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Reddit mentions of Phenomenology of Perception
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We found 3 Reddit mentions of Phenomenology of Perception. Here are the top ones.
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Height | 9.25 Inches |
Length | 6.13 Inches |
Number of items | 1 |
Release date | June 2013 |
Weight | 2.1605301676 Pounds |
Width | 1.57 Inches |
Much like you, I've also recently developed a strong interest in Levinas. I've yet to read him, though, so please take that into account when considering my recommendations.
I recently asked some of my professors and a friend of mine who wrote his master's thesis on Levinas to help me out with getting started. This is what they recommended:
I'm not too knowledgeable of Husserl, so all I can really recommend from him is the Cartesian Meditations, which sort of serves as an introduction to Husserl's own method of phenomenology.
For Heidegger, the most important work in this regard is certainly Being and Time. If you have the time, I recommend picking up the Basic Writings and reading through most of it.
On a final note, Levinas was steeped within the Jewish intellectual tradition. Jewish philosophers often emphasize the role of community and social contextuality in general. It might serve you well to read works such as Martin Buber's I and Thou and Gabriel Marcel's Being and Having.
EDIT: Another good compliment to Levinas is Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception.
Well, there's two issues then.
First, for the most part, models are things we use to deceive ourselves. Or rather, a model is a world constructed in our minds, and in that sense, they typically bear little resemblance to reality. This is another dangerous course to start down, because it ultimately leads to a repudiation of science---not a popular viewpoint in the modern liberal world. In my opinion a more honest viewpoint, but also one that most people don't seem to understand.
If there is a basic truth, then it is that the world isn't modelable, though that brings us to the second point: The source of truth is the perception of phenomena, and for the most part, epistemology is a waste of time. Experience is a slippery word, because formally speaking, empiricism is the belief that knowledge comes from experience, but empiricism has largely failed as a source of truth. What I mean by "perception of phenomena" is more along the lines of what Merleau-Ponty had to say: our worlds are filled with meaning before we can begin analyzing, and analysis obscures that meaning and the way to get back is to "let go." That is, as much as science (and analytic philosophy and religion and so forth) may believe otherwise, you'll never do better than your own perceptions.
In this sense, I don't believe that argument gets anywhere, but there's still hope for language. What one really wants out of words is to embed meaning into someone else's perceptual milieu (that is, their world), and I think that can be done, but probably not through dialectic. After all, the world is still inhabited by other people.
There's probably a few ways you could go about expanding your knowledge base. The two that seem most fruitful are
If (1), then I'd probably suggest one of two courses. Either, (a) read the stuff that influenced the existential thinkers that you've listed, or (b) read some literature dealing with issues related to the thinkers you've listed.
For (a) I'd suggest the following:
For (b) it's really a mixed bag. I'd suggest going through the SEP articles on the thinkers you've listed and looking into some good secondary literature on them. If you're super interested in Nietzsche, I'd definitely suggest reading Leiter's Nietzsche on Morality. I really couldn't tell you more unless you told me something more specific about your interests.
If (2), then I suppose I'd suggest one of the following:
Again, it's hard to give you better directions without more information on what you're actually interested in. I've just thrown a bunch of stuff at you, and you couldn't possibly be expected to read, say, Schopenhauer's World as Will and Representation over break and be expected to really understand it.