PHILOSOPHICAL CLUB

Evening Star, Issue 21518, 16 September 1933, Page 10

PHILOSOPHICAL CLUB

Dr K. Lawson presided over a large attendance at the Philosophical Club at tho University last night, when the Rev. J. M. Bates road a paper on phenomenology, a new philosophical development. Mr Bates said that the phenomenological movement was very active in Germany and was beginning to attract attention outside of that country. The translation of Nicolai Hartmann’s book on Ethics would no doubt do a great deal to further this interest. Phenomenology was founded by Professor Edmund Husserl, of Freiburg, whose first work on the subject appeared in 1901-2. The movement had its birthday when in 1913 several important articles, each a book in itself, were published together as the first issue of an annual edited by Husserl. The latter’s own contribution had recently been translated by Professor W. R. Boyce Gibson, of Melbourne, and published under the title of ‘ Ideas ’ in 1931. Phenomenology in the mind of its founder was conceived as being logically prior to all science and all philosophy, even logic itself. It had a special method and put itself at a special point of view in order to give a description of pure consciousness and what were known as “ essences.” It was possible to see affiliations with both Plato and Kant in Husserl’s thought, and in view of this tho movement was likely to prove very influential. Husserl had a number of followers who, though influenced by the master, were not mere echoes. Indeed, in some respects they differed very sharply. This was notable with Martin Heidegger, who was Husserl’s successor in the chair at Freiburg. Another very individual figure was the late Max Scheler, who was a fellow-student of the late Dr F. W. Dunlop, of Jena. This brilliant philosopher had written many important works carrying the phenomenological method into sociology, and according to a Continental writer is tho true source of certain ideas not very fairly used by Spongier in his overrated book, ‘ The Decline of the West.’ The fact that such individual and diverse minds had been attracted by Husserl’s work and developed it each in his own way shows tho vitality of the new movement, which has displaced the powerful neo-Kantian philosophy and spread all over Germany, even to the highest place, Berlin.