Reflection on Philosophical Methodologies
I think I have applied most of these philosophical methodologies in philosophy classes. First off, the logical analysis is a method we employed in various exercises for my reasoning class. The conceptual analysis is something I am doing quite a bit of right now in my European Contemporary Though class through examining such terms as “democracy”, “freedom” and “sovereignty”. I also experience this methodology through some of the Save Our Constitution panel discussions. I took a whole course basically just about the method of deconstruction in the Sociology of Knowledge class I took last semester. Phenomenology and one that is not on here but seems quite similar to phenomenology, “introspection”, is something I have been doing on my own since I was seventeen. It is, in many respects, my self-therapy as I struggle to reflect on my life experiences and the meanings or lack thereof that they so entail. Also, in a class I am taking now, Feminist Philosophies, we were just reading an essay by Iris Marion Young titled Menstrual Meditations, where young talks a lot about Heidegger’s methodology of exploring oneself by going into and through and reflecting upon one’s moods. The Philosopher as Public Intellectual is a method that I would like to utilize more often, especially once I am out of school. The example I have given through my article about democracy matters I actually got published a few weeks ago in the hill news. In all, I think I have applied most, if not all, of these methods whether in courses or just in my everyday life.
A couple methods that I would like to explore in more depth in my own philosophical activities are the philosophy as conversation method and the two respective comparative methods. I believe these two methods could be synthesized in a way as to facilitate a true dialectic between a diversity of philosophical positions. All too often philosophy is only talking to itself. While the comparative methods might still be subject to this problematic I believe the philosophy as conversation method could really serve as useful tool to bridge the gap between the formally philosophical and everyday experiences. The comparative method is one that I in fact employed in my first philosophy class called Humanities which I had in my senior year in high school. I believe this method is most necessary in terms of its political implications. I say this because the current methods of “Identity Politics” have fragmentized and specialized the Left in comparison to the what I would consider the over-specialization of academia. While particular groups on the left such as women’s liberation, civil rights, socialists, gay rights and environmental organizations fight for there own particular ends, they all too often fail to form coalitions as they instead fight (both internally within organization and externally between different movements) for the same resources and media attention. I firmly believe that the Left needs to bridge this gap if it ever hopes to achieve any of its particular goals in a sustainable way. Thus, if I choose to return to academia my work will most surely focus on making these connections and explicit comparisons between different social movements and between different philosophies.
I think if there is one method here that most reflects my own philosophical work it would be either phenomenology or deconstruction. As I already mentioned I think I’ve been doing phenomenology for some time now, and I believe in the necessity of looking critically and reflectively first and foremost at one’s own experiences. I believe that the deconstruction and phenomenological method are implicit within one another. If there was anything I learned in Sociology of knowledge it is the reciprocity by which our epistemology is created and legitimized by particular subjectivities with particular intentions (usually power). Only by understanding how one’s own sincere intentions figure into this power struggle can one begin to determine how to change the system. One cannot do this by simple abstraction for there is no view from nowhere. The key is to be honest with oneself and one’s intentionality, for it is my contention that only from within the system may the system ever be altered.
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