January 10, Sunday evening -- Reading Edmund Husserl

At Tommy's Joynt, an old time San Francisco bar and restaurant that I'd thought was just for tourists....but it's actually more of a local place and it has good cheap food.

Waiting for his friends and reading Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy, by Edmund Husserl.

The author had been referenced in Anathem, Neal Stephenson's newest book, and so he picked this up.

I told him I was excited to see a book about phenomenology. It's been since a Cognitive Science course in college that I've seen that word. When he asked me what it meant, however, I was stumped. I tried my hardest to describe our labs where we did "phenomenological experiments." In the lab I remember designing fly (the insect) brains by defining their four f's: feed, fight, flee, and reproduction, and I remember sitting with other students watching images being flashed on a screen which we were supposed to duplicate later by employing different memory techniques. After, we discussed how effective were the techniques we chose, like committing pictures to memory by pretending to draw them and encoding them in muscle memory.

phenomenology: a philosophical doctrine proposed by Edmund Husserl based on the study of human experience in which considerations of objective reality are not taken into account. (from wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn)

About the crisis in philosophy?
I don't know.

2 Comments:

Grand Life said...

Glad your back. Your posts are always enjoyable.
Judy

autolycus said...

He was born in my hometown!