Martin Nitsche

By phenomenology, we mean the philosophical school founded at the beginning of the twentieth century by Edmund Husserl and further developed by Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and many others up to the present day. In this book, our aim is not to present elaborate and detailed phenomenological investigations; we are simply concerned with the application of phenomenology to the description of sonic environments. Indeed, as we intend to show and justify in this section, the methodological procedures and outcomes of phenomenological investigations offer valuable tools for describing sonic environments. What, then, are these tools offered by the phenomenological method? After a brief introduction to phenomenology, we will list and explain them.

In this section, we explore noise and silence as dynamic elements of experience that exist both within and beyond the auditory horizon that shapes the sonic environments we inhabit. Noise is conceived as a dimension of auditory experience that straddles chaos and information, both interfering with intelligibility and enriching our understanding of sonic environments. Silence, by contrast, is shown to resonate beyond the auditory sphere as a relational space that transcends mere absence, mingling with other sensory modalities and serving as a backdrop against which sounds gain a heightened significance.

The goal of this chapter is to introduce the phenomenological approach to space. For the main objective of our book, which is to phenomenologically describe and define sonic environments, it is vital to distinguish the phenomenological space from a mere sound-space. We have emphasized already in Chap. 2 that it is not sufficient to analyze sonic environments merely as sound-spaces, that is, environments created by a wide range of different sounds. Sonic environments must be rather understood as lived environments, which consequently leads to accounting not only for sounds (and how they constitute sonic space) but also for both acoustic perception and imagination as factors that co-constitute sonic environments. Based on the phenomenological methodology, this chapter focuses, among other things, on the topological significance of the reversible relation between the emergence of an object (e.g., a sound) and its perception. A brief description of this reversibility makes it possible to explain that perception (including audition) can be understood as localization.

In our exploration of sound and the other constitutive elements of sonic environments, we will not be considering such elements—sound, voice, natural versus technological elements—as thematic objects of experience, but rather as aspects of auditory environments; that is, as the different phenomenological fields within which the objects of auditory experience can appear. These horizons comprise the frameworks against which we make sense of our experiences. In the context of sonic environments, we can begin to identify these horizons in the six points later.

We consider sonic phenomenology to be a phenomenology that has been methodologically transformed to be able to adequately describe sonic environments and audition as an orientation within them. In this brief concluding chapter, we want to highlight the contribution of sonic phenomenology in several ways, mostly in methodological terms, underlining what the focus on sounds and sonic environments brings to phenomenology as a philosophical school and method. Additionally, we aim to briefly articulate what sonic phenomenology in turn has to offer for research on sounds and audition at the interface between philosophy and sound studies. Finally, we will touch on the possible ethical and social significance of sonic phenomenology.

Phenomenological approaches to sounds, noises, voices, and music traditionally privilege methods that center visual perception. This book aims not only to phenomenologically describe sonic environments, but also to develop an audition-centered phenomenological methodology to enable this task. "Sonic environment" is this book's term for the acoustic shape of human life-environment, which is multisensory and does not exclude visual, tactile, olfactory, and gustatory sensations connected with sounds or their sources. Sonic environments (in so far as they are lived) are not composed of separate sounds, but created by “sonic phenomena” – i.e., lived (real or imagined) experiences with sounds, noises, voices, and music. Just as phenomenology traditionally privileges the visual over the audio, phenomenology thematically prefers listening to a voice or a music over less articulated sonic experiences (i.e., sounds without an obvious meaning, melody, or rhythm).In this respect, the book not only provides missing phenomenological descriptions of sonic environments, but also redefines phenomenological methodology with respect to acoustic perception.

This introduction to the Historical Encounters-special issue, "Revisiting history and its epistemology", elaborates upon five main themes that emerge across the various papers presented in the issue and speak to tensions within the field of epistemic cognition in history. Of interest, these themes tackle similar questions and pressures on teachers, student teachers, and learners when it comes to the construction and transmission of historical knowledge. Sometimes these themes problematize the whole history teaching project and its reliance on people’s penetrating understandings of history as discipline and its criterialist manner for constructing knowledge. Sometimes these themes seek to better understand what is going on, to then find ways to improve how things are understood or done. Some of the authors in the special issue implicitly, or even explicitly, question the whole history teaching project, while others seek to build on what we have gained as collective knowledge, hoping to take these results further.

The hermeneutic space of this study is constituted by Heidegger’s methodical »return to Aristotle«, well evident from § 7 of Being and Time, and presented in a more extensive form in the record of the 1925/1926 Winter Semester course on Logik. Die Frage nach der Wahrheit. The late Heidegger understands this way of interpreting metaphysics as a »topology of Being«. In this essay, we pursue the topology of two metaphysical viewpoints, namely the viewpoint of the relational framework of human experience and the viewpoint of the ground. The particular goal of the study is to provide several partial analyses of how both Aristotle and Heidegger explain the role of speech within the justifying grounding of the life-environment of human experience. Concerning this problem, we compare the aristotelian articulation of the relationship ousia – logos with heideggerian phrase speech is speech that is basicaly connected with his conception of grounding out-ground. Our attention focuses on the topological significance of these two explanations. This means we ask in what way a different configuration of the two metaphysical viewpoints leads to different standpoints of understanding, and thus, to different life-attitudes.

This article offers a thorough and critical reading of Husserl’s Thing and Space. This reading is principally motivated by the effort to methodologically design a phenomenological–topological approach to the research of lived sonic environments. In this book, Husserl lays foundations of phenomenological topology by understanding perceptions as places and defining, consequently, the space as a system of places. The critical reading starts with pointing out the ambiguity of location in Thing and Space, which consists mainly in the insufficient implementation of the distinction between the location and the localization. Further investigations then reveal the roots of this ambiguity in both the preference of visual perception and the omission of subjective aspects of kinesthesia. The article critically examines Husserl’s notion of the appended localization that expresses the marginalization of (among others) acoustic experience. In conclusion, the article utilizes the critical findings to formulate the project of a place-based (phenomenological–topological), medium-centered, and multi-sensory approach to sonic environments.

The study focuses on the interpretation of the motif of unaddressed phenomena in the dialogue between Adolf Portmann’s thought and phenomenology. It establishes the closeness between Portmann and phenomenology, not in the foundation of phenomenality, but rather in employing nonaddressedness for interpreting phenomenality’s meaning. The concept of invisibility, especially in M. Merleau-Ponty and M. Henry, is considered as a phenomenological parallel to nonaddressedness. Both nonaddressedness and invisibility determine a layered perceptual environment that is based neither on representation of the perceived in a perceiving subject nor on an objective, causally interrelated system of functional relations.