Rebuttal: Doing Phenomenology on the Things

Abstract

This rebuttal responds to the article “Getting it quite wrong” (published in this journal issue of QHR). My work is described as “amassing experiential descriptions,” simply aiming to “reproduce the original experience unaltered,” naively claiming “that the fundamental question of phenomenology is to understand what it is like to have this or that experience” and other such injudicious points. I take issue with these claims. Husserl is quoted as supportively stating that “phenomenology was from the beginning never supposed to be anything except the path to a radically genuine ‘strictly scientific metaphysics.’” I will show with textual examples that the presented view of phenomenology is too limited and one sided.