My topic so far

So, I’ve made a great deal of progress on my topic so far. I’ve spent the last nine months actively and intensely trying to refine what the hell it is that I’m REALLY interested in. I have been told just how difficult refining one’s topic is but I had no idea it would take this long. A big part of the problem is that I’m a synthetic, high-level thinker, which means that I start big and then have to move into more manageable, practical spaces, which I find excruciatingly difficult. I mean, there are just so many connections and they all seem to be important in some way.

That being said, at the beginning of the summer, I started of with the incredibly ambitious question of “How is it that we know anything?” I mean, I want to investigate what it means to “know” something. Well, as it turns out, there are many ways to investigate this. I found myself delving into a vast array of broad texts on epistemology, the history of scientific psychology, consciousness studies, philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, history of philosophy, history of psychology, and so on. My advisor, Olga Louchakova, suggested I try taking on the topic of “cognitive styles” and looking into the philosophy behind the construct (which is used in cognitive science). I discovered that I just couldn’t own it, as much as I learned a great deal about it in the process. I now feel that I have a better grasp of the cognitive and philosophy of mind literature.

Through this, I’ve discovered just how much I love phenomenology. I mean, c’mon, this stuff if amazing. Phenomenology, as a philosophical school of thought and practice, is at the crossroads of so many disciplines and helps to give depth and context to the humanistic/transpersonal/integral schools of thought of recent decades. It really has brought so much together for me in these last few months and I now feel that I have a vocabulary that lends itself to pretty much any area within philosophy or psychology. Many articles, books, and topics that have made little sense to me in the past seem to have opened themselves up to me since I started to get deeper into the philosophical and historical contexts around phenomenology and the  Continental/Analytic divide since the European Enlightenment and the triumph of Reason (modernism).

Here’s a snapshot of what I’ve got so far. This is my title and abstract:

DIRECT PERCEPTION, INTERSUBJECTIVITY, AND COLLECTIVE EMERGENT CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE WORKS OF HUSSERL, MERLEAU-PONTY, AND LEVINAS: A THEORETICAL THEMATIC ANALYSIS

Abstract

What is the relationship between direct perception (unmediated, preconscious experience) and intersubjectivity (self and other in relation)? What is the “essence,” or underlying core of this relationship? In other words, what can the relationship between direct perception and intersubjectivity tell us about how we “know” the world? Furthermore, how is this relationship analogous to the concept of emergence (autopoiesis) and notions of collective consciousness? Based upon these and other questions, this study seeks to analyze and illuminate the complex relationship between self, other, and world through a middle-ground (moderate) social constructionist lens in the context of the writings of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas.