barebones communication

… a blog on communication

Introduction to Phenomenology


This is it.
Robert Sokolowski’s recent (2000) book on phenomenology “Introduction to Phenomenology” is what I have been looking for for many, many years. I picked it up by browsing the shelves at Bergen University in Bergen, Norway two days ago.
Why? Because it treats phenomenology as a doing, living philosophy, which is just what it is, and also the way phenomenology will be engaged on this blog. And in the barebones communication project. You will find indications of this understanding of phenomenology by reading some of the already submitted pitstop posts. For instance this quote from Stephan Strasser.
If you, by now, have taken an interest in phenomenology as a prerequisite to communication, just go pick up the book. It is important for its content, but even more for its attitude. It contradicts the notion that phenomenology first and foremost is of historical interest. Something that once was. Old men with strange names and long white beards. 
Phenomenology is not that at all. Phenomenology is a present, living philosophy, and Sokolowski tells that story well.
No, I am not on any kind of commission. I’ll even spare you for the obligate picture :-) That is how refreshing this book is.
When you have finished with Sokolowski’s eminent little introduction you can always turn to Edmund Husserl’s originals. He left some 40.000 plus research pages. They were all smuggled out of Germany in the late thirties. Originals are at the Husserl Archives at Leuven in Belgium. Quite a thriller that one. Bringing his papers out of Germany.
Or you could take a shortcut by Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Hans-Georg Gadamer or Paul Ricoeur. Or Jean-Paul Sartre for that matter. Or any other major figure who link into Husserl’s extensive work. All important elaborators on Husserl’s thought among many others. They even managed to add some to the movement.
By the way the combo Sokolowski and Strasser seems a particularly good starting point for your phenomenological endeavor :-) They both practice phenomenology.
Go to amazon to get the book. Or anywhere else you can find it.
Thanks. So far.

March 5, 2008 Posted by knut skjærven | phenomenology | , , , , , | No Comments

out of the bits and pieces (pitstop)

Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (Sokolowski Illustration)

Robert Sokolowski:

“Modes of presentation and representation proliferate and fascinating issues arise: How is an email message different from a telephone call and a letter? Who is addressing us when we read a Web page? How are speakers, listeners, and conversation modified by the way we communicate now?

One of the dangers we face is that with the technological expansion of images and words, everything seems to fall aport into mere appearances. We might formulate this problem in terms of the three themes of parts and wholes, identity in manifold, and presence and absence: it seems that we now are flooded by fragments without any wholes, by manifolds bereft of identities, and by multiple absences without any enduring real presence. We have bricolage and nothing else, and we think we can even invent ourselves at random by assembling convenient and pleasing but transient identities out of the bits and pieces we find around us. We pick up fragments to shore against our ruin”.

Robert Sokolowski, Introduction to Phenomenology, Cambridge University Press, USA, 2006. Pages 3 and 4. 

Library Thing

More on pitstops

Picture by blog author.   

March 5, 2008 Posted by knut skjærven | phenomenology, pitstop | , , , , | No Comments

the living present (pitstop)

Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (Sokolowski Illustration) 

Robert Sokolowski:

“The actual segment of conscious life, the lebendige Gegenwart, is an absolute concretum because everything happens within it: remembering, expecting, perceiving, judging, being passively affected, and even doing phenomenology - all are nested inside the living present, while it is not nested inside anything else. We cannot get down to anything more basic because all further divisions - into central impressions and retentions, for instance - are abstractive. The living present is the theater in which the whole spectacle of conscious life is available for phenomenological viewing. Even the past and future are present only inside it; the living present is a present for my past and future”. 

Robert Sokolowski, Husserlian Meditations, Northwestern University Press, Evanston , USA, 1974. Pages 158-159. 

Library Thing

More on pitstops

Picture by blog author. 

March 5, 2008 Posted by knut skjærven | pitstop | , , , , | No Comments