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83-515: Writing in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy , Thomas D. Williams and Jan Olof Bengtsson cite a plurality of "schools" holding to a "personalist" ethic and " Weltanschauung ", arguing: Personalism exists in many different versions, and this makes it somewhat difficult to define as a philosophical and theological movement. Many philosophical schools have at their core one particular thinker or even one central work which serves as

166-421: 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

249-409: A canonical touchstone. Personalism is a more diffused and eclectic movement and has no such common reference point. It is, in point of fact, more proper to speak of many personalisms than one personalism. In 1947 Jacques Maritain could write that there are at least "a dozen personalist doctrines, which at times have nothing more in common than the word 'person.'" Moreover, because of their emphasis on

332-419: 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 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

415-541: A deep personal obligation to live simply, to look after the needs of our brothers and sisters, and to share in the happiness and misery they are suffering." David Brooks , The Road to Character . 2015. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy ( SEP ) is a freely available online philosophy resource published and maintained by Stanford University , encompassing both an online encyclopedia of philosophy and peer-reviewed original publication. Each entry

498-554: 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 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

581-569: A main source of Newman's personalism. Martin Luther King Jr. was greatly influenced by personalism in his studies at Boston University . King came to agree with the position that only personality is real. It solidified his understanding of God as a personal god . It also gave him a metaphysical basis for his belief that all human personality has dignity and worth. Paul Ricœur explicitly sought to support personalist movement by developing its theoretical foundation and expanding it with

664-435: A method of reflective attentiveness that discloses the individual's "lived experience." Loosely rooted in an epistemological device called epoché , Husserl's method entails 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

747-471: A new personalist social ethic. However, he later had significant disagreements with Mounier and criticized other personalist writers for insufficient conceptual clarity. Ricœur also disagreed with the other personalists in asserting the significance of justice as a value in its own right and gave this primary in the public sphere, whereas Mounier characterized all relationships including public and political ones in terms of love and friendship. Pope John Paul II

830-465: A person to experience it. Ontologically speaking, the person is "larger" than the universe because the universe is but one small aspect of the person who experiences it. Personalism affirms the existence of the soul . Most personalists assert that God is real and that God is a person (or as in Christian trinitarianism , three 'persons', although it is important to note that the nonstandard meaning of

913-590: A personalist, made an important contribution to the personalist cause by declaring that a person is not to be valued merely as a means to the ends of other people, but that he possesses dignity (an absolute inner worth) and is to be valued as an end in himself. Catholic philosopher and theologian John Henry Newman , has been posited as a main proponent of personalism by John Crosby of Franciscan University in his book Personalist Papers . Crosby notes Newman's personal approach to faith, as outlined in Grammar of Assent as

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996-429: A priori . Georgia Harkness was a major Boston personalist theologian. Francis John McConnell was a major second-generation advocate of Boston personalism who sought to apply the philosophy to social problems of his time. George Holmes Howison taught a metaphysical theory called personal idealism or California personalism . Howison maintained that both impersonal, monistic idealism and materialism run contrary to

1079-506: 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 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

1162-662: A single topic to reflect reasoned disagreements among scholars. Initially, the SEP was developed with U.S. public funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Science Foundation . A long-term fundraising plan to preserve open access to the encyclopedia is supported by many university libraries and library consortia. These institutions contribute under a plan devised by

1245-479: A spiritual being, the human creature is defined through interpersonal relations. The more authentically he or she lives these relations, the more his or her own personal identity matures. It is not by isolation that man establishes his worth, but by placing himself in relation with others and with God. Personalism flourished in the early 20th century at Boston University in a movement known as Boston personalism led by theologian Borden Parker Bowne . Bowne emphasized

1328-490: 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 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

1411-461: 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

1494-407: 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 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

1577-439: 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

1660-414: Is competent (although not necessarily considered specialists) in the field covered by the encyclopedia and peer review . The encyclopedia was created in 1995 by Edward N. Zalta , with the explicit aim of providing a dynamic encyclopedia that is updated regularly, and so does not become dated in the manner of conventional print encyclopedias. The charter for the encyclopedia allows for rival articles on

1743-430: Is concretely given to us. This phenomenological reduction is the second stage of Husserl's procedure of epoché . That which 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

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1826-410: 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

1909-428: 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 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

1992-476: 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

2075-436: 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

2158-409: 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

2241-414: 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

2324-416: 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

2407-420: Is peripheral to the primacy of one's existence, for which he introduces Dasein as 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

2490-430: 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 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

2573-425: 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

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2656-404: 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 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

2739-556: 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

2822-480: 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

2905-570: Is written and maintained by an expert in the field, including professors from many academic institutions worldwide. Authors contributing to the encyclopedia give Stanford University the permission to publish the articles, but retain the copyright to those articles. As of August 5, 2022, the SEP has 1,774 published entries. Apart from its online status, the encyclopedia uses the traditional academic approach of most encyclopedias and academic journals to achieve quality by means of specialist authors selected by an editor or an editorial committee that

2988-611: 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 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

3071-734: The SEP in collaboration with the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition , the International Coalition of Library Consortia , and the Southeastern Library Network , with matching funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Phenomenology (philosophy) Phenomenology is a philosophical study and movement largely associated with the early 20th century that seeks to objectively investigate

3154-707: The Second Vatican Council formulated what has come to be considered the key expression of this personalism: "man is the only creature on earth that God willed for its own sake and he cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of himself". This formula for self-fulfillment offers a key for overcoming the dichotomy frequently felt between personal "realization" and the needs or demands of social life. Personalism also implies inter-personalism, as Benedict XVI stresses in Caritas in Veritate : As

3237-469: 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 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

3320-570: 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 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

3403-427: 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, 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

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3486-458: 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

3569-485: The Polish philosopher Karol Wojtyła (later Pope John Paul II). In his work, Love and Responsibility , first published in 1960, Wojtyła proposed what he termed 'the personalistic norm': This norm, in its negative aspect, states that the person is the kind of good which does not admit of use and cannot be treated as an object of use and as such the means to an end. In its positive form the personalistic norm confirms this:

3652-412: The centrality of persons and their unique status among beings in general, and personalists normally acknowledge the indirect contributions of a wide range of thinkers throughout the history of philosophy who did not regard themselves as personalists. Personalists believe that the person should be the ontological and epistemological starting point of philosophical reflection. Many are concerned to investigate

3735-411: 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

3818-563: 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 )

3901-403: 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

3984-441: The existence of external objects, he introduced the method of phenomenological reduction to eliminate them. What 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

4067-487: 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

4150-417: 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 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

4233-521: The experience, the status, and the dignity of the human being as person, and regard this as the starting-point for all subsequent philosophical analysis. Thus, according to Williams, one ought to keep in mind that although there may be dozens of theorists and social activists in the West adhering to the rubric "personalism," their particular foci may, in fact, be asymptotic , and even diverge at material junctures. Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev (1874–1948)

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4316-399: The fact that they constantly communicate about values as they constantly arise due to actual praxis. On the basis of discourse ethics ( Habermas , Apel ) and the methodology of critical mediation, critical personalism in given social contexts reflects on communication practices and the societal conditions for personality development. Philosopher Immanuel Kant , though not formally considered

4399-448: The foremost. Each thinker has "different conceptions of phenomenology, different methods, and different results." Husserl derived many important concepts central to phenomenology from 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" ),

4482-452: The human personality without indulging in excessive collectivism . Mounier's personalism had an important influence in France, including in political movements, such as Marc Sangnier 's Ligue de la jeune République (Young Republic League) founded in 1912. Following on the writings of Dorothy Day , a distinctively Christian personalism developed in the 20th century. Its main theorist was

4565-408: 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

4648-489: The issue of the development of personhood in community. Each person does not only reach a certain position within community but also forms an individual personality over his or her life span. In doing so, they determine a relationship to their selves and to other people. The development of personality appears as a way to take responsibility in community. Communities are thought of as by nature infinitely diverse associations, which are not characterised by fixed values, but rather by

4731-468: The latter is the general affirmation of the centrality of the person for philosophical thought. Personalism posits ultimate reality and value in personhood – human as well as (at least for most personalists) divine. It emphasizes the significance, uniqueness and inviolability of the person, as well as the person's essentially relational or social dimension. The title "personalism" can therefore legitimately be applied to any school of thought that focuses on

4814-560: The moral freedom experienced by persons. To deny the freedom to pursue the ideals of truth, beauty, and "benignant love" is to undermine every profound human venture, including science, morality, and philosophy. Thus, even the personalistic idealism of Borden Parker Bowne and Edgar S. Brightman and the realistic personal theism of Thomas Aquinas are inadequate, for they make finite persons dependent for their existence upon an infinite Person and support this view by an unintelligible doctrine of creatio ex nihilo . The Personal Idealism of Howison

4897-450: 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 the lived experiences . This approach, while philosophical, has found many applications in qualitative research across different scientific disciplines, especially in

4980-730: 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 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

5063-403: The notion that consciousness is always consciousness of something. The object of consciousness is called the intentional object , and this object 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"

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5146-567: 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 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

5229-404: The object or content (noema), which appears in the noetic acts (the believed, wanted, hated, loved, etc.). What 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

5312-418: The object, an object is still constituted as the identical object; consciousness is directed at the same intentional object in direct perception as it 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

5395-401: The person as the fundamental category for explaining reality and asserted that only persons are real. He stood in opposition to certain forms of materialism which would describe persons as mere particles of matter. For example, against the argument that persons are insignificant specks of dust in the vast universe, Bowne would say that it is impossible for the entire universe to exist apart from

5478-481: The person is a good towards which the only proper and adequate attitude is love This brand of personalism has come to be known as "Thomistic" because of its efforts to square modern notions regarding the person with the teachings of Thomas Aquinas. Wojtyła was influenced by the ethical personalism of German phenomenologist Max Scheler . A first principle of Christian personalism is that persons are not to be used, but to be respected and loved. In Gaudium et spes ,

5561-426: 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 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

5644-463: The products of human psychology. In particular, transcendental phenomenology , as outlined by Edmund Husserl , aims to arrive at an objective understanding of 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

5727-764: 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

5810-547: The religious, for whom his thought was heretical; the non-religious, on the other hand, considered his proposals too religious; only J. M. E. McTaggart 's idealist atheism or Thomas Davidson 's apeirotheism seem to resemble Howison's personal idealism. Critical personalism is a German development. Based on humanistic considerations (e.g. Spaemann ), African Theories on Personhood (e.g. Wiredu ) receptions of communitarian theories (e.g. Taylor ) and empirical findings of developmental, social and personality psychology it addresses

5893-443: 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 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

5976-426: The subjectivity of the person, some of the more important exponents of personalism have not undertaken systematic treatises of their theories. It is perhaps more proper to speak of personalism as a "current" or a broader "worldview", since it represents more than one school or one doctrine while at the same time the most important forms of personalism do display some central and essential commonalities. Most important of

6059-436: The subsequent direction of phenomenology. According to Heidegger, philosophy 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

6142-670: The unreflective dealing with equipment that presents itself as simply "ready-to-hand" in what Heidegger calls 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

6225-519: The word 'person' in this theological context is significantly different from Bowne's usage). Bowne also held that persons have value (see axiology , value theory , and ethics ). In declaring the absolute value of personhood, he stood firmly against certain forms of philosophical naturalism (including social Darwinism ) which sought to reduce the value of persons. He also stood against certain forms of positivism which sought to render ethical and theological discourse meaningless and dismiss talk of God

6308-532: 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 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

6391-502: The world, sometimes called "know-how", would be adopted by both Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. While for Husserl, in 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

6474-555: Was a Russian religious and political philosopher who emphasized human freedom, subjectivity and creativity . In France, philosopher Emmanuel Mounier (1905–1950) was the leading proponent of personalism, around which he founded the review Esprit , which exists to this day. Under Jean-Marie Domenach 's direction, it criticized the use of torture during the Algerian War . Personalism was seen as an alternative to both liberalism and Marxism , which respected human rights and

6557-560: Was also influenced by the personalism advocated by Christian existentialist philosopher Søren Kierkegaard . Before his election to the Roman papacy, he wrote Person and Act (sometimes mistranslated as The Acting Person ), a philosophical work suffused with personalism. Though he remained well within the traditional stream of Catholic social and individual morality, his explanation of the origins of moral norms, as expressed in his encyclicals on economics and on sexual morality , for instance,

6640-465: 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

6723-497: Was explained in his book The Limits of Evolution and Other Essays Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Idealism . Howison created a radically democratic notion of personal idealism that extended all the way to God, who was no more the ultimate monarch, no longer the only ruler and creator of the universe, but the ultimate democrat in eternal relation to other eternal persons. Howison found few disciples among

6806-441: Was largely drawn from a personalist perspective. His writings as Roman pontiff, of course, influenced a generation of Catholic theologians who have since taken up personalist perspectives on the theology of the family and social order. "Start your work from where you live, with the small concrete needs right around you. Help ease tension in your workplace. Help feed the person right in front of you. Personalism holds that we each have

6889-423: 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

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