phenomenology

"Perception is not something that happens to us, or in us. It is something we do." Alva Noe (Action in Perception, 2004)

A movement in philosophy which has influenced a wide range of academic disciplines, phenomenology has its origins in the works of Edmund Husserl (1859-1958), with Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) and Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) being among the earliest prominent thinkers influenced by Husserl and the phenomenological approach.

Among the disciplines incorporating phenomenological ideas are the cognitive sciences, notably in relation to the writings of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961), who was concerned with the relationships between the body, consciousness, and the outside world. Merleau-Ponty's works were particularly important in the development of the concept of embodiment in sociology and social theory, whilst his ideas on perception have been taken up by Harvard philosopher Alva Noe.

Phenomenology has contributed to the methodological debates in disciplines as diverse as anthropology, theology and hermeneutics. Husserl's ideas were also developed  by sociologists, notably Alfred Schutz (1899-1959), and later by Peter Berger (1929-) and Thomas Luckmann (1927-). Other thinkers who have drawn on the insights on phenomenology include Derrida (1930-2004), Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995) and Hannah Arendt (1906-1975).

Phenomenological intentions...

"Basically, phenomenology studies the structure of various types of experience ranging from perception, thought, memory, imagination, emotion, desire, and volition to bodily awareness, embodied action, and social activity, including linguistic activity. The structure of these forms of experience typically involves what Husserl called “intentionality”, that is, the directedness of experience toward things in the world, the property of consciousness that it is a consciousness of or about something. According to classical Husserlian phenomenology, our experience is directed toward — represents or “intends” — things only through particular concepts, thoughts, ideas, images, etc. These make up the meaning or content of a given experience, and are distinct from the things they present or mean."

"Phenomenology came into its own with Husserl, much as epistemology came into its own with Descartes, and ontology or metaphysics came into its own with Aristotle on the heels of Plato. Yet phenomenology has been practiced, with or without the name, for many centuries. When Hindu and Buddhist philosophers reflected on states of consciousness achieved in a variety of meditative states, they were practicing phenomenology..."

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy...

The enactive approach.
Implications of:
*   "...perceiving is a kind of skilful bodily activity." (p.2) i.e. certain bodily skills are required to be a perceiver;
*   Rejects notion of perception as being in the brain and involves internal representation of the world;
*   Such a phenomenological approach is counterintuitive.

Rejects input-output model of perception (Hurley, 1998) and rejects the notion that capacities of perception, action and thought can be disassociated from each other.

Ganzfeld -- seeing through halved ping-pong balls!
Experiential blindness -- restored sight to the congenitally blind, which is initially confused and meaningless.
"To see, one must have visual impressions that one understands." (p.6)

"The shape that phenomenological philosophy will take in the first decades of its second century is difficult to say. Work in the four established tendencies will certainly continue. But perhaps the emphasis will be on philosophical anthropology and related issues such as ecology, gender, ethnicity, religion, and technology as well as continuing concerns with aesthetics, ethics, philosophy of the human and natural kinds of science, and politics."

Centre for Advanced Research in Phenomenology

There are rare instances of people losing their sense of proprioception. One of the most famous is the case of Ian Waterman, who lost this sense as a result of a viral infection. Remarkably, Ian relearned to walk and even drive, but every action he undertakes is the result of unfaltering planning and concentration. Alva Noe points to Ian's experiences as evidence for his phenomenological theory of perception.

Mircea Eliade "...makes a distinction between his phenomenological and non-reductionist approach, and other disciplinary approaches ... which he considers 'false' since they analyse religion exclusively as human rather than sacred activity ... For both [Donald] Wiebe and [Russell] McCutcheon, the existence of a distinct religious category of the sacred is a theological assumption, based on a particular form of faith, which can be neither proved or disproved. Instead, they argue that the study of religion is doing what Eliade refutes: studying religion as a human activity."

Malory Nye (Religion: The Basics, 2008, p.114)