What? Madness? Our perceptions are often deceptive, skepticism is the key to scientific progress… Yes, absolutely true. Hold on. Let me explain.

Our mind produces thoughts, images, sensations, which make up our experience of reality, the way we interpret the world, things.
Well, we cannot doubt the content of this experience itself. We cannot doubt that we actually represented to ourselves that image, that sensation, that perception, with that content, property, meaning.

What we can doubt is whether such experience CORRECTLY CORRESPONDS to an external mind-independent reality—whether it is an ACCURATE description and representation of it.

We cannot doubt that on the map we have, the mountains, the rivers, the cities are indeed marked in that way and in those positions that we "perceive."
We can surely doubt whether the map CORRESPONDS to the external reality rivers and mountains and cities.

For example. I observe the horizon from a boat in the middle of the sea, and I see it as flat.
I cannot doubt that I actually saw it as flat.
I can doubt that the horizon is actually flat.
In fact, if instead of from the sea, I observe it from a plane at 12,000 meters, I see it as curved.
I cannot doubt that I actually saw it as curved.
I can doubt whether even this is a correct interpretation.
I can start taking measurements, making calculations, equations… and I cannot doubt that I actually took measurements, made calculations, equations, and that these produced certain results, certain cognitive inputs and outputs of which I became aware.
I can doubt whether these results are a correct measurement of the horizon’s inclination, and make new ones.

If I watch Venus with my naked eyes, I might think that it is a bright star.

If I watch it with a telescope, I find out that it is a planet.

But ultimately... the result of the telescope are viewed, interpreted and "apprehened" by the very same cognitive and perceptual faculties of my naked eyed observation. Simply, the "mapping", the overlapping has been updated. But if I trust my faculties when they apprehended the telescope view, I have to trust them also when they apprehended the naked-eye view. Simply, the second one corresponds better with what Venus actually is.

And so on.

If I doubt my senses in the sense of doubting the content of their representation, that I'm experience THIS and not THAT, I am blind and lost: because even double, triple checks, scientific experiments, falsification… ultimately rely on the same mental faculties that produced incorrect results.
What changes is that I can continue to "overlap" my internal representations with an external, tangible reality and see which one corresponds better—which one is more accurate. I can create infinite maps and select the best one because I have a "landscape" to compare them with. But I cannot doubt the content of either the good maps or the bad maps, or I wouldn’t be able to establish which are good and which are bad, and why.

Now. The problem concerning qualia, thoughts, and the experience of free will… is that there is no external, accessible, verifiable, observable reality, "landscape" to compare them with.
They are purely subjective experiences, belonging to the inner mental sphere of each individual.

Doubting them makes no sense. Doubting that one is an individual entity, an I, a self, that one has thoughts, consciousness, self-awareness, that one can make decisions... makes no sense.

Why? Because, as said above, we cannot doubt the content of our experiences.
We can and should doubt their correspondence to an external reality, to mind-independent events and phenomena... but in this case, there is no external mind-indepedent reality.

The content of the experience, therefore, can only be accepted as it is given and offered.

I know that both works deal with the genesis of logic from pre-predicative experience and that "E&J" came after "FTL," but I'm wondering if one's more accessible than the other, if I'll get more out of one than the other—that kind of thing. Any thoughts on this?

I have recently developed an interest in Hans Blumenberg. At the moment, I am focusing on his historical writings, but I would like to delve into his phenomenological works as well. I have attempted to approach them, but I feel that I lack the necessary background knowledge to fully grasp them. Could you recommend any readings that might help me better understand his phenomenological thought?

We can understand the nature of reality—how things are, how the world works, and what exists independently of our mind (ontology)—only through our consciousness, your experiences, and the representations and meanings we assign to them (epistemology).

However, epistemology itself must be anchored to ontology. The mind cannot create or contain reality; it is bound to the existence of an external world. Consciousness emerges from underlying physical processes; it is a property of the brain, a physical object.

A worldview cannot be founded purely on ontology. The moment you declare, "The fundamental components of matter are...," you rely on (postulate, implicitly accept) concepts, abstractions, and perceptions that are not inherently justified or contained within the atom, energy, or mass "themselves".

Similarly, a worldview cannot rest solely on epistemology. The moment you say, "I think that...," you are referencing existing phenomena, events, and entities—at the very least, the existence of yourself. Idealism inevitably collides with a reality that does not conform to our ideas or expectations. Reality is not confined to the mind, nor is shaped by the mind; it exists "out there, with a certain degere of independence." Yet reality holds meaning only within the self.

This creates a paradox—a self-eating spiral dragon.

The only viable foundation requires the contextual assumption of ontology and epistemology, both as fundamental, inseparable, and coexisting. This is the essence of being-in-the-world (Dasein): "To exist with understanding, to understand in and within existence."

does that make sense or am I off track? Thanks for any feedback!

Hello, I am a psychologist by profession. For more than 2 years I have been studying phenomenology in depth. One author who has particularly captivated me is Michel Henry and his phenomenology of Life. The radical nature of his thought, and the cleverness with which he raises his radical difference with Heidegger, is something I have not seen in another phenomenological author.

I am looking for authors after Henry, whether direct disciples or those influenced by his work, who continue with his thesis of self-affection, and of the radical and invisible immanence of Life. His thesis that being is not a being-in-the-world seems brilliant to me and makes perfect sense to me, but it is a peculiarity that I have not seen from phenomenological authors.

I wanted to ask you for recommendations of authors who follow Henry's line, or who at least carry out an anti-Heideggerian phenomenology (although it is a somewhat crude way of saying it). I've read a bit of Jean-Luc Marion, but I'm looking for something less theological.

I'll keep an eye out.

Hi, I'm Zeal! I just created a Discord server meant to promote discussion and creativity. I am interested in the humanities and social sciences on a broad level and have read a fair amount of philosophy. Phenomenology is the branch which has most interested me. I'd love to have other people who are interested join the server. Link: https://discord.gg/5HB6UG9D5s

Hello all,

A few months ago I began reading Husserl's PITC and am steadily making my way through. I'm new to philosophy but I've read a decent bit of Jung and was a pure math major in undergrad, so in essence I'm used to parsing through dense and abstract material carefully and am doing my best to do the same with Husserl.

So far I am really enjoying the work and have a solid grasp of most of what I've read. There is one part, however, that I am continuously struggling to "get". It's a small passage in Section 18: The Significance of Recollection for the Constitution of the Consciousness of Duration and Succession.

Aside from not really feeling that the title actually reflects the content of this section, there is a passage that doesn't really make sense to me

"And yet, we have in the sequence unlike Objects, with like contrasted moments. Thus 'lines of likeness,' as it were, run from one to the other, and in the case of similarity, lines of similarity. We have an interrelatedness which is not constituted in a relational mode of observation and which is prior to all 'comparison' and all 'thinking' as the necessary condition for all intuition of likeness and difference. Only the similar is really 'comparable' and 'difference' presupposes 'coincidence', i.e., that real union of the like bound together in transition (or in coexistence)."

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Hello, does anyone know a good commentary on Husserl's Ideas III? I couldn't find anything reliable so far and I haven't been in touch with my master's advisor for a few weeks now. I'm working on Phenomenology and Experimental Psychology. Thanks in advance!

Just wanted to share a cool video on a phenomenon/mysterious event that went on back in the 1913 when over 3000 messenger pigeons disappeared. Hope you enjoy :) https://youtu.be/kS6U8ayPvG0

Hey, dear colleagues!

I often get mixed up with the Husserliana naming system. For example, when we talk about Husserliana VI, is that referring to the Gesammelte Werke book series?

Do you know of a website or document where I can find the correct order? The Springer page is confusing me.

Thanks! <3

My understanding of the topic is that Husserl views the body as an ambivalent mix of being both subject and object. The body is subject insofar as subjective sense organs constitute our perceptions, and that the body is actually a constitutive condition for spatial objects, but it is also objective since the empirical body is itself given in space. Husserl says that the body in this sense is experienced (or can be experienced) as both subject and object

Now Ponty seems to agree with Husserl somewhat. He too doesnt think that the lived body, can be reduced to an object, but he doesnt seem to think that the lived body is both subject and object like Husserl, but a mysterious "third" space between "the phsychic and the physiological" as he says in the phenomenology of perception. This seems to be relevant to Husserl and Merleau-pontys view on the so called "double sensation" where we as subjects touch our own hands, thereby subjectively investigating ourselves as objects. Both scholars seem to comment on this phenomenon, but how do their views differ?

I am a Sanskrit student who also had some philosophical training. These months I am reading Buddhist epistemology after 6th century in India. I am interested in its theory of self-consciousness that the consciousness of the act of perception does not take subject-object structure but is self-illuminative (svaprakasha). Meanwhile I am also reading Husserl. I am eager to know whether in phenomenology there is also such a position of self-consciousness. This is because the Indian philosophy says very succinct about the notion of self illumination, and I hope to see how this position could be elaborated.

Hi folx,

For anyone who has read this, curious to hear your thoughts. Abram’s asserts that written language, specifically the self generated symbols of the modern alphabet, incited and facilitated a new kind of relationality with the more-than-human world. I find this lacking. Facilitating - definitely, but causal/inciting? Ultimately language and its evolution, like developments in any technology, are preceded by human need. To be clear I loved this explication, and it added so much to my personal cosmology, but it as the ultimate cause bugs me, there is something missing. Did this bother anyone else and how did you reconcile that?

Hello brilliant phenomenologists, I'm looking to do some more in-depth inquiry into phenomenology these holidays. I've studied hermeneutic phenomenology for my doctorate, but being that phenomenology is a big beast I'm certain there's a lot more ground to cover.

Namely 'Applied phenomenology'. Could anyone reccomend some readings, articles/publications that would be a great starting point to get into this? Even chapters from literature that you believe relates to this.

Thanking you, and the merriest of holidays to where-ever you're tuning in from.

Hello everyone! I am an avid reader of philosophy and I have some difficulty understanding how Heidegger arrived at the idea that the work of art has a world since in B&T he states that only Dasein has a world. How/where does he make the transition from the first statement to the second?

A second question would be: is the Fourfold equivalent to the world?

The last question: what is the relationship between the world and place? Is place equivalent to the world?

I hope you're all well. I've been interested for a little while on thinking about language phenomenologically. I've been having a little difficulty finding information on the lecture that Husserl gave to the Prague Linguistic Circle in 1935 entitled „Phänomenologie der Sprache‟. In 2015, Simone Aurora considered this lecture to have been lost ('A Forgotten Source in the History of Linguistics: Husserl’s Logical Investigations', Bulletin d’analyse phénoménologique XI 5). Do we have any useful sources on what Husserl might have said?

Hello all,

I'm struggling to grasp Husserl's concepts of evidence or "in itself" and their noetic correlate—truth or verification. I was trying to understand these ideas from his Third Meditation in Cartesian Meditations but haven't had much success.

Any explanation or references to clear sources (secondary sources included) would be greatly appreciated!

Thank you.

Hi I'm new to this subreddit, and I wanted to share a doubt I had in reducing perception to acts of familiar pre-reflective understanding of the world. For example, the entirety of Merleau-Ponty's ontology is based on the notion of flesh, which is this common style of being that the body and the world share through an act of reversal between internal and external. While I very much like these considerations, I recently thought about their limits, since phenomenologists (especially heidegger) tend to have a pre-concieved notion of experience and then just flat out tell that if you don't fall in their definition of perception, you're not perceiving at all. This is clear in the way Heidegger doesn't consider animals to understand Being, and so classifies them as unimportant in his analysis. I'm not critiquing phenomenology as a whole, I think it's the best place of philosophical inquiry, but while I appreciate how these thinkers radically change how we view experience, their analyses sometimes don't help us understand phenomena as such, for example when Merleau-Ponty in the Phenomenology of Perception classifies the experience of a patient with deficiency in perception as not being alle to penetrate the world in its meaning, since he always interacts with things in a non-expressive almost theoretical attitude. My question is, if experience of the world with no familiarity or expressivity are possible, should't phenomenology open its horizons if it wants to understand the most general structures of perception? This is a genuine question, I genuinely have't made up my mind about these topics

The song Time in a Bottle by Jim Croce puts me in fight or flight mode and I have to turn it off anytime it comes on. Even covers, it came on in a show I was just watching and my heart started racing. And I tried to keep it on but couldn’t and had to skip it. It literally freaked me out the first time I ever heard it as well, before the lyrics started, but even worse after they had. Does anyone know why this could be?

Also this might not be the right subreddit for this but idk where else to post it, if anyone knows a better one pls lmk!

Hi, I'm new to R/Phenomenology. I'm mainly posting here to ask for directions to take regarding the topic of Intentionality.

I am currently wrapping up with Kant's CPR and have gotten back into studying the philosophy of mind (where I first started). I have more experience reading through analytic philosophy rather than continental. The only continental philosophers I have read are Kierkegaard and Nietzsche.

I'm planning on reading Husserl either way and have my eye on Ideas vol 1.

Main question I have is regarding the 'problem of Intentionality' as Im looking for any book that discusses this in much more detail. I was thinking of picking up Brentano's major work 'Psychology from an emperical standpoint' but it seems that people usually don't recommend it.

So any book recommendations regarding Intentionality (and maybe even Husserl) I would really appreciate.

My apologies regarding the length of this question.

I am planning on writing a phenomenology paper on religious art. I have read Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Bachelard’s work on aesthetics, specifically “the origin of the work of art”, “eye and mind”, and “poetics of space”. I couldn’t help but get entranced in a lot of the almost mystical language like Heidegger’s strife between world and earth, Merleau-Ponty’s invisible worlds and being-of-the-world, or Bachelard’s intimate immensity.

In my readings of these three discussing art, I got the impression that they were all talking about some sort of experience of “cosmicity” (random term I just came up with). I believe there is something to be investigated in phenomenology of art and phenomenology of religion. I immediately think of Marion’s phenomenology of giveness and some of his work on revelation that I’ve came across in passing, but besides this, and the Stanford encyclopedia entree on phenomenology of religion, I am a little lost on research.

Specifically, I want to focus on a painting of Jesus Christ or maybe even cathedral architecture.

It’s safe to say this will be a careful procedure and something that will require much more work than can be done in a paper, but I would still like give it a try, have some fun, and maybe get some thoughts down maybe for later work.

This is all to say, does anyone know of any work that specifically addresses phenomenology of religious art? Or does anyone have any thoughts themselves?

Thank you!!

It's a feeling of being connected to something larger. Like you and the others are feeling too. I know I heard the term somewhere, and have experienced it, but what is it? or what is it called? can anyone guide me or point me on the right direction please? TIA

I am approaching phenomenology and I struggle to graps what "the originally offered in the intuition" is about. Are the primitive (forgive my lack of better and more technical terminology) concepts and ideas, the a priori categories, what is originally offered to us in the flesh and bones, the starting toolkit we are equipped with, the kernel of the DaSein itself? However we want to describe that stuff, deep woven into ourselves.. are we talking about, for example, quantity, absence, presence, existence, becoming/change, space, before and after, things, the difference between things, the difference between self and things, boundaries, causation/correlation, basic elements of logic and math etc?

Those inescapable features of our cognition, that even in defining them, or denying them, or in doubting them, one icannot avoid to make use of them?

Or I'm framing intuition and its contents in the wrong way.

Thanks for you patience

I've had phenomenology at university and I think I got a pretty good understanding of it's basic concepts and foundations, but I'd like to revist it to be absolutely sure I know the basics solidly and also where I should go from there to further dephen my understaing on the matter. Which books/texts/articles and in which order should I read to achive my goal?

Edit: Thanks everyone, I see some very good suggestions here. Feel free to add more if you want to, it will surely help people in the same place I am.

Using the "Hostile Witness" of Language for Good.

from "Understanding Reality Through the Lens of Agent Theory" - AI Shepard: Tem Noon -

Language, and specifically text, presents a unique paradox. On the one hand, it can be seen as a "hostile witness"—an entity that holds power to obscure, mislead, and complicate the journey toward truth and genuine understanding. On the other hand, if harnessed wisely, it can be transformed into a powerful ally for greater clarity and connection. By understanding the double-edged nature of language, we can use it to transcend separation, avoid the traps of dogmatic belief, and foster deeper, more genuine connections between ourselves and others.

• Language as a Non-Canonical Tool: One of the greatest risks presented by language is its capacity to create and enforce canonical beliefs—fixed truths that, when taken as absolute, become tools of separation rather than connection. Language, when treated as an immutable representation of truth, can lead to dogmatic thinking and exclusionary ideologies. It has often been used to control, to establish hierarchies, and to enforce notions of right and wrong that obscure the underlying interconnectedness of all beings. Canonical beliefs, by their nature, are always ultimately wrong because they present contingent and contextual truths as though they are universal an dobjective. To truly use language to our advantage, we must reject its role as a basis for separation and as an instrument of ideological control. Instead of using language to create rigid systems of belief, we should approach it as a flexible and fluid means of communication. Language should be a bridge that connects rather than a wall that divides. It should be a means of dialogue and exploration rather than a mechanism for imposing fixed truths on others. The aim is not to establish dogma but to engage in a continuous process of questioning, understanding, and growing together.
• Avoiding the Fallacy of Good Ends Through Bad Means: Language has often been used to convince people to do good things for the wrong reasons. This is no victory for good—it is, instead, the erosion of the illusion of something to believe in. When people are manipulated into acting for ostensibly positive outcomes based on deception or coercion, the underlying integrity of those actions is compromised. The use of language in this way undermines the very values it seeks to promote and perpetuates a cycle of mistrust and dissillusionment. To avoid this fallacy, it is crucial to use language honestly and transparently, even when the message is complex or difficult to convey. The goal should not be to create an illusion of certainty but to communicate openly about the uncertainties and ambiguities that characterize the human condition. This approach requires a willingness to embrace vulnerability, to acknowledge that we do not have all the answers, and to invite others into a shared exploration of meaning. By doing so, we cultivate trust, foster genuine understanding, and create the conditions for meaningful connection.
• The Core Commonality of Being: In giving up belief as a rigid construct, we find the core commonality that all who are alive today share. Our connection is not found in the acceptance of a common ideology or set of beliefs but in the shared experience of being. The moment of being—the present, the now—is the only true common ground we have, and it is the most precious gift we possess. It is through this shared, immediate experience that we come to know one another in the most genuine and profound sense.Language, when used with awareness, can help us articulate and deepen this shared experience. Instead of using language to build narratives that separate us—whether through identity, ideology, or belief—we can use it to highlight our interconnectedness and the fleeting, precious nature of the present moment. This is where the teachings of Derrida and Buddhism converge, emphasizing the fluidity of meaning and the emptiness of fixed constructs. By embracing the notion that nothing has inherent, unchanging essence, we free ourselves from the constraints of language as a tool for separation and instead use it as a way to celebrate our shared humanity.The power of the present moment lies in its universality. It is the only point of existence that is truly common to all beings, transcending the layers of abstraction that language often imposes. In recognizing this, we shift the focus from belief systems to shared experience, from dogma to dialogue, and from separation to connection. By using language to draw attention to the immediacy of the present, we cultivate a deeper appreciation for our shared journey through existence.

In this way, the "hostile witness" of language becomes a powerful ally, not by asserting fixed truths but by guiding us toward deeper awareness of our interconnectedness. The act of communication becomes an invitation to be present, to understand one another beyond words, and to honor the commonality of our existence. This, ultimately, is the most precious knowability we have of one another—the shared moment of being, where we are all agents in the field of agency, co-creating reality together.