Robert Sokolowski

A fruitful way to approach The Idea of Phenomenology is through Husserl’s claim that consciousness is not a bag, box, or any other kind of container. The bag conception, which dominated much of modern philosophy, is rooted in the idea that philosophy is restricted to investigating only what is really immanent to consciousness, such as acts and sensory contents. On this view, what Husserl called “the riddle of transcendence” can never be solved. The phenomenological reduction, as Husserl develops it in The Idea of Phenomenology, opened up a new and broader sense of immanence that embraces the transcendent, making it possible both to solve the riddle and to escape the bag conception once and for all. The essay will discuss ways in which this new conception of immanence is tied to the key Husserlian themes of appearance, phenomenon, essence, seeing or intuiting, and constitution.

Husserl’s Idea of Phenomenology is his first systematic attempt to show how phenomenology differs from natural science and in particular psychology. He does this by the phenomenological reduction. One of his achievements is to show that the formal structures of intentionality are more akin to logic than to psychology. I claim that Husserl’s argument can be made more intuitive if we consider phenomenology to be the study of truth rather than knowledge, and if we see the reduction as primarily a modification in our vocabulary and discourse and not as simply a change in attitude. I briefly compare Husserl’s concept of philosophy with those of Plato and Kant.

This book presents the major philosophical doctrines of phenomenology in a clear, lively style with an abundance of examples. The book examines such phenomena as perception, pictures, imagination, memory, language, and reference, and shows how human thinking arises from experience. It also studies personal identity as established through time and discusses the nature of philosophy. In addition to providing a new interpretation of the correspondence theory of truth, the author also explains how phenomenology differs from both modern and postmodern forms of thinking.

In this book, Robert Sokolowski argues that being a person means to be involved with truth. He shows that human reason is established by syntactic composition in language, pictures, and actions and that we understand things when they are presented to us through syntax. Sokolowski highlights the role of the spoken word in human reason and examines the bodily and neurological basis for human experience. Drawing on Husserl and Aristotle, as well as Aquinas and Henry James, Sokolowski here employs phenomenology in a highly original way in order to clarify what we are as human agents.

Transcendental phenomenology is the mind’s self-discovery in the presence of intelligible objects. I differentiate the phenomenological sense of “transcendental” from its scholastic and Kantian senses, and show how the transcendental dimension cannot be eliminated from human discourse. I try to clarify the difference between prephilosophical uses of reason and the phenomenological use, and I suggest that the method followed by transcendental phenomenology is the working out of strategic distinctions. Its targets are the various blends of presence and absence that make up human cognition.

Distinctions are set in obscurity and imagination. Distinctions are not made anywhere and anytime, nor are they made in no place and at no time; they are made in a situation in which they are called for. Distinctions push against an obscurity that needs the distinction in question. In the story about Jack and the doctor, the obscurity against which the distinction is made is included as part of the story; in the quotation from Chaucer the obscurity that provides the setting for the distinction is not mentioned—although you would find it if you were to read the Wife of Bath’s tale—but it is easy for us to imagine a setting in which the distinction between counseling and commandment ought to be made. When we entertain a distinction, such as "counseling is not commandment," "ignorance is not negligence," or "medical data is not medical care," we always experience or imagine an obscurity against which the distinction arises. When we think philosophically about executing distinctions, we must pay attention to the obscurity that lets the distinction occur.

FERDINAND DE SAUSSURE says that a word is composed of two parts, a sound-image and a concept: "The linguistic sign unites not a thing and a name, but a concept and an acoustic image." The sound-image signifies the concept: the sound-image is the signifier, the concept is the signified. De Saussure is only one of a large company of thinkers who describe words in this way. Most philosophical and semiotic analyses of words claim that words have two components, a dimension of sounds and a dimension of concepts.

Philosophers have long agreed that thinking is expressed in the use of language, that we “think in the medium of words.” It is also true, however, that we think in the medium of pictures, and it is likely that these two ways of thinking are interrelated; certainly, we could not think in pictures if we did not have words, and perhaps we could not use words, in principle, unless we were also engaged in some sort of picturing, at least in our imagination. An ideographic language like Chinese would give greater support to the latter possibility than would our phonetically based form of writing.

The author considers the phenomenon of honor (timē) by examining Aristotle’s description of it and its role in ethical and political life. His study of honor leads him to two related phenomena, anger (orgē) and belittlement or contempt (oligōria); examining them helps him define honor more precisely. With his examination of honor the author shows how densely interwoven Aristotle’s ethical theory is; he illuminates such diverse things as the human good, political life and friendship, virtue, vice, incontinence, flattery, wealth and pleasure; he shows how the metaphysical principles of dunamis and energeia are at work in human affairs; he treats the passion of anger as well as the moral attitude of contempt that provokes it, and he situates both within the study of rhetoric.

The first part of this essay presents Patrick Masterson’s exposition of the phenomenology of religion developed by Jean-Luc Marion, and his exposition of the Thomistic philosophy of religion. Masterson argues that phenomenology can be helpful as an analysis of faith and religious experience, but it remains within subjective immanence. It needs to be complemented by a metaphysical analysis that deals with causation and explanation, as Thomism does. The essay then makes three points: first, that phenomenology need not be limited to the merely subjective domain nor need it fail to speak about being; second, that Thomistic “cognitional existence,” as developed by Joseph Owens, can be fruitfully compared with the domain studied by phenomenology as the analysis of being as truth; third, that the “saturated phenomena” introduced by Marion and used by Masterson involve categorial articulation and hence some initiative on the part of the knower, even in matters of religious faith. The essay discusses issues such as the nature of philosophical discourse, the differences between the modern and the premodern understandings of appearance; and the nature of cognitional existence in words and images.