Phenomenology in Practice and Theory

by Wolfe Mays It is a great pleasure and honour to write this preface. I first became ac quainted with Herbert Spiegelberg's work some twenty years ago, when in 1960 I reviewed The Phenomenological Movement! for Philosophical Books, one of the few journals in Britain that reviewed this book, which Herbert has jok ingly referred to as "the monster". I was at that time already interested in Con tinental thought, and in particular phenomenology. I had attended a course on phenomenology given by Rene Schaerer at Geneva when I was working there in 1955-6. I had also been partly instrumental in getting Merleau-Ponty to come to Manchester in 1958. During his visit he gave a seminar in English on politics and a lecture in French on "Wittgenstein and Language" in which he attacked Wittgenstein's views on language in the Tractatus. He was apparently unaware of the Philosophical Investigations. But it was not until I came to review Herbert's book that I appreciated the ramifications of the movement: its diverse strands of thought, and the manifold personalities involved in it. For example, Herbert mentions one Aurel Kolnai who had written on the "Phenomenology of Disgust'!, and which had appeared in Vol. 10 of Husserl's Jahrbuch. It was only after I had been acquainted for some time with Kolnai then in England, that I realised that 2 Herbert had written about him in the Movement. The Movement itself contains a wealth of learning.

Contenu
One: Epistemology and Ontology.- Structuring the Phenomenological Field: Reflections on a Daubert Manuscript.- Phenomenology and Relativism.- Memory and Phenomenological Method.- Plato's Cave, Flatland and Phenomenology.- Time and Time-Consciousness.- Two: Social and Political Life.- Left and Right as Socio-Political Stances.- A Phenomenology of Coercion and Appeal.- Phenomenology as Psychic Technique of Non-Resistance.- The Self in Question.- Existential Phenomenology and Applied Philosophy.- Three: Aesthetic, Ethical, and Religious Values.- The Good and the Beautiful.- The Retributive Attitude and the Moral Life.- Kindness.- The Phenomenology of Symbol: Genesis I and II.- Epilogue: For the Third Generation of Phenomenologists Contributing to this Volume.