Katie Huffman / PHIL 340 / Halteman

Journal # 1.5 (date?) ; Response to the Phonomenological Movement

Several Quotations I reacted to very strongly:

“When epistemological inquiry sought to answer the question of how the subject, filled with his own representations, knows the external world and can be certain of its reality, the phenomenological critique showed how pointless such a question is” (p.131).

“To that extent, the method of phenomenology, in contrast to all scientific methods, is a method which has no foundation, the way of a “transcendental experience,” not an empirical induction. For it must first create its ground for itself” (p.160).

“Now all these relativities, even out captivity in our own life-world, which has become historical, lose their disconcerting meaning when the eidos “life-world” as such and the range of it’s variation is known” (p161-162).

“The idea of a gathering of all the past into the “absolute” present of an “absolute knowledge” proves itself to be absurd. Just as the future, which fades away into the uncertain distance, is incorporated into the immediate flow of the ego as an infinite horizon, so does the past, which also fades into the distance” (p.162).

The idea of philosophy and the use of language being the self-healing of self-inflicted wounds (p.177) was also particularly striking to me. That “the field of language is not only the place of reduction for all philosophical ignorance, but rather itself an actual whole of interpretation that, from the days of Plato and Aristotle till today, requires not only to be accepted, but to be thought through to the end again and again…” rung so true.

I really liked the articulation that “we are ever and again only “on the way to language”” (p.177).

This reading, though very difficult, was joyously so. The challenge was fascinating and I loved every minute I spent with it! 🙂 Many things hearkened back to our class lectures and the few texts we had thus far consumed 😉 but I only caught onto a few, I know. In reading the piece over again I find more and more that I can say I have a fuller understanding of where I had only an inkling of meaning and direction before…

c. Mary Kathryn Gough (huffman, maiden)