Architectonics of a Method: On the Relations Between Husserlian Phenomenology and Its Feminist and Critical Successors
S. Heinämaa
Human Studies March 1, 2025 DOI: 10.1007/s10746-025-09785-2 (opens in new tab)
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Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Topics | Philosophy of mind |
| Key points | Argues that the widespread notion that Husserlian phenomenology is inadequate for critical, ethico-political purposes rests on selective readings and misreadings of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. Proposes a third strategy, beyond the two current revisions examined, that suspends the world thesis permanently and in toto and builds critical and transformative concepts anew. |
Abstract
This paper argues that Husserlian philosophy offers a powerful methodology for feminist phenomenology and for any phenomenology with ethico-political aims. I will first explicate the widely spread notion that Husserlian phenomenology is fundamentally inadequate for such critical purposes and incurably distorted by Husserl’s supposedly ideological commitments. I will distinguish the main variants of this view recently put forward in the field of critical phenomenology. The second part of the paper argues that this widespread notion about inadequacy is based on selective readings and misreadings of the sources, Husserl’s own explications as well as Merleau-Ponty’s accounts of them. In the third and final part of the paper, I will introduce the phenomenological method of Besinnung to critically study two current strategies of revising Husserl’s philosophy for contemporary political ends. Both strategies use classical phenomenology for antinaturalistic purposes but delimit its operations on transformative grounds demanded by Critical Theory and/or Foucauldian analytics of power. I will demonstrate that, in addition to these two strategies, there is a third alternative, which does not submit Husserl’s philosophical aims to the neo-Marxist idea of world-transformation nor delimit these aims by such ideas but, in contrast, ventures to suspend the world thesis permanently and in toto and, on this radical basis, proceeds to build its critical and transformative concepts anew.
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