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Phenomenology: An Introduction

What is phenomenology? This question has been asked, indeed, seemingly since the word “phenomenology” was first introduced. It is a question, also, which gives testimony to a point often made by John Deely: efforts at philosophical innovation require either the posit of a neologism, in which case no one understands its significance, or the effort at adapting an old term to a new meaning, in which case everyone will attempt to interpret your new meaning by the old. Despite this confusion, phenomenology has continued to exercise an influence for just as long as its meaning has been questioned.

In an effort, therefore, to provide a much-needed clarification—not by mere didactic exposition but by a “genuine repetition” of the inquiry that led to its development—this seminar will endeavor to re-discover phenomenology from its very roots. Accordingly, we focus our inquiry primarily on the thought of Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), the first founder of phenomenology as a formal movement within philosophy.  But we will also expand our considerations into the practical application of phenomenological method for understanding various aspects of human experience, including what it means in fact to be a human person, and to dwell among and with other persons.

By our inquiry into phenomenology, we hope to clarify both what it is, itself, and its fittingness in the context of philosophical inquiry broadly speaking.  This seminar, taught by Drs. Daniel Wagner and Brian Kemple, will lead students through the tangle and into the clearing. View the syllabus here.

Schedule

Discussion Sessions

1:00pm ET

(World times)
Study Topics &
Readings


June
3
Break with Reality: The Need for Phenomenology
Lecture 1: Classical Sense-Realism and the Modern Break
Readings:
» “Key Texts on Sense-Realism in Aristotle & St. Thomas Aquinas” and “The Modern Break”.
June
10
The History and Question of Phenomenology
Lecture 2: Origins and Methodologies
Reading:
» [Required] Spiegelberg 1956: “Introduction” and “Part One: The Preparatory Phase, Chapter One: Franz Brentano” (1-52).
» [Recommended] Moran 2000: Introduction to Phenomenology, 1-22.
June
17
The Phenomenological Attitude
Lecture 3: From Natural to Phenomenological Attitude via the Phenomenological Ἐποχή
Reading (same for weeks 3 and 4):
» [Required] Husserl 1907: The Idea of Phenomenology, 1914: Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and a Phenomenological Philosophy,51-62 (§27–32).
» [Recommended] Moran 2000: Introduction to Phenomenology, 124-163.
June
24
First Fruits of the Phenomenological Reduction
Lecture 4: Intentionality, Νοησίσ-Νοημα, and the End of Idealism
Reading:
» [Required] Husserl 1907: The Idea of Phenomenology, 1914: Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and a Phenomenological Philosophy,51-62 (§27–32).
» [Recommended] Moran 2000: Introduction to Phenomenology, 124-163.
July
1

BREAK
July
8
The Self and the Other
Lecture 5: Other Persons, Empathy, Intersubjectivity, and Objective Truth
Reading:
» [Required] Husserl 1931: Cartesian Meditations, Meditation V.
» [Recommended] Selections from Stein 1916: On the Problem of Empathy.
July
15
Structures of Experience
Lecture 6: Perception, Memory, and Language
Reading:
» [Required] Sokolowski 2000: Introduction to Phenomenology, c.5-7.
» [Recommended] Excerpts from various authors.
July
22
Structures of the Lifeworld
Lecture 7: Temporality, Science, and Meaning
Readings:
» [Required] Sokolowski 2000: Introduction to Phenomenology, c.9-11.
» [Recommended] Moran 2000: Introduction to Phenomenology, 164-191.
July
29
Phenomenology of Personhood
Lecture 8: Reflections upon Intentional Consciousness
Readings:
» [Required] Spaemann 1996: Persons, 1-40.
» [Recommended] Wojtyła c.1965: Person and Act: The Introductory and Fundamental Reflections (36-58).

Registration

Lyceum Institute seminar costs are structured on a principle of financial subsidiarity. There are three payment levels, priced according to likely levels of income. If you wish to take a seminar but cannot afford the suggested rate, it is acceptable to sign up at a less-expensive level. The idea is: pay what you can. Those who can pay more, should, so that those who cannot pay as much, need not. Lyceum Institute members receive a further discount (see here for details).

One payment covers all 8 weeks.

[2023 Summer] Phenomenology: An Introduction – Public Participant

A payment level recommended for those who are currently students, who are between jobs, or who have part-time employment.

$60.00

[2023 Summer] Phenomenology: An Introduction

Recommended for those in professions that do not pay as well as they ought and for whom continued education is especially important (including professors and clergy). Helps allow us to subsidize lower-cost registrations.

$135.00

[2023 Summer] Phenomenology: An Introduction

Recommended for those with fulltime employment in well-paying professions and sufficient resources to provide a little more. Greatly aids us in allowing to subsidize lower-cost registrations.

$200.00

Pricing Comparison

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Enrollment
Advanced Lyceum EnrollmentPremium Lyceum Enrollment
Benefactor$200 per seminar$903 seminars included
$90 after
8 seminars included
$90 after
Patron$135 per seminar$653 seminars included
$65 after
8 seminars included
$65 after
Participant$80 per seminar$403 seminars included
$40 after
8 seminars included
$40 after

IO2S Deely – Peirce on History, Science, and Realism

On 5 February 2022 at 12pm ET/5pm UTC (check event times around the world here), Tullio Viola will present, “Peirce on History, Science, and Realism”. Viola is an assistant professor in Philosophy of art and culture at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. He has a doctorate in philosophy from the Humboldt University in Berlin, and before joining Maastricht University he held post-doc positions in Berlin and Erfurt. He has published mainly on Peirce, north-American pragmatism, and its links to European philosophy. His book, Peirce on the Uses of History, has come out with De Gruyter in 2020.

2022 International Open Seminar on Semiotics (IO2S) | Website

This collaborative international open scientific initiative and celebration is jointly organized by the Institute for Philosophical Studies of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Coimbra, the Lyceum Institute, the Deely Project, Saint Vincent College, the Iranian Society for Phenomenology at the Iranian Political Science Association, the International Association for Semiotics of Space and Time, the Institute for Scientific Information on Social Sciences of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Semiotic Society of America, the American Maritain Association, the International Association for Semiotic Studies, the International Society for Biosemiotic Studies and the Mansarda Acesa with the support of the FCT – Foundation for Science and Technology, I.P., of the Ministry of Science, Technology and Higher Education of the Government of Portugal under the UID/FIL/00010/2020 project.

[Fall 2020] Semiotics: John Deely

Semiotics–toward which human beings took their first explicit steps in the beginning of the Latin Age of philosophy, in the work of St. Augustine of Hippo–is that by which we begin in a true postmodernism. This is one of the key and perhaps surprising claims of John Deely (1942–2017). That is, often today what is called “postmodernism” is nothing more, in fact, than an ultramodernism: a fragmentary, distorted view of the world grown out of the errors of modern philosophical thinking, run toward its natural, incoherent conclusions.


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In contrast, consider this description Deely gives in his 1994: New Beginnings (18 and 19):

In a word, postmodernism is the opening of a passageway from the age of classical modern philosophy to an epoch as distinct from the modern age as the modern age was from Latin times, or Latin times from the ancient Greek period. The opposition of modernity to Latin (and Greek) times eventually took the form of the opposition of idealism to realism in philosophy. Postmodern thought begins, properly speaking, not so much by rejecting this opposition as by transcending it, for in experience integrally taken, mind-dependent and mind-independent being assert themselves equally–not “equally” in the quantitative sense, but “equally” in the sense of components both asserting themselves in different ways at different times and in different proportions throughout the course of human life, both together making up the one fabric of our lives we call “experience”.

What was needed for philosophy to mature [to postmodernism] was not so much a shift as an expansion, an expansion of the notion of reality–and with it, being–to include the whole experience as the prior ground out of which human understanding arises and on which it throughout depends. From the start, being should have been an inclusive, not an exclusive and oppositional notion. Being is not only “that which can only be said in many ways” (Aristotle), but that out of which the division between what is and what is not independent of the mind arises (Aquinas), and not in any finally fixed way, but differently according to the time and circumstances of the one experiencing such a contrast among objects.

To understand and affect this maturation into postmodernity, we will turn our attention in this seminar to the major contributions to semiotics given by Deely: the proto-semiotic history, an expanded doctrine of causality,  the retrieved and clarified notion of relation, the concept of physiosemiosis, the continuity of culture and nature, the notion of purely objective reality, and the real interdisciplinarity which semiotics fosters. This is an advanced seminar which provides a serious challenge to all participants.

WHEN: Saturdays from 17 October through 12 December 2020 (no session on 28 November), from 3:00-4:00pm Eastern Time US.

WHERE: on the Lyceum Institute platform run through Microsoft Teams.

Lyceum Institute seminar costs are structured on a principal of financial subsidiarity. There are three payment levels, with discounts for those who are professors and clergy (whose continuing education is not sufficiently prioritized by their institutions) and for students (who are already taxed excessively by the educational system). However, if you are part of the working world and wish to take a seminar but cannot afford the “standard” rate, it is acceptable to sign up at one of these discounted prices. The idea is: pay what you can. Those who can pay more, should, so that those who cannot pay as much, need not. Lyceum Institute members receive a further discount (see here for details).

REGISTRATION IS CLOSED.