Mission Statement "This book is written for the nonspecialist and for the generally educated reader who wants to know more about phenomenology, the kind of philosophy that considers anything appearing to consciousness as a legitimate field of enquiry. Phenomenology may not yet be a household word in this country, but with its offspring, existentialism, phenomenology offers one of the two major alternatives in contemporary philosophy. The other, variously called logical analysis or linguistic analysis (although adherents to that point of view might not be comfortable at being subsumed under such broad categories), focuses on the problems of philosophy as having been engendered by lack of clarity in the proper use of language. " Samples ". . .assumptions must be challenged, and it should be philosophy's task to question all such presuppositions—even its own. This recognition of philosophy's role in challenging the basic assumptions of all rational endeavors was one of the motivating principles in Edmund Husserl's development of phenomenology. Husserl's insight was that for philosophy to be equal to this task, it must free itself from all such presuppositions." "By the beginning of the twentieth century, philosophy was no longer looked upon as a discipline whose function was to supply foundations for science and, indeed, all other human endeavors. Philosophy was not seen as having any power of its own to question the assumptions of science, and its realm was narrowed to include only an explication of the meaning of logic and language. Scientism was one of the terms phenomenologists used to describe the elevation of science as the supreme method for resolving all human questions. Its philosophical corollary was positivism . . . . But positivism, even in its evangelistic fervor, failed to answer the question of the objective validity of logic itself, and it was forced into the embarrassing position of being unable to justify its own assumptions and first principles." "Man was interpreted as another 'object' to be investigated by the same methods used in the physical sciences. This signaled a kind of radical reductionism in which all human functions were reduced to physically observable characteristics. Psychology was moving toward behaviorism, a study of scientifically verifiable and measurable characteristics. But behaviorism introduced a further paradox: although the task of psychology is to describe human behavior, the describer, who is conscious of that behavior . . . is left unaccounted for."
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