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This post is a collection of quotes about phenomenology. There are 23 quotes divided into 9 sections. The painting above is by Giovanni Ambrogio Figino titled
Metal Plate with Peaches and Vine Leaves (1594).
A. Phenomenology is the study of immediate perception (3)
B. All knowledge begins with phenomenology (2)
C. Direct perception in the present moment is fact (1)
D. Memory is a bookcase that we can grab knowledge from (3)
E. The six main senses are vision, hearing, touch, taste, smell and thought (3)
F. Most thoughts mimic the other five senses (2)
G. Reality is full of details (3)
H. Reality is full of potential concepts (3)
I. The feeling of good is mysterious (3)
A. Phenomenology is the study of immediate perception
Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914, philosopher):
1. "That artist's observational power is what is most wanted in the study of phenomenology." (Pragmatism and Pragmaticism, 1903)
Edmund Husserl (1859-1938, philosopher):
2. "To begin with, we put the proposition: pure phenomenology is the science of pure consciousness." (Brainyquote.com)
Edmund Husserl (1859-1938, philosopher):
3. "A new fundamental science, pure phenomenology, has developed within philosophy: this is a science of a thoroughly new type and endless scope. It is inferior in methodological rigor to none of the modern sciences." (Pure Phenomenology, 1917)
B. All knowledge begins with phenomenology
William Stanley Jevons (1835-1882, economist):
4. "In a certain sense all knowledge is inductive. We can only learn the laws and relations of things in nature by observing those things." (The Principles of Science, 1874)
Simone Weil (1909-1943, philosopher):
5. "Although people seem to be unaware of it today, the development of the faculty of attention forms the real object and almost the sole interest of studies." (Reflections on the right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God)
C. Direct perception in the present moment is fact
John Stuart Mill (1806-1873, economist):
6. "Whatever is known to us by consciousness, is known beyond possibility of question. What one sees or feels, whether bodily or mentally, one cannot but be sure that one sees or feels." (A System of Logic, 1843)
D. Memory is a bookcase that we can grab knowledge from
Philip Roth (1933-2018, novelist):
7. "Memories of the past are not memories of facts but memories of your imaginings of the facts." (The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography, 1988)
Francis Buller (1746-1800, judge):
8. "Some instances of strength of memory are very surprising." (Coleman v. Wathen, 1793)
Henri Bergson (1859-1941, philosopher)
9. "Without this survival of the past into the present there would be no duration, but only instantaneity." (An Introduction to Metaphysics, 1903)
E. The six senses are vision, hearing, touch, taste, smell and thought
Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519, artist):
10. "The eye, which is called the window of the soul, is the principal means by which the central sense can most completely and abundantly appreciate the infinite works of nature; and the ear is the second, which acquires dignity by hearing of the things the eye has seen." (Quoted by The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci by Rudolf Flesch)
Michel Foucault (1926-1984, philosopher):
11. "The painter is turning his eyes towards us only in so far as we happen to occupy the same position as his subject. We, the spectators, are an additional factor." (The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, 1970)
Martin Heidegger (1889-1976, philosopher):
12. "We ourselves are the entities to be analyzed." (Being and Time, 1927)
F. Most thoughts mimic the other five senses
Robert Andrew Wilson, Frank Keil:
13. "However, the central role of imagery in theories of mental activity was undermined when Kulpe, in 1904, pointed out that some thoughts are not accompanied by imagery..." (The MIT Encyclopedia of Cognitive Sciences, 2001)
Temple Grandin (1947-now, professor):
14. "To understand animal thinking you've got to get away from a language. See my mind works like Google for images. You put in a key word; it brings up pictures. See language for me narrates the pictures in my mind." (NPR: A Conversation with Temple Grandin, 2006)
G. Reality is full of details
Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677, philosopher):
15. "The more reality or being a thing has, the greater number of its attributes." (Ethics, 1677)
Laurence Sterne (1713-1768, novelist):
16. "Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine; and they are the life, the soul of reading; take them out of this book for instance, you might as well take the book along with them." (The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentlemen)
George Henry Lewes (1817-1878, literary critic):
17. "...it is in the selection of the characteristic details that the artistic power is manifested." (The Principles of Success in Literature, 1865)
H. Reality if full of potential concepts
Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913, linguist):
18. "Without language, thought is a vague, uncharted nebula. There are not pre-existing ideas, and nothing is distinct before the appearance of language." (Cours de Linguistique Generale, 1916)
Albert Einstein (1879-1955, physicist):
19. "By means of such concepts and mental relations between them, we are able to orient ourselves in the labyrinth of sense impressions." (Physics and Reality, 1936)
Peter Strawson (1919-2006, philosopher):
20. "Part of my aim is to exhibit some general and structural features of the conceptual scheme in terms of which we think about particular things." (Individuals, 1959)
I. The feeling of good is mysterious
Jacques Lacan (1901-1981, psychologist):
21. "Desire, a function central to all human experience, is the desire for nothing nameable. And at the same time this desire lies at the origin of every variety of animation." (Goodreads.com)
G. E. Moore (1873-1958, philosopher):
22. "If I am asked, 'What is good?' my answer is that good is good, and that is the end of the matter. Or if I am asked, 'How is that to be defined?' my answer is that it cannot be defined, and that is all I have to say about it." (Principia Ethica, 1903)
Simone Weil (1909-1943, philosopher):
23. "There is a reality outside the world, that is to say, outside space and time, outside man's mental universe, outside any sphere whatsoever that is accessible to human faculties. Corresponding to this reality, at the centre of the human heart, is the longing for an absolute good, a longing which is always there and is never appeased by any object in this world." (
Draft for a Statement of Human Obligation, posthumous)
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