Make applied phenomenology what it needs to be: an interdisciplinary research program

Once a marginal affair, applied phenomenology is now a vast and vibrant movement. With great success, however, comes great criticism, and critics have been harsh, accusing applied phenomenology’s practitioners of everything from spewing nonsense to assailing down-to-earth researchers with gratuitous jargon. In this article, I reconstruct the most damning criticisms as a dilemma: Either applied phenomenology merely describes experience, in which case it offers nothing distinctive, or it involves the kind of analysis characteristic of classical phenomenology, in which case it’s only of interest to a small number of philosophers; either way, we should explore the experiential dimension by other means. Notwithstanding the enormous body of research in applied phenomenology, few authors have tried to explain what makes it an independent intellectual enterprise distinct from pure phenomenology, and none has defused this dilemma. Here I try my hand at both. After considering eight major approaches to applied phenomenology that fail to defuse the dilemma, I propose an approach that, I argue, does the job, one that understands applied phenomenology as a research program that brings the phenomenological method and the resources of at least one other discipline to bear on problems beyond the scope of any monodisciplinary approach.

ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PHENOMENOLOGY IN LATVIA: 1920–2020

Looking over a hundred years, it should be acknowledged that phenomenological studies in Latvia were initially carried out in the twenties and thirties of the 20th century, starting with 1) Husserl’s studies and criticism of solipsism (T. Celms), 2) phenomenological analysis of forms of community (K. Stavenhagen), and 3) development of cognitive phenomenology in Ladusāns’ many-sided gnoseology. It was not possible to work on phenomenology during the harsher years of the Soviet regime (1945–1970), but in the mid-1970s, a phenomenological circle emerged in Riga under the influence of Nelly Motroshilova and Merab Mamardashvili. Its focus was on the issues of consciousness and language, on phenomenological ontology, communication, time-consciousness. Since 1990, phenomenological studies have been expanding, four international conferences have been held in Latvia in cooperation with the World Phenomenology Institute, nine monographs on phenomenology have been published, and 56 articles from Latvia have been published in Analecta Husserliana. Themes of papers and presentations included historicity, space and time, passions, teleology, educational philosophy, aesthetics. Since 2005, nine phenomenology-related doctoral theses have been defended in Riga. Over the last decade, greater focus has been given to applied phenomenology, its relationships with medicine, social media, violence research. Phenomenologists influenced a transformation of classical philosophy towards wider horizons and reflected the necessity to consider concepts of life, nature, body, we-consciousness, it also opened the way for contemporary perspective dialogue with cognitive sciences, linguistics, identity studies and psychoanalysis.

Phenomenology in Public Administration: Bridging the Theory–Practice Gap

Phenomenology is the study of things as they “appear” (phenomena) to us in their own terms, prior to formal conceptualization. This article traces the development of phenomenology in public administration within the larger realm of interpretive approaches. It describes applied phenomenology as developed by Ralph Hummel and discusses its usefulness in the study of public organizations and administrative practice. As a way of studying process, phenomenology allows administrators to bridge the theory–practice gap. Since understanding a situation depends on different kinds of knowledge, phenomenological epistemology fosters a more democratic public administration.

STRATEGI KIKI SULISTYO DALAM ARENA SASTRA INDONESIA

<p>This paper discusses Kiki Sulistyo’s strategy for reaching position in Indonesia literary field. This research applied phenomenology and structural analysis method. Data were gathered by interview and objectification from social structure. The style of the writers’ poems and his consciousness toward Lombok were analyzed by phenomenology. The research result shows that Lombok literary field is denoted as the economy upside. Kiki Sulistyo denounces the world economy, thus moving within the production of a restricted arena. Kiki Sulistyo created literature as a movement, so he formed <em>Akar Pohon</em> community. Through this community, he generates a young poet and simultaneously undertakes a project of publishing works. Two anthologies of poetry he published brought him to the position of a legitimate poet. The legitimacy is given by poets, literary scholars, and institutions</p>

The Later Sartre

Toward the midpoint of his career, Sartre famously announced the separation from his previous work which he described as a rationalist philosophy of consciousness. Henceforth, he implied, his focus would be on free organic praxis. It would be dialectical and historical not just analytical and psychological. It seemed that he was distancing himself from classical (constitutive) Husserlian phenomenology in favor of something more fluid, more concrete like the hermeneutic phenomenology that he discovered in the Heidegger of Being and Time and was recommending as an ingredient in his Existential psychoanalysis. But classical phenomenology was not so much passed over as it was placed in abeyance to return in Sartre’s study of Gustave Flaubert, his life and times. The author proposes to chart and critique this methodological circle of applied phenomenology.