An Introduction to Phenomenology

A book review of Phenomenology: An Introduction

I’ve become increasingly fascinated with phenomenology whenever I found it, and I felt it was worth dedicating some time to it. Phenomenology is generally considered to start with Husserl in the 1890s, and it’s still practised today.

The book starts with Kant’s philosophy, because it is the background into which phenomenology is born, and what many of the earlier thinkers were critiquing or trying to improve. Then it moves on to the “first” phenomenologist: Edmund Husserl. This sets the entire tone for what the book will be, and most of the field relies on Husserl’s insights over 100 years ago.

Then the book moves to Heidegger and his existential phenomenology. The deals with the intelligibility of the everyday world, the misguided cognitivism of Descartes, Being-in-the-world, the existential conception of the self, and finally themes like death, guilt, and authenticity. I somewhat liked that the book wasn’t afraid to occasionally deviate from pure phenomenology to the general philosophy of its thinkers, which while perhaps not a foundation to the topic, it’s nevertheless connected and dependent upon it.

After Heidegger, it moves to gestalt psychology. The was a movement that attempts to emphasize the notion of emergence and how the “the whole is more than the sum of its parts”. We perceive patterns and not just individual sensations. This was a movement against atomistic psychology, and it greatly influenced Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who along with Husserl, is likely the most influential phenomenologist. It starts with his work on perception, which is what he focused on the most. He shows how perception isn’t just passive reception of information, but already comes “pre-packaged” with meaning. It’s anti-representationalist (going against Kant), and shows that we perceive the world according to its utility. Afterward, it touches on Jean-Paul Sartre with his phenomenological existentialism and James Gibson’s ecological psychology.

It finishes with Hubert Dreyfus’ work and phenomenological cognitive science. This was my favorite part, and it ended the book nicely. Dreyfus argued against the cognitive revolution within cognitive science, neglecting the insights of phenomenology. This was especially relevant as it was the start of artificial intelligence, and Dreyfus successfully argued the cause of the massive failure of the field by wrongful thinking of “mind” as basic rule-based computation. Regarding cognitive science, it touches on the frame problem that plagues AI, and then some phenomenologically inspired subfields of cognitive science, like radical embodied cognitive science and dynamical system theories. This was delightful to read, especially because it puts phenomenology into such a practical use, and it’s a clear example of philosophy directly guiding scientific understanding. It’s how odd how there is even “Heideggerian” cognitive science, and how that can help us understand how to develop intelligent and human-like agents, by abandoning the cognitivist approach but instead emphasizing the world of the body and how the world manifests itself by its meaning and utility.

Overall I found the book very well written. Although at times difficult, the book is generally accessible, and no heavy background is needed. I felt each chapter had an appropriate length, and most of the time I dived into the appropriate amount of depth. I only missed a summary chapter at the end. It just ended abruptly. Concluding the book and connecting all the dots that were explored throughout the history of phenomenology would be tremendously helpful. I should it be introduced in the next edition.

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Tiago V.F.