What can phenomenology say nowadays concerning the sciences? Is phenomenology able to provide the ground stone Husserl dreamt of, or, as he himself says in the Crisis, “der Traum ist ausgeträumt”? If this is the case, what is the position that phenomenology can assume towards sciences? Can phenomenology itself be considered as a specific science? Can phenomenology offer any contribution to scientific research, both basic and applied? Should phenomenology be understood as a kind of epistemology? Or is there a specific field of research that pertains specifically to phenomenology and that is not on a pair with epistemological reflection?
From its very beginning, phenomenology has shown a strong connection with scientific thought and the sciences. Husserl’s (more or less orthodox) followers, and, more generally, scientist and philosophers, who have found some kind of inspiration in Husserl’s phenomenological project, have variously tried to implement the idea, according to which phenomenology should prepare the ground, clarify the basic concepts and practices, as well as the relationships between different scientific disciplines. Just to mention some, think of Alfred Schutz for sociology, Hermann Weyl for Physics, Oskar Becker for mathematics and geometry, Ludwig Binswanger and Erwin Straus for psychopathology, Roman Jakobson for linguistics, Aron Gurwitsch for psychology. During the past decades, phenomenological researches have especially been carried out in collaboration with, or within the field, of cognitive sciences, the psy-sciences, and the neurosciences. The foundational task of phenomenology has only seldom been at the center of these researches, though. More recently, phenomenology has been seen as offering important insights and contributions to questions and investigations pertaining physics, as well as a potentially powerful tool to tackle classical epistemological questions, and questions concerning philosophy of science, thus finally opening a new bridge between phenomenology and analytic philosophy beyond the restricted field of philosophy of mind.
All in all, phenomenology is nowadays active in two ways towards the sciences, somehow confirming its hybrid position: on the one hand, phenomenology has a clarificatory task, that is concurrently foundational one; on the other hand, phenomenology is practiced in order to offer insights and, more generally, contributions that allow enlarging knowledge within specific sciences.
The 2024 issue of Studia Phaenomenologica will be devoted to the aforementioned and related questions. We invite scholars to submit contributions that tackle the following issues, and strictly related ones:
- phenomenological clarification of the concept of science and non-science
- phenomenological foundations of specific scientific disciplines
- phenomenological contributions to scientific knowledge
- phenomenology and epistemology
- cases of knowledge transfer between phenomenology and specific scientific disciplines
DEADLINE: 1st of June 2023
Submission Guidelines: https://zetabooks.com/library/journals/studia-phaenomenologica/
The papers should be sent to: submissions@phenomenology.ro (subject title: Studia Phaenomenologica 2024)