Page 35 - Contribution To Phenomenology

28 LESTER EMBREE

rV. When is Reflection on the Cultural Disciplines Phenomenological?

Although the names, preparation processes, etc., have varied, there have
been what are here called cultural disciplines for millennia. In ancient
and medieval times there were the seven liberal arts, at least some of
which are cultural disciplines, and an examination of them in relation to
the analysis proposed here might be interesting.^ It can furthermore be
argued that there has been philosophical reflection, at least of the
cognitive and evaluational sorts, on such disciplines at least since Socrates,
Plato, and Aristotle, but comprehensive efforts in modern times only
became emphatic with the efforts of Comte, Mill, Dilthey, and others
during the 19th Century and seem no older than Hume's "attempt to
introduce the experimental method of reasoning into moral subjects.''^^
How does what can be called ''philosophy of the cultural disciplines"
approach the world? A philosopher interested in nature can approach the
natural world directly but she can also and, as history has shown, more
effectively approach nature obliquely through reflection on the natural
sciences. In parallel fashion, a philosopher of culture can approach
culture, cultural life, or cultural worlds directly in a philosophy of culture,
but she can also approach it obliquely through a reflection on the
cultural disciplines, and that may also prove more effective.

^ Actually, there seem once to have originally been nine such arts, but
architecture and medicine were later omitted. Cf. Stephen H. Mason, A History of
the Sciences (New York: Collier Books, 1%2), 62. Such a comparative analysis ought
to include Edward G. Ballard, Philosophy and the Liberal Arts (Dordrecht: Kluwer
Academic Publishers, 1989).
^^ "Hume's work as a social scientist has been largely ignored by philosophers,
both because of its glaring incompatibility with his positivist image and because it
develops a line of thought which, until recently, was more likely to be appreciated
in Continental intellectual circles than in Anglo-American philosophy. For Hume,
man is not just a natural object but a cultural product., and this means that the
science of man must be conceived of as a normative moral science of action, not
a descriptive natural science of behavior. In social science [sic], Hume moved
beyond the narrowly mechanical, and even the organic levels of explanation, to the
historical and personal. What emerged was the image of man as a role-playing or
rule following agent, whose comprehension and self-comprehension requires the use
of Verstehen. Not only does this make Humean social science Geisteswissenschaft, but
it requires that we view philosophy as a form of social science, and it requires that
we reformulate our notions of what consitutes science and explanation. Thus Hume's
philosophy reemerges in contemporary debate but at a most unexpected place."
Nicholas Capaldi, "Hume as Social Scientist," Review of Metaphysics 32 (1978), 99.