Husserl’s phenomenology is epitomized in his call for a return “back to the things themselves,” “Zurück zu den Sachen selbst.” We view this “return” as a shared project. The return, in other words, is intersubjective and not solipsistic: we return to the things in order to dialogue together about them together in the contexts of our philosophical, psychological, and other work.

The idea for this blog originated in my conversations with friends and colleagues who had studied phenomenological psychological research under the guidance of Amedeo Giorgi, or who had met in the the context of Giorgi’s work. Those of us who studied with him spent hours reading Husserl or Merleau-Ponty together, line by line, and this opened the door to the tradition of phenomenological and continental thought and its implications for human sciences such as psychology.

In addition to our teaching, research, and scholarly writing–and in fact as a practical extension of these activities–we’re turning to this online platform in order to broaden the discussion in a more conversational voice. In doing so, we will be speaking from a largely Husserlian foundation–yet one that’s open to the richness of the phenomenological tradition’s descriptive and hermeneutic dimensions, and is intrinsically interdisciplinary. More than anything else, we hope to contribute to what Husserl envisioned as “the progressive development of a phenomenological community” (in Fink, 1995, translated by Bruzina, p. 191).

Welcome to all–

Marc Applebaum

photo credit: Philippe Moreau Chevrolet via photo pin cc

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