About Me

I am a PhD student in Philosophy at Peking University, now staying at Universität zu Köln, Germany. My interests are primarily in Philosophy of Mind, Epistemology and Analytic Phenomenology. Now I am working on my Dissertation: Method, Intentionality, and Knowledge--An essay in analytic phenomenology. --------- I also have substantial interest in Early Modern Philosophy, Political Philosophy and Ethics.

Thursday, July 2, 2009

Philip Pettit on Phenomenology

It is curious to find that Philip Pettit also begins his career with Phenomenology, at least, partially. His first ever publication is on phenomenology. In another paper "On Phenomenology as a Methodology of Philosophy" He writes:
It might question the area of concern assigned to philosophy--man in his conscious behaviour--or might question the way in which philosophy is supposed to master this area--by experience and description....
What we need for our critique of Husserl is a theory of the relation of experience and description....The relation is simple in the case of low-level description, where to describe is to give an account of how the data appear in a particular experience. The relation is naturally more complex in high-level description, where the description synthesises the data of many different experiences in terms of some overall pattern. In phenomenological philosophy it is clearly low-level description which is meant to be invovled, description based in each case on a particular experience. This is description in the proper sense. High-level description is really a matter of processing data which, in the strict sense, have already been described.
But this is obviously FALSE. It is actually high-level description that is in question for Phenomenology, i.e., to reveal the essence of Perception, etc, and the entireconceptual structure of mental concepts, etc.

Pettit's other criticisms are:
1. Phenomenological Description does not have intrinsic philosophical value.
2. There is no inner perception of both experience and essence, because there are no such things.
3. Husserl's description seems to require private language, which is quite absurd.
4. It is explainatio, not description, that is the task of philosophy. This is a critique of both Husserl and Wittgenstein.
His positive comments on Phenomenology are:
1. Phenomenology is right in consider the subject of philosophy is conscious human behaviour.
2. Phenomenological description is preparatory for Philosophical Explanation. Because before one starts explanation, one must know what he is explaining. According to Pettit, Gilbert Ryle, in The Concept of Mind, appeals to the subject's consciousness and to the description which this would force him to gvie of what it means to understand an argument.

Finally, Considering Phenomenology as preparotory is not uncommon. Pettit thinks it is preparation for explaination, Searle, by Contrast, thinks that phenomenology is preparation for logical analysis. Searle writes: "But the point is that the phenomenological investigation is only the beginning. You then have to go on and investigate logical structures, most of which are not often accessible to phenomenology. And, of course, in the course of the investigation, phenomenology plays another role: it sets conditions."

No comments: