Philosophus Autodidactus ), while vaguely foreshadowing historical materialism . In France, Pierre Gassendi (1592–1665) represented the materialist tradition in opposition to

5559-458: The Greek nous (mind) designate respectively the real content, noesis , and the ideal content, noema , of an intentional act (an act of consciousness). The noesis is the part of the act that gives it a particular sense or character (as in judging or perceiving something, loving or hating it, accepting or rejecting it, etc.). This is real in the sense that it is actually part of what takes place in

SECTION 50

#1732790244584

5668-656: The Kantian understandings of the transcendental include Jean-François Lyotard and Jean-Luc Nancy . Classical conservative thinker Roger Scruton has been greatly influenced by Kantian ethics and aesthetics. German materialism Materialism is a form of philosophical monism which holds that matter is the fundamental substance in nature , and that all things, including mental states and consciousness , are results of material interactions of material things. According to philosophical materialism, mind and consciousness are caused by physical processes, such as

5777-494: The Soul . According to the phenomenological tradition, "the central structure of an experience is its intentionality, it being directed towards something, as it is an experience of or about some object." Also, on this theory, every intentional act is implicitly accompanied by a secondary, pre-reflective awareness of the act as one's own. Phenomenology proceeds systematically, but it does not attempt to study consciousness from

5886-462: The Southwest school emphasized issues of culture and value theory (notably the fact–value distinction ). A third group, mainly represented by Leonard Nelson , established the neo-Friesian School (named after post-Kantian philosopher Jakob Friedrich Fries ) which emphasized philosophy of science . The neo-Kantian schools tended to emphasize scientific readings of Kant, often downplaying

5995-502: The United States and consistently held that mental states are brain states and that mental terms have the same referent as physical terms. The twentieth century has witnessed many materialist theories of the mental, and much debate surrounding them. But not all conceptions of physicalism are tied to verificationist theories of meaning or direct realist accounts of perception. Rather, physicalists believe that no "element of reality"

6104-543: The attempts of René Descartes (1596–1650) to provide the natural sciences with dualist foundations. There followed the materialist and atheist abbé Jean Meslier (1664–1729), along with the French materialists : Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709–1751), Denis Diderot (1713–1784), Étienne Bonnot de Condillac (1714–1780), Claude Adrien Helvétius (1715–1771), German-French Baron d'Holbach (1723–1789), and other French Enlightenment thinkers. In England, materialism

6213-460: The class of monist ontology , and is thus different from ontological theories based on dualism or pluralism . For singular explanations of the phenomenal reality, materialism is in contrast to idealism , neutral monism , and spiritualism . It can also contrast with phenomenalism , vitalism , and dual-aspect monism . Its materiality can, in some ways, be linked to the concept of determinism , as espoused by Enlightenment thinkers. Despite

6322-407: The colonial orientation of the race for a "new" materialism. Watts in particular describes the tendency to regard matter as a subject of feminist or philosophical care as a tendency too invested in the reanimation of a Eurocentric tradition of inquiry at the expense of an Indigenous ethic of responsibility. Other scholars, such as Helene Vosters, echo their concerns and have questioned whether there

6431-432: The common foundational approach of phenomenological inquiry; that is, investigating things just as they appear, independent of any particular theoretical framework. The term phenomenology derives from the Greek φαινόμενον, phainómenon ("that which appears") and λόγος, lógos ("study"). It entered the English language around the turn of the 18th century and first appeared in direct connection to Husserl's philosophy in

6540-422: The concept of historical materialism —the basis for what Marx and Friedrich Engels outlined as scientific socialism : The materialist conception of history starts from the proposition that the production of the means to support human life and, next to production, the exchange of things produced, is the basis of all social structure; that in every society that has appeared in history, the manner in which wealth

6649-436: The concept of materialism to elaborate a materialist conception of history centered on the roughly empirical world of human activity (practice, including labor) and the institutions created, reproduced or destroyed by that activity. They also developed dialectical materialism , by taking Hegelian dialectics , stripping them of their idealist aspects, and fusing them with materialism (see Modern philosophy ). Materialism

SECTION 60

#1732790244584

6758-522: The concept of matter had merely changed, while others believed the conventional position could no longer be maintained. Werner Heisenberg said: "The ontology of materialism rested upon the illusion that the kind of existence, the direct 'actuality' of the world around us, can be extrapolated into the atomic range. This extrapolation, however, is impossible...atoms are not things." The concept of matter has changed in response to new scientific discoveries. Thus materialism has no definite content independent of

6867-411: The consciousness of the subject of the act. The noesis is always correlated with a noema. For Husserl, the full noema is a complex ideal structure comprising at least a noematic sense and a noematic core. The correct interpretation of what Husserl meant by the noema has long been controversial, but the noematic sense is generally understood as the ideal meaning of the act. For instance, if A loves B, loving

6976-569: The conventional concept of matter as tangible "stuff" came with the rise of field physics in the 19th century. Relativity shows that matter and energy (including the spatially distributed energy of fields) are interchangeable. This enables the ontological view that energy is prima materia and matter is one of its forms. In contrast, the Standard Model of particle physics uses quantum field theory to describe all interactions. On this view it could be said that fields are prima materia and

7085-464: The dialectical form of materialism. George Stack distinguishes between materialism and physicalism: In the twentieth century, physicalism has emerged out of positivism. Physicalism restricts meaningful statements to physical bodies or processes that are verifiable or in principle verifiable. It is an empirical hypothesis that is subject to revision and, hence, lacks the dogmatic stance of classical materialism. Herbert Feigl defended physicalism in

7194-563: The eidetic method to capture our inherence in the perceived world, that is, our embodied coexistence with things through a kind of reciprocal exchange. According to Merleau-Ponty, perception discloses a meaningful world that can never be completely determined, but which nevertheless aims at truth. Some scholars have differentiated phenomenology into these seven types: The contrast between "constitutive phenomenology" (sometimes static phenomenology or descriptive phenomenology ) and "genetic phenomenology" (sometimes phenomenology of genesis )

7303-444: The empirical sciences. " Pre-reflective self-consciousness " is Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi 's term for Husserl's (1900/1901) idea that self-consciousness always involves a self-appearance or self-manifestation prior to self-reflection . This is one point of nearly unanimous agreement among phenomenologists: "a minimal form of self-consciousness is a constant structural feature of conscious experience. Experience happens for

7412-543: The energy is a property of the field. According to the dominant cosmological model, the Lambda-CDM model , less than 5% of the universe's energy density is made up of the "matter" the Standard Model describes, and most of the universe is composed of dark matter and dark energy , with little agreement among scientists about what these are made of. With the advent of quantum physics, some scientists believed

7521-501: The epoché, being appeared only as a correlate of consciousness, for Heidegger the pre-conscious grasp of being is the starting point. For this reason, he replaces Husserl's concept of intentionality with the notion of comportment , which is presented as "more primitive" than the "conceptually structured" acts analyzed by Husserl. Paradigmatic examples of comportment can be found in the unreflective dealing with equipment that presents itself as simply "ready-to-hand" in what Heidegger calls

7630-403: The evidencing itself." In Ideas , Husserl presents as the "Principle of All Principles" that, "every originary presentive intuition is a legitimizing source of cognition, that everything originally (so to speak, in its 'personal' actuality) offered to us in 'intuition' is to be accepted simply as what it is presented as being, but also only within the limits in which it is presented there." It

7739-460: The existence of real objects, properties or phenomena not explicable in the terms canonically used for the basic material constituents. Jerry Fodor held this view, according to which empirical laws and explanations in "special sciences" like psychology or geology are invisible from the perspective of basic physics. Materialism developed, possibly independently, in several geographically separated regions of Eurasia during what Karl Jaspers termed

7848-487: The experience of moving around it, seeing new aspects of it (often referred to as making the absent present and the present absent), and still retaining the notion that this is the same thing that one saw other aspects of just a moment ago (it is identical). One's body is also experienced as a duality, both as object (one's ability to touch one's own hand) and as one's own subjectivity (one's experience of being touched). The experience of one's own body as one's own subjectivity

7957-411: The experiencing subject in an immediate way and as part of this immediacy, it is implicitly marked as my experience." In 1913, Husserl published Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology . In this work, he presents phenomenology as a form of " transcendental idealism ". Although Husserl claimed to have always been a transcendental idealist, this was not how many of his admirers had interpreted

8066-743: The fields of social and political philosophy . Towards the end of 1898 G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell rebelled against Kant and Hegel who were the leading philosophers within British and American universities at that time. Neo-Kantianism was banned out of them for the following fifty years and continued to survive solely in the Continental Philosophy. In the 1960s Strawson published The Bounds of Sense , which relaunched Neo-Kantianism while proposing to deny its doctrine of transcendental idealism . John Rawls ' A Theory of Justice (1971) restored Kantian practical philosophy of

8175-549: The foundation of 20th-century neo-Kantianism. It is in reference to the Fischer–Trendelenburg debate and Cohen's work that Hans Vaihinger started his massive commentary on the Critique of Pure Reason . The several schools of thought, in spite of seeing themselves as united by a common movement, often saw massive fundamental disagreements. Hermann Cohen became the leader of the Marburg School (centered in

8284-553: The historic struggle between material idealism and mechanistic materialism. Fischer was earlier involved in a dispute with the Aristotelian idealist Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg concerning the interpretation of the results of the Transcendental Aesthetic , a dispute that prompted Hermann Cohen 's 1871 seminal work Kants Theorie der Erfahrung ( Kant's Theory of Experience ), a book often regarded as

8393-495: The history of phenomenology and is often credited with leading Edmund Husserl to adopt the vocabulary of transcendental idealism . Emil Lask was influenced by Edmund Husserl's work, and himself exerted a remarkable influence on the young Martin Heidegger . The debate between Cassirer and Heidegger over the interpretation of Kant led the latter to formulate reasons for viewing Kant as a forerunner of phenomenology ; this view

8502-408: The intention is "filled" by the direct apprehension of the object, one has an intuited object. Having a cup of coffee in front of oneself, for instance, seeing it, feeling it, or even imagining it – these are all filled intentions, and the object is then intuited . The same goes for the apprehension of mathematical formulae or a number. If one does not have the object as referred to directly, the object

8611-490: The intentional structures of mental acts and how they are directed at both real and ideal objects. The first volume of the Logical Investigations , the Prolegomena to Pure Logic , begins with a critique of psychologism , that is, the attempt to subsume the a priori validity of the laws of logic under psychology. Husserl establishes a separate field for research in logic, philosophy, and phenomenology, independently from

8720-443: The large number of philosophical schools and their nuances, all philosophies are said to fall into one of two primary categories, defined in contrast to each other: idealism and materialism . The basic proposition of these two categories pertains to the nature of reality: the primary difference between them is how they answer two fundamental questions—what reality consists of, and how it originated. To idealists, spirit or mind or

8829-488: The laws of chance, rather than the rigid rules of causality. An extension of the quantum theory goes beyond even this; it paints a picture in which solid matter dissolves away, to be replaced by weird excitations and vibrations of invisible field energy. Quantum physics undermines materialism because it reveals that matter has far less "substance" than we might believe. But another development goes even further by demolishing Newton's image of matter as inert lumps. This development

8938-493: The mid-19th century was German materialism , which included Ludwig Büchner (1824–1899), the Dutch-born Jacob Moleschott (1822–1893), and Carl Vogt (1817–1895), even though they had different views on core issues such as the evolution and the origins of life. Contemporary analytic philosophers (e.g. Daniel Dennett , Willard Van Orman Quine , Donald Davidson , and Jerry Fodor ) operate within

9047-436: The mind. In Husserl's own words: experience is not an opening through which a world, existing prior to all experience, shines into a room of consciousness; it is not a mere taking of something alien to consciousness into consciousness... Experience is the performance in which for me, the experiencer, experienced being "is there", and is there as what it is, with the whole content and the mode of being that experience itself, by

9156-555: The normally circumspect mode of engagement within the world. For Husserl, all concrete determinations of the empirical ego would have to be abstracted in order to attain pure consciousness. By contrast, Heidegger claims that "the possibilities and destinies of philosophy are bound up with man's existence, and thus with temporality and with historicality." For this reason, all experience must be seen as shaped by social context, which for Heidegger joins phenomenology with philosophical hermeneutics . Husserl charged Heidegger with raising

9265-454: The objects of mind ( ideas ) are primary, and matter secondary. To materialists, matter is primary, and mind or spirit or ideas are secondary—the product of matter acting upon matter. The materialist view is perhaps best understood in its opposition to the doctrines of immaterial substance applied to the mind historically by René Descartes ; by itself, materialism says nothing about how material substance should be characterized. In practice, it

9374-480: The particular theory of matter on which it is based. According to Noam Chomsky , any property can be considered material, if one defines matter such that it has that property. The philosophical materialist Gustavo Bueno uses a more precise term than matter , the stroma. In Materialism and Empirio-Criticism , Lenin argues that the truth of dialectical materialism is unrelated to any particular understanding of matter. To him, such changes actually confirm

9483-596: The perception of Brahman are considered to destroy the illusion. Rudolf Peierls , a physicist who played a major role in the Manhattan Project , rejected materialism: "The premise that you can describe in terms of physics the whole function of a human being   ... including knowledge and consciousness, is untenable. There is still something missing." Erwin Schrödinger said, "Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness

9592-557: The performance going on in its intentionality, attributes to it. In effect, he counters that consciousness is not "in" the mind; rather, consciousness is conscious of something other than itself (the intentional object), regardless of whether the object is a physical thing or just a figment of the imagination. In the first edition of the Logical Investigations , under the influence of Brentano, Husserl describes his position as " descriptive psychology ." Husserl analyzes

9701-442: The perspective of clinical psychology or neurology. Instead, it seeks to determine the essential properties and structures of experience. Phenomenology is not a matter of individual introspection: a subjective account of experience , which is the topic of psychology, must be distinguished from an account of subjective experience , which is the topic of phenomenology. Its topic is not "mental states", but "worldly things considered in

9810-412: The phenomenological method is composed of four basic steps: the époche, the phenomenological reduction, the eidetic variation, and intersubjective corroboration. According to Maurice Natanson , "The radicality of the phenomenological method is both continuous and discontinuous with philosophy's general effort to subject experience to fundamental, critical scrutiny: to take nothing for granted and to show

9919-618: The philosophy, but in the economics of each particular epoch. Through his Dialectics of Nature (1883), Engels later developed a "materialist dialectic" philosophy of nature , a worldview that Georgi Plekhanov , the father of Russian Marxism , called dialectical materialism . In early 20th-century Russian philosophy , Vladimir Lenin further developed dialectical materialism in his 1909 book Materialism and Empirio-criticism , which connects his opponents' political conceptions to their anti-materialist philosophies. A more naturalist -oriented materialist school of thought that developed in

10028-697: The physical sciences to incorporate forms of physicality in addition to ordinary matter (e.g. spacetime , physical energies and forces , and exotic matter ). Thus, some prefer the term physicalism to materialism , while others use the terms as if they were synonymous . Discoveries of neural correlates between consciousness and the brain are taken as empirical support for materialism, but some philosophers of mind find that association fallacious or consider it compatible with non-materialist ideas. Alternative philosophies opposed or alternative to materialism or physicalism include idealism, pluralism , dualism , panpsychism , and other forms of monism . Epicureanism

10137-764: The question of ontology but failing to answer it, instead switching the topic to Dasein. That is neither ontology nor phenomenology, according to Husserl, but merely abstract anthropology. While Being and Time and other early works are clearly engaged with Husserlian issues, Heidegger's later philosophy has little relation to the problems and methods of classical phenomenology. Maurice Merleau-Ponty develops his distinctive mode of phenomenology by drawing, in particular, upon Husserl's unpublished writings, Heidegger's analysis of being-in-the-world, Gestalt theory , and other contemporary psychology research. In his most famous work, The Phenomenology of Perception , Merleau-Ponty critiques empiricist and intellectualist accounts to chart

10246-421: The role of intuition in favour of concepts. However, the ethical aspects of neo-Kantian thought often drew them within the orbit of socialism , and they had an important influence on Austromarxism and the revisionism of Eduard Bernstein . Lange and Cohen in particular were keen on this connection between Kantian thought and socialism. Another important aspect of the neo-Kantian movement was its attempt to promote

10355-451: The suspension of judgment while relying on the intuitive grasp of knowledge, free of presuppositions and intellectualizing. Sometimes depicted as the "science of experience," the phenomenological method, rooted in intentionality, represents an alternative to the representational theory of consciousness. That theory holds that reality cannot be grasped directly because it is available only through perceptions of reality that are representations in

10464-403: The usage of Franz Brentano (and, as he later acknowledged, Ernst Mach ) that would prove definitive for Husserl. From Brentano, Husserl took the conviction that philosophy must commit itself to description of what is "given in direct 'self-evidence'." Central to Brentano's phenomenological project was his theory of intentionality , which he developed from his reading of Aristotle 's On

10573-402: The warranty for what we claim to know." According to Husserl the suspension of belief in what is ordinarily taken for granted or inferred by conjecture diminishes the power of what is customarily embraced as objective reality. In the words of Rüdiger Safranski , "[Husserl's and his followers'] great ambition was to disregard anything that had until then been thought or said about consciousness or

10682-409: The work of Max Weber . The Kantian concern for the limits of perception strongly influenced the antipositivist sociological movement in late 19th-century Germany, particularly in the work of Georg Simmel (Simmel's question 'What is society?' is a direct allusion to Kant's own: 'What is nature'?). The current work of Michael Friedman is explicitly neo-Kantian. Continental philosophers drawing on

10791-408: The works and lectures of his teachers, the philosophers and psychologists Franz Brentano and Carl Stumpf . An important element of phenomenology that Husserl borrowed from Brentano is intentionality (often described as "aboutness" or "directedness" ), the notion that consciousness is always consciousness of something. The object of consciousness is called the intentional object , and this object

10900-551: The world [while] on the lookout for a new way of letting the things [they investigated] approach them, without covering them up with what they already knew." Edmund Husserl "set the phenomenological agenda" for even those who did not strictly adhere to his teachings, such as Martin Heidegger , Jean-Paul Sartre , and Maurice Merleau-Ponty , to name just the foremost. Each thinker has "different conceptions of phenomenology, different methods, and different results." Husserl derived many important concepts central to phenomenology from

11009-563: The world via the discovery of universal logical structures in human subjective experience. There are important differences in the ways that different branches of phenomenology approach subjectivity . For example, according to Martin Heidegger , truths are contextually situated and dependent on the historical , cultural , and social context in which they emerge. Other types include hermeneutic , genetic , and embodied phenomenology. All these different branches of phenomenology may be seen as representing different philosophies despite sharing

11118-528: Was developed in the philosophies of Francis Bacon (1561–1626), Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), and John Locke (1632–1704). Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume (1711–1776) became one of the most important materialist philosophers in the 18th century. John "Walking" Stewart (1747–1822) believed matter has a moral dimension, which had a major impact on the philosophical poetry of William Wordsworth (1770–1850). In late modern philosophy , German atheist anthropologist Ludwig Feuerbach signaled

11227-584: Was disputed in important respects by Eugen Fink . An abiding achievement of the neo-Kantians was the founding of the journal Kant-Studien , which still survives today. By 1933 (after the rise of Nazism ), the various neo-Kantian circles in Germany had dispersed. The Neo-Kantian movement had a significant impact on the development of 20th-century philosophy, particularly in the areas of epistemology , metaphysics , and ethics . It continues to be an important influence on contemporary philosophy , particularly in

11336-465: Was done by a sort of apperception built on the experiences of one's own lived body. The lived body is one's own body as experienced by oneself, as oneself. One's own body manifests itself mainly as one's possibilities of acting in the world. It is what lets oneself reach out and grab something, for instance, but it also, and more importantly, allows for the possibility of changing one's point of view. This helps to differentiate one thing from another by

11445-642: Was left over was the pure transcendental ego, as opposed to the concrete empirical ego. Transcendental phenomenology is the study of the essential structures that are left in pure consciousness: this amounts in practice to the study of the noemata and the relations among them. Some phenomenologists were critical of the new theories espoused in Ideas . Members of the Munich group , such as Max Scheler and Roman Ingarden , distanced themselves from Husserl's new transcendental phenomenology. Their theoretical allegiance

11554-472: Was more fundamental than science itself. According to him, science is only one way of knowing the world with no special access to truth. Furthermore, the scientific mindset itself is built on a much more "primordial" foundation of practical, everyday knowledge. This emphasis on the fundamental status of a person's pre-cognitive, practical orientation in the world, sometimes called "know-how", would be adopted by both Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. While for Husserl, in

11663-482: Was not material precludes labelling them as materialists). Buddhist atomism and the Jaina school continued the atomic tradition. Ancient Greek atomists like Leucippus , Democritus and Epicurus prefigure later materialists. The Latin poem De Rerum Natura by Lucretius (99 – c. 55 BC) reflects the mechanistic philosophy of Democritus and Epicurus. According to this view, all that exists

11772-423: Was resurrected by Brentano who in turn influenced Husserl's conception of phenomenology, who refined the term and made it the cornerstone of his theory of consciousness. The meaning of the term is complex and depends entirely on how it is conceived by a given philosopher. The term should not be confused with "intention" or the psychoanalytic conception of unconscious "motive" or "gain". Significantly, "intentionality

11881-443: Was to the earlier, realist phenomenology of the first edition of Logical Investigations . Martin Heidegger modified Husserl's conception of phenomenology because of what Heidegger perceived as Husserl's subjectivist tendencies. Whereas Husserl conceived humans as having been constituted by states of consciousness, Heidegger countered that consciousness is peripheral to the primacy of one's existence, for which he introduces Dasein as

#583416