Has phenomenology ever produced a useful philosophical insight?

Question

Analytic philosophy, although not without its faults, has made some real progress in moving us beyond traditional metaphysics. Nobody really believes, for example, in Platonic forms any more.

On the other hand, phenomenology, or the phenomenological method, seems not to have produced anything useful at all... just a lot of jargon-laden hand-waving about vague generalities like subjectivity, etc. etc. The idea of intuiting essences by introspecting really hard just doesn't cut it.

Or am I wrong?

Has phenomenology produced ANY useful philosophical advances?

Answer 1

"Nobody really believes, for example, in Platonic forms any more" - Most mathematicians are Platonists. For example, Grothendieck, Godel and Penrose have explicitly stated that they are Platonists, they all believed that there are eternal forms / ideas that mathematics discovers. Quantum physics is very Platonic. Heisenberg, Schrodinger and Dirac were obvious Platonists.

To answer your question, yes, phenomenology did produce useful results that went beyond philosophy. Modern day AI would not exist without Husserl. His concepts of intentionality, noema, noesis and many others were crucial to the development of all theories of cognitive science. He gave a model of the mind that 100 years later cashed out in ChatGPT, deep learning and machine learning. However, I do admit that analytic philosophy played a great part in those developments as well.

Gestalt psychology is very phenomenological in it's basic approach to human nature.

I don't know if you consider psychoanalysis useful, but Freud was a student of Brentano's (founder of phenomenology) as a young man.

You are right that phenomenology is very difficult and vague compared to analytic philosophy.

I think you will enjoy a book called "Fate of analysis" by a guy called Robert Hanna (i think that's his name, it's been a while since i read it). He pretty much says that analytic philosophy is a bunch of wrong doctrines that was always inconsistent, and it has no future.

Answer 2

Citing "moving beyond metaphysics" as an achievement of analytic philosophy, with which to compare the supposed lack of achievements of phenomenology, is a very peculiar standard to use. Instead, the absolute failure of the first two "analytic" movements, Logical Positivism, and its child Ordinary Language Philosophy, to banish metaphysics from philosophy is instead taken as an absolute repudiation of the entire idea. In fact, critics of these movements like to revel in spelling out how their starting assumption sets are explicitly metaphysical claims, and the movements were encumbered with self-contradictory assumptions from the outset.

Phenomenology also suffered a major failure. The fundamental reductive strata of qualia that trained self-evaluators identified, proved to be fundamentally inconsistent between those trained from different self-evaluation schools. The two programs were similar in near-absolute failure in their primary goal. But the nature of phenomenology's failure was not intrinsic to a logic contradiction at the outset. Instead, it was an experiment, which had a negative outcome, and it was therefore instructive about the nature of our world.

Phenomenology was the first scientific reductionist program which arrived at a decisive conclusion that the subject matter being evaluated cannot be reduced. Reduction of experience to qualia -- fails.

The rivals to phenomenology illegitimately seized upon this to dismiss the SUBJECT MATTER of phenomenology, as reductionism was still considered unquestionable at that point, and a failure of reduction was seen as a failure of the field. the subsequent limits to reduction which have been encountered in multiple other science endeavors in the latter parts of the 20th century, have lead to a general recognition that aspects of our universe are just non-reducible.

Phenomenology should be seen as the first definitive case of what is now recognized to be a general truism.

Note the efforts to define the most basic components of a meme, lead memetics into a similar morass as the efforts to reduce experience to quales. Units of thought, like units of experience, seem to come only in groups.

The concept of qualia -- that we have unitS of experience, has now been almost universally accepted. And the methods of identifying details of experience, the core methodology of phenomenology, is now essential for providing the data for neuroscience to try to correlate to, in its project of seeking "neural correlates of consciousness".

Answer 3

There is a very good introductory essay in this book. “What is philosophy?” by Von Hildebrand, Dietrich, 1889-1977 (1991) Introductory essay by Josef Seifert. Book Available at Internet Archive.

Apparently Ratzinger is a fan of von Hildebrand, so he is finding a link to Plato/ Augustine.

Another Platonic move was Nicolai Hartmann, I think in his Ethics is where he used Phenomenology.

Then you find Gygory Lukacs also interested in Nicolai Hartmann. Lukacs was in search of ontology from Hartmann. Lukacs had the idea of the Soviet disaster in mind, and he was in search of an Ontology and Ethics for Marxism I believe.

Well there we have Ratzinger and Gyorgy Lukacs, two men with excellent philosophical intuition, so this keeps me in the game of investigating Phenomenology. Again the introductory essay by Seifert above is good.