Phenomenology as the Method of Philosophy

Abstract

The title of this conference is ‘Philosophers into Europe’; I am not sure precisely what the organisers had in mind, but I presume they wanted to demonstrate that some form of ‘common market-place’ or forum was possible for English and European philosophy. If this is a correct account of their aims, then it seems to me that it will best be achieved by English philosophers endeavouring to show their colleagues across the Channel that the kind of researches which we are engaged in in this country are in fact relevant, and importantly so, to what is being done in Europe. And this means not trying to produce philosophy in the idiom that is currently employed in Continental schools, but producing it in our own current idiom and trying to show how this is relevant to questions asked or problems raised by Husserl, Heidegger or Merleau-Ponty and their disciples and colleagues. Hence I here make no attempt to speak in the language of phenomenology, though I will often draw attention to things that phenomenologists have said.