conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me a description for a book titled Understanding Phenomenology about Locke, Berkeley, Hume with the genre: New, Used & Rental Textbooks, Humanities.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: "A welcome addition to the introductory literature on empiricism, filling a gap between the books which are very heavy on Locke, Berkeley, Hume scholarship, and books that focus purely on contemporary epistemology." Graham Stevens, University of Manchester
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first five paragraphs for this book.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Understanding Phenomenology
  For the remainder of this chapter, we shall attend almost exclusively to Being and Time, drawing occasionally on some of the surrounding lecture material. Although I shall not be offering anything like a commentary on the work, my discussion will nonetheless follow roughly the order of Heidegger's presentation in Being and Time.
  For Heidegger, phenomenology is subservient to what he calls fundamental ontology", which is centred on the "question of being". That is, Heidegger's guiding question in Being and Time is that of what it means for anything to be. Heidegger considers this question both the most basic philosophical question and at the same time one that the Western philosophical tradition has had a shameful tendency to neglect: the question of being "provided a stimulus for the researches of Plato and Aristotle, only to subside from then on as a theme for actual investigation" (BT: §1). Such neglect has been fostered in part by a tendency to treat the question of being as one whose answer is in some way already settled; being is treated as "the most universal concept", as "indefinable" or even as "self-evident" (see BT: §1). By raising the question anew, Heidegger takes himself to be challenging the entirety of Western philosophy from the ground up (no small undertaking, to say the least).
  Heidegger is well aware that the question of being is a peculiar question, liable to induce little beyond an uncomfortable feeling of confusion in those to whom it is addressed (Western philosophy's neglect of the question is no doubt partly responsible for this discomfort). Indeed, on hearing the question, it is not at all clear just where to begin in trying to answer it. However, Heidegger argues that we have far more to go on than this initial sense of bewilderment would suggest. The place to begin is precisely with ourselves, with what Heidegger calls "Dasein", his name for the kind of beings we are. Heidegger uses this idiosyncratic locution, which is composed of "Da-", meaning "there", and "-sein", meaning "being", in order to exclude as many assumptions and prejudices as possible concerning the kind of beings we ourselves are. Other terms, such as "man", "human being","Homo sapiens" and so on, already carry connotations from years of circulation in philosophy, theology, anthropology, psychology and biology, to name a few, that may prove problematic (here we see a continuation of Husserl's desire to avoid any presuppositions in the practice of phenomenology). Dasein is the place to begin in answering the question of being because it, unlike other kinds of entities, always has an understanding of being: human beings are beings to whom entities are manifest in their way of being. This does not mean that we already have a worked-out conception of what it is to be (if we did, there would be little for Heidegger and Being and Time to accomplish), but rather that our understanding is largely implicit and taken for granted, what Heidegger calls "pre-ontological". Since Dasein has an understanding of being, however implicit and non-thematic, Heidegger argues that fundamental ontology must begin with the task of spelling out or articulating this pre-ontological understanding of being. Doing so will provide a first pass at answering the question of being in general, since understanding Dasein, that is, what it is to be the kind of beings we are, involves understanding what we understand, namely being.
  The claim that Heidegger wishes to explicate Daseins pre-ontological understanding of being needs to be carefully understood. Heidegger is not particularly interested in what we happen to believe, or even think, about the notion of being, to the extent that we think or believe anything at all. Heidegger is emphatically not a philosopher of "common sense". The understanding of being is not so much something we think, but instead is manifest in how we act. Our activity, Heidegger thinks, displays a sensitivity to the categorical distinctions with respect to being that our explicit thoughts (again, in so far as we have them on these matters) have not really managed to comprehend.
  Despite the surface similarities, very few, if any of us, will confuse these two instructions. By this, I do not mean only that we are unlikely to run together toy surprises and prime numbers, but something further: very few, if any of us, will so much as treat this pair of instructions as asking us to do the same kind of thing. Looking for prime numbers and looking for toy surprises are very different kinds of activity. An indication of this is the puzzlement that would greet the following instruction:
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me four more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: In the first case [empiricism] consciousness is too poor, in the second [intellectualism] too rich for any phenomenon to appeal compellingly to it. Empiricism cannot see that we need to know what we are looking for, otherwise we would not be looking for it, and intellectualism fails to see that we need to be ignorant of what we are looking for, or equally again we should not be searching. They are in agreement in that neither can grasp consciousness in the act of learning, and that neither attaches due importance to that circumscribed ignorance, that still "empty" but already determinate intention which is attention itself.
  Although intellectualism presents itself as, and is in some respects, an antidote to empiricism, correcting the errors and distortions present in the empiricists conception of perception, part of the problem with the intellectualist position is that it shares too much in common with the empiricist view it claims to reject. Consider again Kant's dictum. That perceptual experience involves, as one of its two components, what Kant calls "intuitions" indicates that the intellectualist retains, and builds on, the empiricist model of perception. As Merleau-Ponty notes: "Judgment is often introduced as what sensation lacks to make perception possible" (PP: 32). The problem here is that the introduction of judgement, as making up for what sensation lacks, still shows a commitment to sensations as an ingredient or component of perceptual experience: "Perception becomes an 'interpretation of the signs that our senses provide in accordance with the bodily stimuli, a 'hypothesis' that the mind evolves to 'explain its impressions to itself" (PP: 33). By only adding on to the empiricist conception of perception, rather than abandoning it altogether, intellectualism thus inherits the same problems and liabilities inherent in the view it seeks to displace.
  Merleau-Ponty's critique of the "traditional prejudices" informing many prevalent (then and now) conceptions of perception in both philosophy and psychology, as well as his insistence on what I have been calling the integrity of perception, opens on to a wider array of phenomena to be described. In particular, what both of the traditional prejudices obscure from view is a proper appreciation of the embodied character of perceptual experience: the integrity of perception is informed by, and founded on, the integrity of bodily self-experience, which neither empiricism nor intellectualism recognizes. We have seen that the empiricist's account of perception treats perception as the endpoint of a causal, mechanical process (the receipt of stimuli, the presence of sensations before the mind), whereas the intellectualist treats perception as a species of judgement. In the case of the empiricist, the body is itself treated as a mechanism, or perhaps an assemblage of mechanisms, causally connected with the surrounding world via the "bombardment" of light rays and molecules, thereby serving as a conduit of sensations. The intellectualist account of perception, bound up as it is with the mental act of judgement, treats the perceiving subject as only accidentally or contingently embodied, with all of the organizing and schematizing work of perceptual experience taking place within the confines of consciousness. Just as the twin prejudices can be shown ultimately to share a picture of perception as involving stimuli or sensations as a key ingredient, so too do the two share a conception of the body as merely one material entity among others, playing only a causal role in the production of perceptual experience. Where they differ is on whether anything more is needed than the workings of such causal mechanisms for there to be perceptual experience. We have already seen how Husserl's phenomenology of embodied experience opens a perspective from which the defects of this underlying conception of the body can be discerned, and Merleau-Ponty continues in this vein, deepening and developing Husserl's insights. Accordingly, Merleau-Ponty's "return to the phenomena", which begins with a description of the integrity of perception, quickly develops into a phenomenology of the body and bodily self-experience.
  What a reader new to Phenomenology of Perception may find jarring about this development is the amount of attention Merleau-Ponty devotes to the consideration of pathological cases. Part One, which is devoted to the body, opens with a discussion of the phenomenon of phantom limb (along with anosognosia, in which the appendage is still present but "ignored" by the patient), and continues after that with an even longer analysis of a particular case: of a man referred to as Schneider, a brain-damaged veteran of the First World War who has difficulty performing various kinds of movements. I want to look in more detail at these discussions, but it is important first to address the general question of why Merleau-Ponty focuses on these pathological cases, given his desire to "return" to the phenomena of lived experience. After all, most of us do not partake of these pathologies, and so they would not appear to be a fruitful starting-point for understanding non-pathological, normal embodied experience. This appearance is misleading, however, and for at least three reasons:
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last five paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Levinas, E. 1969. Totality and Infinity, A. Lingis (trans.). Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press.
  Levinas, E. 1996. Basic Philosophical Writings, A. Peperzak, S. Critchley, & R. Bernasconi (eds). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
  Quine, W. V. 1976. The Ways of Paradox and Other Essays, rev. and enlarged edn. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
  Sartre, J.-P. 1997. The Transcendence of the Ego: An Existentialist Theory of Consciousness, F. Williams & R. Kirkpatrick (trans.). New York: Hill & Wang.
  Smart, J. J. C. 1987. Essays Metaphysical and Moral: Selected Philosophical Papers. Oxford: Blackwell.