“Aude Describere!”

D. R. Koukal (from here):

My reading of the western tradition of philosophy tells me that the exegetical attitude has a long history, and that this attitude has periodically nettled various thinkers, who have generated movements to counter this trend.

[…]

Phenomenology should certainly be counted as yet another attempt to bring philosophy back to the world, in the face of the reductionism of the natural sciences. It may also perhaps be the most comprehensive, since it claims that the explanatory dimension of all of the various theoretical disciplines must necessarily have their ultimate grounding and unity in a descriptive realm of a single lived world. The most exciting aspect of phenomenology is its fundamental claim that it is a philosophy which contacts life and does so directly, thereby allowing us the possibility of seeing it again, as if for the first time. In this phenomenology is not a speculative system or a school of thought that we are enhancing and defending in the memory of Husserl or Heidegger or Merleau-Ponty. It is, first and foremost, a manner of philosophical practice, a human activity that allows us to see the world again in a primordial fashion. The aim of phenomenology has always been to bring philosophy back to the larger world, that is, to describe the relationship between lived experience and consciousness, without necessarily turning to theories or other conceptual constructs that are typically employed to “explain” experience.