Here I’m in dialogue with Davood Gozli on his podcast—he is a professor of cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and theoretical psychology who teaches in Macau, China. His book “Experimental Psychology and Human Agency” was published by Springer in 2019. We had a wide-ranging conversation about phenomenological psychology and philosophy, how the tradition has informed my teaching
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I recorded this short talk in response to psychology students who asked “What does “interpretation” mean in phenomenological research?” Merleau-Ponty makes a critical distinction in the first pages of the Phenomenology of Perception between explicitation (making the implicit explicit) and expliquer (explaining). A bit more of the passage in Merleau-Ponty that I’m reading from is: “…all
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“No one is saved and no one is totally lost.” (171) With these words Merleau-Ponty closes the section of his Phenomenology of Perception dedicated to the Body in its Sexual Being. Why should we feel lost or safe in relation to sexuality? And what does sexuality have to do with metaphysics? Merleau-Ponty and Husserl explain
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“It is one thing to sift the data of inner observation conceptually and to set them up as compounds, then to decompose these into ultimate ‘simple’ elements and to study through artificial variation by observation and experiment, the conditions and results of such combinations. It is quite another to describe and understand the units
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Merleau-Ponty (1993) wrote, “For the speaker no less than for the listener, language is definitely something other than a technique for ciphering or deciphering ready-made significations” (p. 80). He is ever insistent that being-in-the-world is an embodied event, an ongoing discovery, and he relentlessly examines the ways in which experiences are given to us, prior
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I’m happy to expand the linguistic diversity of our blog with this post of mine in Portuguese, which I offer with deep gratitude to the colleagues who volunteered to translate it: Eu ensino uma introdução à investigação psicológica para estudantes de doutorado que dura um ano. Muitos dos meus alunos são psicoterapeutas ou estão em
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Since Husserl, phenomenological philosophers have dialogued with the empirical sciences in an attempt to contribute to a more complete human science—a science that speaks to the fullness of being human. The job of our philosophers, in this context, is to invite an opening up of an epistemological conversation that renews the sciences’ exploration of human
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This conversation between philosopher Susi Ferrarello and me began, as is often the case in phenomenology, with an everyday experience: dreaming. My description of a dream led us to reflect on Merleau-Ponty’s discussions of dreaming and waking perception, and Husserl’s active and passive intentionality. The exchange continued over several weeks, and we’ve summarized it here–
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Shogo Tanaka’s site Embodied Knowledge, with which I’ve just become acquainted, approaches the philosophy and psychology of embodiment through the lens of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology. Tanaka teaches at Tokai University in Japan, and he is particularly interested in the dialogue between phenomenological philosophy and empirical sciences such as “neuroscience, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, robotics, etc.”
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This is the first in a series of our posts on central ideas in phenomenology—please add your observations, additions, or questions in the comments section! I’ll begin with what Husserl calls “the natural attitude.” In everyday life we see the objects of our experience such as physical objects, other people, and even ideas, as simply
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