Unit 5 History of Psychology Phenomenology and Existentialism

Franz Brentano

Franz Brentano was born January 16,1838 in Marien-berg, Germany. He became a priest in 1864 and began teaching two years later at the University of Wurzburg. Religious doubts led him to leave the priesthood and resign from his teaching position in 1873.

The following year, he wrote Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint. It was in this book that he introduced the concept that is most associated with him: in-tentionality or immanent objectivity. This is the idea that what makes mind different from things is that mental acts are always directed at something beyond themselves: Seeing implies something seen, willing means something willed, imagining implies something imagined, judging points at something judged. Intentional-ity links the subject and the object in a very powerful way. He was given a position as professor at the University of Vienna soon after.

In 1880, he tried to marry, but his marriage was forbidden by the Austrian government, who still considered him a priest. He left his professorship and moved to Leipzig to get married. The next year, he was permitted to come back to the University of Vienna, as a lecturer.

He was quite popular with students. Among them were Cnrl Stumpf and Edmund Husserl, the founders of phe-

Nomenology, and Sigmund Freud himself. Brentano retired in 1895, but continued to write until his death on March 17, 1917, in Zurich.

Carl Stumpf

Carl Stumpf was born April 21,1884 in Wiesentheid in Bavaria. He was strongly influenced by Brentano. As lecturer at the University of Gottingen, he published The Psychological Origins of Space Perception in 1870. In 1873, he became a professor at the University of Wurz-burg. His masterwork, Tone Psychology, was completed during a series of professorships at Prague, Halle, and Munich.

He became a professor and the director of the institute of experimental psychology at the Friedrich-Wilhelm University in Berlin in 1894, where he continued his work on the psychology of music, started a journal on the subject, and began an archive of primitive music.

Stumpf retired in 1921, continuing his work until his death on December 15, 1936, in Berlin. With Husserl, he is considered a cofounder of phenomenology and in particular an inspiration to the Gestalt psychologists.

Edmund Husserl

Edmund Husserl was born on April 8, 1859 in Pross-nitz, Moravia. He studied philosophy, math, and physics at Leipzig, Berlin, and Vienna and received his doctorate from the University of Vienna in 1882 in mathematics. The next year, he moved to Vienna to study under Franz Brentano.

Husserl, born into a Jewish family, converted to Lu-theranism in 1886, and married Mai vine Steinschneider in 1887, also a convert. They had three children. In these same years, he went to study with Carl Stumpf at the University of Halle and became a lecturer there. They became good friends and exchanged ideas.

While at Halle, he agonized over the connection between mathematics and the nature of the mind. He recognized that his original ideas, which involved mathematics as coming out of psychology, were misguided. So he began the development of his brand of phenomenology as a way of investigating the nature of experience itself. This led to the publication of Logical Investigations in 1900.

He was invited to a professorship at the University of Gottingen in 1901, where students began to form a circle around him and his work. He also developed a friendship with Wilhelm Dilthey, and was influenced by Dilthey's ideas concerning the historical context of science.

In 1916, he went to the University of Freiburg. Here he wrote First Philosophy (1923-1924), which outline his belief that phenomenology offered a means towards moral development and abetter world. He received many honors and gave guest lectures at the University of London, the University of Amsterdam, and the Sorbonne, making his ideas available to a new, wider audience.

He retired in 1928. Martin Heidegger, with Husserl's strong approval, was appointed his successor. As Heidegger's work developed into the basis of existentialism, Husserl distanced himself from the new movement.

His last work, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (1936), introduced the concept of Lebenswelt. The next year, he became ill and, on April 27, 1938, he died.

Phenomenology

Phenomenology is an effort at improving our understanding of ourselves and our world by means of careful description of experience. On the surface, this seems like little more than naturalistic observation and introspection. Examined a little more closely, you can see that the basic assumptions are quite different from those of the mainstream experimentally-oriented human sciences: In doing phenomenology, we try to describe phenomena without reducing those phenomena to supposedly objective non-phenomena. Instead of appealing to objectivity for validation, we appeal instead to inter-subjective aggreement.

Phenomenology begins with phenomena — appearances, that which we experience, that which is given — and stays with them. It doesn't prejudge an experience as to its qualifications to be an experience. Instead, by taking up a phenomenological attitude, we ask the experience to tell us what it is.

The most basic kind of phenomenology is the description of a particular phenomenon such as a momentary happening, a thing, or even a person, i.e. something full of its uniqueness. Herbert Spiegelberg (1965) outlines three « steps »: