Presentation at HEA-funded workshop 'A dialogue between phenomenology and realism in pedagogical and educational research '. The workshop aimed to stimulate debate around the philosophical underpinnings of different research methodologies, whose shared terminology is often interpreted in radically contrasting ways, and in particular, to encourage dialogue between realist and phenomenological research traditions. The workshop was aimed at pedagogical and educational researchers who are looking to expand their methodological repertoire and to explore new ways of teaching research methods. This presentation is part of a related blog post that provides an overview of the event: http://bit.ly/1oww6m1 For further details of the HEA's work on teaching research methods in the Social Sciences see: http://bit.ly/RIZtTz

1. Phenomenology: What is it and
where does it fit?

2. Heidegger or Husserl?
 Husserl – zu den Sachen selbst, “to the things themselves!”
 For Husserl the directly intuited objects of consciousness constitute the
phenomena, which are prior to any hypothesis or explanation of these objects on
the level of metaphysics or theory of knowledge
 Employed directly in Giorgi’s psychological phenomenological project (a
‘qualitative research procedure’)
 The method of ‘reduction’ – ‘bracketing out’ (ontological) assumptions , avoiding
abstract intellectual generalisations, focusing on lived (embodied) experience; aim
to reveal the essential meaning structures of a phenomenon – an emphasis on
what is given
 A phenomenological attitude: the research strives to be open to the ‘other’ and to
attempt to see the world freshly, in a different way (but employing phenomenology
in an empirical project already takes us beyond what Husserl intended in his own
philosophical project)

3. Heidegger or Husserl?
 Heidegger: Husserl did not follow his own methodological principles, but retained
a Cartesian ontological assumption about the basic nature of consciousness. For
Heidegger, the phenomenon of intentionality, or the ‘aboutness’ or ‘directedness’
of consciousness, is derivative of a more basic mode of comportment toward
things that needs to be described in terms of Dasein, the world, and being-in-the-
world
 Entities occur as ‘present-at-hand’ only when our ordinary and originary mode of
being, in which we are engaged in ‘concernful dealings’ with things, is interrupted,
when the ‘referential context’ or (non-thematic) ‘totality’ is broken
 A shift in focus to how it is that objects are given as such, or as they are, or to
thinking through the meaning of being
 Dasein is always already taken up in a particular existential project: calls into
question conventional distinctions between subject and object, self and world

4. Heidegger or Husserl?
 Some theorists (e.g. Finlay, 2009) would locate methodological approaches along
a spectrum – Husserl to Heidegger, descriptive to interpretive, methodological to
philosophical (the further end of the spectrum has been called ‘hermeneutic
phenomenology’)
 For Heidegger, phenomenological description is inseparable from interpretation:
we never simply perceive or intuit our object
 Phenomena are not immediately apparent, but must be made (allowed) to show
themselves (there is an element of recognition or return in the Heideggerian
happening of truth)
 Dreyfus (1991) ‘we dwell in our understanding like a fish in water’: it is precisely
because our ‘average understanding’ of being is always presupposed, because it
is in fact so close to us, that it is so difficult for us to articulate explicitly.
Phenomena can be covered over by the history of mankind’s attempts to
thematise them

5. How much philosophy is good for us?
 A distinction between beings (the usual objects of scientific enquiry) and the Being of beings
 This distinction is useful for understanding Heidegger’s (rejection of?) realism. There are of
course, mind-independent beings, or beings that predate human existence or would continue
to exist if there were no human beings, but there is no Being without Dasein
 To what extent does the philosophical project of ‘fundamental ontology’ yield a research
procedure – or, how much do we as education researchers need to concern ourselves with
the ontological difference?
 While Heidegger acknowledges that there can be local overlapping ‘work-worlds’, it appears
in Being and Time that he intends ‘world’ to capture some ahistorical aspect of being-in-the-
world, whereas in his later writing he moves toward a ‘historical ontology’ where world is
disclosed differently in different historical ‘epochs’ (Dreyfus 2006:346)
 The later Heidegger: the ‘Kehre’ or turning, recognition of the ‘clearing’ or the there in which
being is given; emphasis on the ‘truth’ of being, where truth is an ‘event’ of disclosure.
Requires an attentiveness or poetic beholding as opposed to the (technological) attempt to
make ‘man’s vision and thinking...determinative of truth and being’ (Linge 1977)

6. How much philosophy is good for us?
 A distinction between beings (the usual objects of scientific enquiry) and the Being of beings
 This distinction is useful for understanding Heidegger’s (rejection of?) realism. There are of
course, mind-independent beings, or beings that predate human existence or would continue
to exist if there were no human beings, but there is no Being without Dasein
 To what extent does the philosophical project of ‘fundamental ontology’ yield a research
procedure – or, how much do we as education researchers need to concern ourselves with
the ontological difference?
 While Heidegger acknowledges that there can be local overlapping ‘work-worlds’, it appears
in Being and Time that he intends ‘world’ to capture some ahistorical aspect of being-in-the-
world, whereas in his later writing he moves toward a ‘historical ontology’ where world is
disclosed differently in different historical ‘epochs’ (Dreyfus 2006:346)
 The later Heidegger: the ‘Kehre’ or turning, recognition of the ‘clearing’ or the there in which
being is given; emphasis on the ‘truth’ of being, where truth is an ‘event’ of disclosure.
Requires an attentiveness or poetic beholding as opposed to the (technological) attempt to
make ‘man’s vision and thinking...determinative of truth and being’ (Linge 1977)