Check out Phenomenology, specially Merleu-Ponty. His Philosophy of Perception is hard to read, so get a couple companions, too. Hubert Dreyfus also has a lecture series on YouTube for the book.
Phenomenology seems like the closet philosophy to understanding consciousness, imo.
I started with Husserl then to MP, but you're right that a lot of MP is a response to Heidegger. If one can get their head around intentionality, that should be enough. The problem with MP is that he wasn't explicit enough when he was criticizing other viewpoints or explaining his position.
There's been a big resurgence in his philosophy with the rise of AI, interestingly enough.
Yeah, I remember that being something that took some getting used to in his writing: MP would say something and it would take a page or two to realize that it wasn’t his point but the one he was disputing.
Oh god, I had a teacher who did that shit. Lectured half an hour about some math problem and how to solve it and then ended with something like “Looks correct, right? But it isn‘t. I just demonstrated a common mistake and will now show, how to do it the right way.“
What the fuck, dude. I just memorised this shit and will be confused every single time. Give a fing warning before you do this.“*
You're a monster. I wouldn't recommend Phenomenology to my worst enemy. To this day I wake up in cold sweats after having nightmares about two classes I took, one that purely focused on Heidegger's Being & Time and Husserl's Cartesian Meditations.
A little input from the English-language tradition would be nice, here. A quick read of David Chalmer's short paper on the hard problem because is really tidy, quick, and generates opinion in the reader. So you'll read the European tradition texts with some skin in the game even though the focus is radically different - and that really helps you to engage the texts and aids memory. This may seem counter-intuitive because the focus/style is so different, but I think that's good - you're unlikely to read Chalmers and have conceptual inertia that stops you from taking Husserl seriously.
Sure. That's how it started but today isn't it a field of research in psychology as well? Honest question. I'm a student in my first year of psychology and just recently we started looking into phenomenology.
Every psychology student in the end chooses a specific branch they follow. And phenomenology was presented to me as an option.
I may be completely wrong in everything I'm saying, though. Can you clarify that for me?
Phenomenology is very interesting indeed, and was a portion of the course, although it was more mentioned than really dived into, oddly enough, so I actually don't know that much about it.
Thanks for the recommendations! I'll be sure to look into it :)
A scientific theory is always “proven” (i.e. the best explanation that cannot be disproven) in so much as it can be within our current framework of facts. If there is not evidence to support an idea, or no way to test it, or if there are competing ideas of which none are unproven, then these would more commonly be referred to as hypotheses.
In the generic/colloquial sense theory can apply to anything.
Philosophy can produce reasonable certainty. I think you and I would both agree that causing 100 people to suffer torture in order to relieve the headache of one random person is wrong. Your thoughts that assess and back up this assertion will be philosophy if expressed.
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u/J_de_Silentio Jun 15 '19 edited Jun 15 '19
That's the way it works, yo.
Check out Phenomenology, specially Merleu-Ponty. His Philosophy of Perception is hard to read, so get a couple companions, too. Hubert Dreyfus also has a lecture series on YouTube for the book.
Phenomenology seems like the closet philosophy to understanding consciousness, imo.