Freud and Psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis: Exchange of words between patient and doctor. Patient would lie on a couch and talk about whatever came to mind. Freud says psychological traumas are a result of childhood sexual desires.
Greater part of mental life is subconscious
Sexual impulses cause mental illness
Subconscious' existence is proven by: Everyday mistakes, dreams, symptoms of neurosis.
Infantile sexuality - Oral, Anal, Phallic
Boy attracted to mother - Oedipus Complex
Husserls Phenomenology
Two contents of thought: Content - Dragon, Horse, whatever
Processor - You, it's your thought, not someone else's
Phenomenology
Aim: study of immediate date of consciousness without reference to anything that consciousness might tell us, or purport to tell us, about the extra-mental world. When I think of a phoenix the intention of my thought is the same whether they exist or not.
Immanent Perception: immediate acquaintance with own mental acts or states
Transcendent perception: perception o fpast acts and states. physical things and events, contents of other people's minds.
Existentialism of Heidegger
Dasein:
Being in the world
Res curans - caring thing - only if I care about the world will I ask questions about it
Carpenter relates to world using hammer, but does not need to be thinking about the hammer to perform his job well
Dasein is not a substance, but the unfolding of a life
We are beings among other beings, reacting with them and and acting upon them
Three aspects of Dasein: 1) Attunement - whether a situation is attractive, alarming, boring, etc...
2) Discursive - entities are interpreted by us with language and culture
3) Understanding - Activities are directed towards a goal
The Existentialism of Sartre
Attacks the thought that in imagination we are surveying the contents of an internal mental world
Imagining relates us to extra-mental objects, not much different to perception, i.e. remembering a dead person
If object doesn't exist, imagination creates it in the world
Emotion is a certain manner of apprehending the world - hatred towards someone, etc. 'Magical transformation' of our situations
Being precedes and underlies all different kinds and aspects of things that we encounter in consciousness
Essence before existence - at least one being who had an essence before existence
Jacques Deridda
Attacks 'Phonocentrism' - overemphasis in the Western world on spoken word, despite the fact that most things, such as laws and contracts, being put in writing. Someone may die before completing a promise.
'The metaphysics of presence' - Basis of claims to meaning and truth is something intimate given in consciousness
