1. Phenomenology
By:
DILSHAD HUSSAIN SHAH

2. .
The sociology of everyday life is a
sociological orientation concerned with:
Experiencing, Understanding ,Describing,
Analyzing, communicating.
With this people interact in concrete
situations.
The studies face to face social interactions by
observing and experiencing them in natural
situations, that is, in situations that have not
been scientifically manipulated.

3. Sociologies of Everyday Life
Phenomenology studies common sense, conscious
experience, and routine daily life.
It can be placed in the category of sociologies of
everyday life.
In the article, Sociologies of everyday life, by Jack
Douglas
Argues that sociologist have years been rebuilding the
and thus rebuilding the foundation of all theory and
method in the social sciences.
Five major bodies of theoretical ideas found
 Symbolic interactionism
 Dramaturgical analysis
 Labeling theory
 Phenomenology and ethnomethodology
 existentialism

4. The Role of Consciousness
• There are several difference between phenomenology and
sociology.
• Phenomenology relies on reflexive experience as it takes form
in consciousness.
• The research assumes intentional consciousness of the
researcher.
• Through the techniques of reduction in variation,
phenomenology is able to find the rudimentary structures
and processes of experience.
• From this perspective, the researcher takes the perspective of
the other and imposes a sense of order on the environment.

5. .
• Phenomenologist are more concerned
with the way individuals construct in
their own conscious the meanings of
things.
• They are characterized as a subjective or
creative sociology because it seeks to
understand the world from the point of
view of the acting subject and not from
the perspective of the scientific
observer.
• Meanings come from interacting
through a negotiation in their everyday
lives.

6. The Phenomenological Approach
• Edmund Husserl developed the phenomenological
approach.
• Designates two things:
– A new kind of descriptive method that made a
breakthrough in philosophy at the of the nineteenth
century.
– A science which is intended to supply the basic
instrument for a rigorously scientific philosophy and
in its consequent application to make possible a
methodological reform of all the science.
Roots of Phenomenological:
oEntrenched in the German tradition
oSome of the most important intellectual debates
taking place between the world wars.

7. .
The ideas that came under the phenomenology umbrella
Generated in an atmosphere of heightened social conflict
and anxiety about the future.
Husserl wanted to examine the phenomena of conscious
and bracket them in order to test their truth.
Influence by Descartes, Hume, and Kant
Descartes Mediations
Husserl’s first conceived of the possibility of seeking a
universally rational “science of being” by turning his
theoretical focus on an objective world to a reflective one.
Descartes argued that the social world exist only in the
context of presentations of experiences of people. He also
promoted the idea of transcendental subjectivity, a
philosophy founded through a psychology of inner
experience.

8. Edmund Husserl• Background
– He was sent away to school in Vienna at age 10
to began his German classical education at a
“real gymnasium.”
– Universities attended were Leipzig (math,
physics, and philosophy), Berlin (math), Vienna
(doctoral Work)
– Father of phenomenology
– His ideas were complex and confusing
– His work was translated from German to
English
– He was Jewish, the Jewish population was
controlled by marriage licenses; only 328 Jewish
families were allowed in 1787 and stopped in
1849.
• Married Malvine Charlotte Steinschneider and
had three children.

9. .
Held a position of Privatdozent at Halle University.
He accepted a professorship at Freiburg in Breisgau in
1916 and stayed there until retirement in 1928
Calvin O. Schrag wrote in the introduction to The
phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness
Some of the main themes and ideas that emerged
throughout this development were:
A critique of psychololgism
The phenomenological
Eidetic reduction
The phenomenological ego
Transcendental intersubjectivity
Time consciousness
The life world

10. PhenomenologyBegins with the assumption that every certainty is
questionable.
In Ideem I
Husserl describe phenomenology as a “doctrine of
essences” and a doctrine concerned with what things are
not with whether they are.
He was not looking to establish absolute presupposition on
which to build a whole system of knowledge. Therefore, he
was not interested in being a system builder.
He was always a beginner, reexamining the foundations of
his investigations, resisting all fixed formulations and final
conclusions.
Philosophy, was never ending pursuit of serious and open-
ended questions, which lead to further questions that may
require a resetting of the original questions.

11. .
• Nakhnikian described “Husserl’s
phenomenology as an outgrowth of his attack
on psychologism.
–Psychologism is a species of the view that
philosophy is reducible to a factual science,
in this case to psychology.
–Also is an attempt to reduce the
fundamental laws of logic and mathematics
to psychological generalizations about the
way people think; it is a type of scientific
generalization.
• Husserl is against ‘biologism’ and
anthropologism as he is against pschologism.

12. .
• In short, phenomenology is not a science of facts,
but a science of essential being, an eidetic science
(meaning an insubstantial empirical science; it is a
science that aims at establishing the “knowledge”
of essence.
• Distinguished between facts and essence.
–Described sciences of experience as sciences of
“fact”
–Facts are determined by acts of cognition which
underline human experiences.
–Something is real and thus a fact because it
possesses a spatiotemporal existence, having a
particular duration of its own and a “real”
content.

13. DILSHAD HUSSAIN SHAH
MUHAMMAD ASHFAQ
M.PHIL IN APPLIED LINGUISTICS (SESSION 2011-2013)