My replies will begin with [J
 

Stephen Shields wrote:

 Jon,Welcome to faithmaps!  We are very happy to have you with us and look forward to taking advantage of your learning!  I had a couple of questions about your post.You wrote:"methodological ways of deconstructing sedimented, over-time,
meanings and they encouraged me to get back to the originary experiences
in the flow of life where our concepts originate from.  "What are "deconstructing sedimented, over-time,
meanings"? 
{J  Well consider the history of the church!  The fundamental simplicity of the early churches as described in the NT, got covered over by a "growth" of meanings and replaced by the new meanings. The originary meanings have been  forgotten in almost eighteen hundred  of denominationalsim..   Tremendous sedimented meanings over time.  Consider the word 'church.'  Most people hearing that word will think of a building or a denomination. How many will think of it as those called out from the world of darkness into His marvelous light, Acts 26:18, 1 Cor. 12:13.  Much of the disastisfaction of many Christians with today's churches is the fact that the churches and the Christians are so far from the NT patterns and experiences!  There is a need to get back to a close walk with the Lord, prayer and study of the Word written and thinking about what He demands of us...without traditional and denominational barnacles and crusts of stale man-made meanings that cover over the original terminology and radical life style of discipleship tha the Lord calls us to and which He made the central focus of His Great Comission.  I remember once worshipping in a Lutheran church and in Sunday School, the pastor was dealing with 1 Cor. 11 about the Lord's supper.  Paul was accusing the Corinthians of not discerning the  the body of Christ. 1 Cor. 11:29-34 The pastor interpreted this as the communion wafer!!!!!!!!!!  His sacramentalism overriding the meaning of the text which is that the body of Christ are His regenerated people!

Phenomenology as taught by Husserl and the earlier Heidegger provide ways of thinking and rethinking by getting at the things themselves.  Since we are not imprisoned by our language, conceptual frameworks etc, it is possible to look at things and even meanings and be critical about them in seeking out more of what they are, not being limited to the standard conceptual understandings.  This means looking and thinking for oneself and, usually, the discovery that so much of routinized and standardized meaning covers over aspects of everything.  It is to be with the things inquired into and to let them "speak"  without our standard responses shutting them up.  This was what Husserl had in mind in his theory of phenomenological reduction.
 

It is to seek fresh and new encounters  with what is inquired into and letting them appear in their integrities rather than to use knee-jerk conceptual imperialism over them.  This can happen to believers if they are willing to radically follow the Lord and believe His Word written and who as Dallas Willard says begin to find the interactive  and on-going relationship with the Lord on a daily basis.  When this happens, there will be a strong distate for the old wineskins!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

    Phenomenoliogy was, in Husserl and the early Heidegger, a way of getting at the things themselves without being unduly influenced and circumscribed by what earlier philosophers said.  It was the recognition that philosophy does not live in books.  Philosophy books are  really are like musical scores, they have to be played!  So, the philosopher has to do her own thinking and seeing while also interacting with living philosophers and others and studying the great texts of the dead and departed.

and you wrote:"My research was on the phenomenological foundations of  modern symbolic logic.  "I understand "phenomenological" as referring to the language of appearance (e.g. "The sun will rise tomorrow at 7:17 AM")  When you use the term, is its technical philosophical meaning more robust than that? 
[J  Yes!  There is a  a rather difficult way to go about training oneself to see freshly and newly the old things.....

    Husserl spent almost 40 years both talking about the method of doing phenomenology and also doing it.  Heidegger followed him and developed another version of phenomenology in his great book "Being and Time."

    The meaning of words like 'phenomena', 'appearance', and 'experience' are, in philosophy never to be just taken for granted because philosophers tensd to use them in very different ways and often to denote very different entities.

Would the sentence"I was convinced that the logical operations and elementary patterns or logical
forms were elementary patterns that can be found in perception.  "be basically the same as "...can be found in [nature]" ? 

[J yes, found in nature so that they are there independently of humans.  But then there is the problem as to how those structures go through levels of development within the human body, brain, and mind and how they got discovered and in some cases lost!!!  Humans lost knowledge of  De Morgans laws or laws of duality for about 400 years.  From about 1450 to 1850!

    The human body and mind play a major role in the coming-to-be of the symbolic sciences of mathematics and logic  and yet these structures of logic and math have their roots in nature, independently of human cognition..

    These thoughts have to do with the kind of holistic integrity that I experience and want my philosophy to reflect and which I have mentioned to you in earlier emails.
 

Welcome again! 
Thanks!
 Stephen Shields
sshields@...
http://www.faithmaps.org

 

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