INTRODUCTION:

METHODS OF PHILOSOPHIZING

• The meaning and process and process of doing philosophy, emphasizing the importance
of holism, as well as learning how to construct philosophical essay were introduced.
• Philosophizing is to think or express oneself in rational and logical manner.

A. Phenomenology: On Consciousness
• Edmund Husserl founded Phenomenology, which is essentially a philosophical method.
Phenomenology focuses on careful inspection and description of phenomena or
appearances defined as any object of conscious experience, that is, that which we are
conscious of (Johnston, 2006).

Husserl’s Logical Investigation

• He argued against psychologism: the idea that truth is dependent on the peculiarities of
the human mind, and that philosophy is reducible to psychology.

• The word ”phenomenon” comes directly from Greek (φαινόμενο), meaning

“appearance” Immanuel Kant, a German philosopher, had used the same word to refer
to the world of our experience.

Phenomenology
• O’Hear (1999) studied reality and the structures on consciousness known as
phenomenology. The phenomenological method is a series that continuously revises our
perceptions of reality. Phenomenology removes or “brackets out” the non-essentials.
• Both phenomenology and postmodernism reject modernity and their contributions
(e.g., science and technology). Progress, as seen by both, is oppressive and destructive.
• There is every reason to assume that realities (e.g., science and technology) will be both
conditioned by social, economic, cultural, and political factors.

 This method uncovers the essentials structures of experience and its objects.
The phenomenological standpoint is achieved through a series of phenomenological
“reductions”that eliminate certain aspects of our experience from consideration.

I. The first and best known is the epoche or “suspension” that he describes in Ideas:
General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology.
II. The second reduction eliminates the merely empirical contents of consciousness and
focuses instead on the essentials features, the meaning of consciousness.

 Phenomenology concludes that people cannot fully and directly experience the physical
world but we can only see and analyze the consciousness of our minds that perceive the
physical world. This implies that people could be strongly biased in their perception of
things and they must be careful to weed out this biased.
B. Existentialism: On Freedom

• Unlike phenomenology existentialism is not primarily a philosophical method. Neither is

it exactly a set doctrines but more of an outlook or attitude supported by diverse
doctrines centered on certain common themes.

These themes include:

• The human condition or the relation of the individual to the world;
• The human response to that condition;
• Being, especially the difference between the being of person (which is “existence”) and
the being of other kinds of things;
• Human freedom;
• The significance (and unavoidability) of choice and decision in the absence of certainty;
and
• The concreteness and subjectivity of life as lived, against abtractions and false
objectifications.

• As the first existentialist, Kierkegaard insisted that the authentic self was the personally-
chosen self, as opposed to public or “herd” identity which is the tendency of people to
blindly follow the crowd because it is familiar, easy, and less stressful.

• Friedrich Nietzsche took this view of opposition of the genuine individual versus the
public “herd” identity. Both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche influenced Martin Heidegger
whose conception of ownness came to dominate contemporary existentialist thought.

• Existentialism’s relationship to phenomenology is a matter of some controversies.

However, some philosophers, such as Jean-Paul Sartre, have employed
phenomenological methods to arrive at or support their specific variations on existential
themes.

• Our search for truth by means of critical thinking is a rational choice. Existentialism, with
Sartre, a French Philosopher, emphasizes the importance of free individual choice,
regardless of the power of other people to influence and coerce our desires, beliefs, and
decisions.
• This implies that a person might not be able to change his circumstances but he can
change his attitude toward the situation.
• This was vividly portrayed in the autobiographical account of Viktor Frankl in his book,
Man’s Search for Meaning.
• Socrates promoted the self-examination of one’s beliefs and values in order to escape
from bias and stereotypes.
• Augustine was concerned with spiritual nature of the ”true” self as opposed to the
inauthentic demands of desire and the body.
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau was adamant about the essential goodness of the “natural” self
in contrast to the “corruption” imposed by society (Baird & Kaufmann, 1997)
• Although existentialism has been on the wan since the 1960s, it has enjoyed exceptional
prominence, even popularity, for a philosophical movement, in part because of its
literary expressions by writers such as Sartre, Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, and
Gabriel Marcel.