Presentation

Phenomenology and Life-World

Phenomenology is a philosophical style and method, developed to respond to the new role that philosophy is currently being called on to play, namely to shed light on the relationship between the world of everyday life and those worlds discovered and investigated in recent centuries by the natural sciences, especially by physics, biology and the cognitive sciences. The world of life is that into which all our cognitive curiosity and emotional responses are born, and in which our interests, choices, actions, culture and institutions are rooted. It includes everything that manifests itself as life-world, whether concrete or intangible, good or bad, sacred or profane. And it includes us, human persons apparently capable of intentions and desires, of choosing and of being held accountable for our choices – even of sacrificing ourselves freely. But the objects and events of our everyday experience – red poppies and base betrayals; works of art and acts of theft; war and peace and, especially, we persons – find no place in the world of the natural sciences and the neurosciences, from which the only reliable answers to philosophical questions concerning the nature of mind and person are expected. And so our life, our convictions and our actions are traced back to unfounded presuppositions, thereby corrupting and impoverishing all our moral and civil life.

The Contemporary Mind

There exist today two widespread forms of skepticism relative to the world of life: Hermeneutic Relativism and Reductive Materialism. The former is currently (in the West) the philosophy of the dominant culture in the widest circles of knowledgeable people, while the latter is the dominant natural philosophy, especially with regard to man and the mind. Both are forms of skepticism relative to things immediately apparent on the horizon of everyday life, including ourselves, human persons. According to Hermeneutic Relativism there are no modes of immediate experience such as intuition, perception or feeling that are true to reality, the world being bound in language, culture and interpretation. But according to Reductive Materialism, phenomena are nothing but epiphenomena, appearances are nothing but illusions, shadows or dreams “caused” by a reality which is completely different from the apparent world, like the virtual world of Matrix. And today these two forms of skepticism are reaching out to and willingly completing each other.

Working Hypothesis

The Laboratory was created out of the experience - consolidated through dialogue - that no argument is conclusive against this scepticism concernng phenomena. It was developed in order to test the hypothesis from which phenomenology arose, but which each generation much rediscover for itself in the midst of contemporary research and debate: what is needed is not an argument, however complex, but a true revolution in the way of conceiving of the relationships between appearance and reality.

The need is felt today, from many sides, to affirm two principles which open new perspectives, one in philosophy of mind, and the other in analytic ontology: that our experience (not only sensorial but also that which includes affective sensibility, social cognition and structural intuition) is by no means reducible to subjective states or qualia, but is open to the real and the true and is also, for this very reason, fallible. And that the phenomenon is by no means the epiphenomenon of more basic realities, but rather the emergence of the essential properties of things: music is more in the melody than in the sounds, water more in the quenching liquid than in the molecules, the person more in her flourishing than in her biological bases. The identity of things is therefore determined, as it were, starting from the face they reveal to us. But these two theses are the two pilasters of the philosophical method to which Husserl gave the name phenomenology.