2000 Fiscal Year Final Research Report Summary
The Consciousness-the science and phenomenology about it
| Project/Area Number |
10610006
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| Research Category |
Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
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| Allocation Type | Single-year Grants |
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| Section | 一般 |
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| Research Field |
Philosophy
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| Research Institution | The University of Tokyo |
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Principal Investigator |
MURATA Junichi The University of Tokyo, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Professor, 大学院・総合文化研究科, 教授 (40134407)
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| Project Period (FY) |
1998 – 2000
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| Keywords | consciousness / phenomenology / philosophy of mind / cognitive science / color / ecological psychology / Edmund Husserl / James Gibson |
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| Research Abstract |
Recently it is often said that the consciousness becomes a research subject of natural sciences, and it is no more considered a peculiar subject exclusively belonging to philosophy. Indeed we find various hypotheses about consciousness in the fields of brainscience, cognitive science or ethology. In this situation, the purpose of this research is firstly to make clear what kind of fundamental difficulties there are in the studies of of sciences about consciousness and secondly to make clear the possibility of "ecological phenomenology" which makes a productive use of the phenomenological insights concerning consciousness.
When it comes to the science of consciousness, there are two extreme positions. One is the materialistic and scientistic position, according to which conscious phenomena are to be reduced or eliminated because of the development of brain science. The other is the subjective and "agnostic" position, according to which the important character of consciousness can never be explained. The phenomenology is sometimes considered to belong to the latter position. In contrast to this kind of view, seeing the characteristic of consciousness in the interactional process between subject and environment and the bodily "Being in the World", I have tried to liberate the concept of consciousness from the subjectivistic tendency. At the same time I have tried to find an alternative view against the materialistic one in which consciousness is related only to the brain process. In order to make this "ecological phenomenology" more concrete, I have taken up various studies about color phenomena as a typical example in which scientific and phenomenological view are interwoven. Especially interesting is the controversy between Goehte and Newton, or Helmholtz and Hering, from which we could learn much.
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