In this essay, I attempt to use Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology for purposes of describing central features of competition. While not accepting all theoretical aspects of this methodology, I employ its central strategies to see how well it works. In carrying out the phenomenological analysis, I examine noetic and noematic correlates of competitive projects including the factors of plurality, normativity, disputation, temporality, and comparability. I finish by reviewing three forms of pseudo or defective competition. I conclude that eidetic analyses like the (...) one produced in this essay have utility in spite of their significant limitations. (shrink)

The notion of value neutrality has been a contentious issue within the human and social sciences for some time. In this paper, some of the philosophical and scientific bases for the confusion surrounding the fact-value dichotomy are covered and the discrepancy between how psychology studies values and expresses them is noted. The sense of value neutrality is clarified historically and the clarified meaning of the term applied to some qualitative data demonstrating in what sense values may be expressed in psychology. (...) The position is upheld that psychology as a human science intentionally should not be absolutely value free in the sense that human reality has to be studied in a non-reductionistic manner and thus methods of study must be respectful of the full ethical sense of humanness. This is simply meeting the phenomenological requirement of “fidelity to the phenomenon”. However, psychology can be value free in the historical sense of the term properly understood because it refers to the fact that the personal values of the scientists ought not to be conflated with scientific findings. The discussion of values takes place primarily within the context of science, where the problem of value neutrality emerged, but it is acknowledged that non-scientific approaches to value have merit and can also be compelling. (shrink)

Within the purview of the sociology of knowledge Durkheim and Scheler appear among its important inaugurators theorizing the social foundations of knowledge, seemingly from mutually exclusive perspectives. Scheler’s phenomenology of values and community is often juxtaposed with Durkheim’s attempt to integrate values in reality, represented by the social configuration of organic solidarity. This essay argues that the affinity between Scheler and Durkheim deserves reexamination. Means employed for pursuing this aim include a reconsideration of how values mediate reality, but, above all, (...) an attempt to show that both thinkers converge on their principal normative goal. This is no other than a global community of solidarity which both Scheler and Durkheim, albeit through different trails, visualize as the culmination of value-ethics. While Durkheim pursues this goal through a systematic exposition of the transition from mechanical to organic solidarity, late Scheler’s view of ‘the age of adjustment’ discloses a normative approach on modernity at odds with the then prevalent Kulturkritik . This ideal helps to rehabilitate Scheler and to approach the notions of sociality, the sociology of knowledge and the configuration of the ‘encompassing person’ through Durkheimian lenses. The essay concludes with a brief appraisal of theoretical gains drawn from this newly lit affinity. (shrink)

Following a brief summation of the phenomenological method, the paper considers three metaethical positions adopted by phenomenologists and the implications of those positions for a normative ethics. The metaethical positions combine epistemological and ontological viewpoints. They are non-intellectualism and strong value realism as represented by the axiological views of phenomenologists such as Scheler, Meinong, Reinach, Stein, Hartmann, von Hildebrand, and Steinbock; non-intellectualism and anti-realism as represented by the freedom-centered phenomenologies of Sartre, Beauvoir, and Merleau-Ponty; and weak intellectualism and weak value (...) realism as represented by Husserl and Drummond. The paper argues that only the third metaethical view can support a normative ethics that is consistent with the essential features of the phenomenological method, that allows for freedom in an agent’s choosing from a multiplicity of first-order goods, including vocational goods, practical identities, and life plans, available in the agent’s factical circumstances, and that provides norms governing the correctness of our actions and our obligations to others. The normative dimension is introduced, first, by the requirement that the fulfillment of first-order evaluations and choices be truthful, that is, that the evaluations be appropriate and the actions right. Second, transcendental considerations revealed in the phenomenological analysis of intentional experience disclose a notion of second-order goods of agency that universally bind agents in their exercise of freedom and their dealings with others. (shrink)