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phenomenology emerged near the turn of the 20th century

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one main goal of phenomenology is to enrich your perception and reflection as your live your life from day to day

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emerged from 20th century European philosophy

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founder was Edmund Husserl (1859-1938)

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was a professor at Göttingen and Freiburg Universities

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began his academic career studying mathematics

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cogito

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Latin, "I think"

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philosophers use it because of Descartes famous statement "cogito ergo sum"

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Descartes uses cogito to cover every mental act, even acts like doubting

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cogito becomes short-hand for all the activity of consciousness

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cogitare = to think

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cogitarum = what thought is about

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the world is constituted by acts of awareness

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there is considerable flexibility in the constituted world

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epoché

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the concept epoché [ἐποχή] is the suspension of belief in the real, we regard the real as if it were fiction, we get behind it, and thus experience it as malleable, the world is still there right in front of us, but it is a world that consciousness makes, not the world of physics

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one often may find that the concept of epoché begins to shake one's confidences in the outside world

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there is a limit to this game of questioning

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Descartes: Meditations on First Philosophy

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wonders if one can one trust one's senses

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yet one can be tricked by thoughts

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there is no reliable way to distinguish whether one is awake or asleep

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many of our dreams are mundane experiences of ordinary situations, at least in sections, and this could be one of those

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epoché provokes the question what is reality

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this is a cliché for the discipline of philosophy

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if the world could be a dream, then our confidence in reality is reduced

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how to move from taking the convincing evidence that this is true from the duck/rabbit examples

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and give convincing evidence that much of what we know is indeed who it seems to be

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example: six-sided figure

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did you notice that it is a playground merry-go-round seen from above?

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did you also notice that it is a representation of London or of Purple Haze or the square root of -1, Hillary Clinton?

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yes, but only in a stretched metaphor of interpretation

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there are an infinite number of interpretations but not every interpretation is as accurate as the next based on other experiences that we have

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example: two rectangles, one on top of the other

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it could be an abstract representation of a beach below a sky, or a receding floor below a curtain

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yet it is a poor map of Indian and an unlikely banana, and it fails as a bust of Voltaire

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we can make a list of referents which are successes and fails

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in all the successes, the lines and planes have a consistent interpretation across the entire image

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sky and beach: it's true for the whole image

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example: vase / faces

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we can see either interpretation easily but we can't see both at once

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multiple interpretations are possible but we make them sequentially one at a time

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invariant

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a feature of experience that does not change despite differing interpretations

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after a long session of what-if and what-else, we hit an inescapable wall of essential features of the objects of visual perception

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the essential and unalterable features of different types of conscious experience

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we achieve phenomenological fact

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the invariants are invariable for me, for you, and for every human

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these facts are generalizations with the possibility of public and inter-subjective verification

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Principle of Interpretive Exclusivity

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visual experience can only posit or constitute one interpretation at any one time

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this is an invariant

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superposition

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everything we see comprises both sensory and non-sensory features

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semi-sensation

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being away of hidden sides of three-dimensional objects

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consciousness is wily creative in its capacity for constituting alternate variations of reality, but not everything goes

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at the edge of all of our what-ifs and what-elses we encounter invariants and these seem common among all humans

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this comprises the structure of consciousness

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phenomenology seeks the foundations of consciousness itself