Edmund Husserl, founder of Phenomenology

Alberto Aune

This great philosopher founded a school of thought whose influence endures in the universal culture. Here, an approach to his life and work.

Index

1. A system of thought

Phenomenology is one of the great philosophical methods; is a reading and description of the phenomenon, not an explanatory theory, which seeks to describe the phenomenon that is what appears (from the Greek fainomenos), the immediately given, the datum of consciousness.

Phenomenological intuition is to stop the mental representation of the object (intended), by removing the subjective psychological theoretical elements transmitted, the prejudices and preconceptions in abeyance underlying the particular existence of the thing, to put between brackets the argument for its existence.

2. Husserl, founder of a new school

Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl, German philosopher (1859-1938) faced the nineteenth century psychologism beautician founding the phenomenological school.

Edmuind Husserl

(Source: wikimedia.org)

That thinker identified the subject of knowledge and psychological subject.

Absorbing psychological laws of logic confuses things, because the psychological laws refer to facts, the logical validations.

With the publication of the Logical reason, in 1900, Husserl inaugurated a philosophical movement with a characteristic note of the twentieth century around the object and being.

The significance of this thought was beyond the time it was made, being taken up by other philosophers that enriched early Husserlian ideas.

Each school of philosophy and thought is put into a historical and social context. Its real importance and presence is verified when in another situation maintains the principles under which it was formulated.

This has happened with several schools and trends in philosophy, and is one of the best ways to check the validity of a thought and not that there was a fad.

3. “Back to the things themselves!”

Johannes Hirrchberger, author of History of Philosophy, argues that phenomenology is a method in which the rule is to let these things become apparent in its essential content through an intuitive and insightful look into the most intimate and faithful contact with the objectivity sintonizante any real philosophical grounds.

Hence the phenomenological school motto: «Back to the things themselves!», which shows the need to understand without using artificial verbal constructions, rather than seeking the philosopher interpretations should inquire about the truth.

The phenomenological method had followers in many areas of philosophy, immediately receive the credit they gave him his influence.

4. Disseminating new ideas

Hsserl founded in 1913 a publication that was organ school: Phänomenologische Jarbuch für Philosophie und Forschung (Yearbook of Philosophy and Phenomenological Research), of which eleven volumes were published.

His first volume is one of the major works of this great thinker: Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phäanomenologische Philosophie (Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy).

Also were presented in this directory works as Formalismus in der Ethik und die Materiale Wertethik (Formalism in ethics and ethics material values), by Max Scheler, and Sein und Zeit (Being and Time) by Martin Heidegger.

This publication was until 1930. After 1940 it was a second stage in Buffalo (USA), now in English, with the name of Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.

5. Phenomenology, a questioning look

By placing brackets belief in the reality of the natural world and the propositions which leads to that belief, does not seek to assert that it denies the reality of the natural world, as in the classical skepticism, but would only put a new sign to the «natural attitude» with abstention on the time-space existence in the world.

The phenomenological method considers all the contents of consciousness, but rather to judge whether these contents are real or unreal or imaginary, they are examined as they are purely given.

The center of Husserl’s philosophy is occupied by the concept of absence that does not mean for him the old transcendental metaphysics, but an objective unit of meaning, logical and ideal character.

This great thinker fully developed phenomenology, but the term already appeared in its meaning in the singular number in the work Phänomenologie des Geistes (Phenomenology of Spirit) by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, published in 1807.

The term was used, after Husserl, by numerous authors, including Max Scheler and other important philosophers. Alberto Auné