Linda's Blogspot

  Understanding Phenomenology: The Philosophy of Conscious Experience ​What does it mean to experience something directly? While the natural sciences map the physical world through measurement and third-person observation, phenomenology turns its gaze inward to study consciousness from the inside out. ​Emerging in Europe at the turn of the 20th century, phenomenology became one of the most influential movements in modern philosophy. Its central ambition is simple yet radical: to describe human experience exactly as it is lived, stripping away theoretical assumptions, scientific biases, and common-sense preconditions. ​1. Origins: Husserl and the Return "To the Things Themselves" ​Phenomenology was formally inaugurated by German mathematician and philosopher Edmund Husserl (1859–1938). Dismayed by what he saw as a crisis in modern thought—where science treated human consciousness as merely a biological product—Husserl called for a return "to the things themselves...

Phenomenology and Me What Phenomenology Has Me Thinking About I recently came across the word phenomenology again while exploring philosophy. The word sounds complicated. Philosophy often has a way of giving long names to things that human beings have been doing all along. Phenomenology, in simple terms, is concerned with lived experience—what it is actually like to experience something from the inside. That idea immediately made me think about my own life. I have always been an observer. I didn't necessarily know that about myself when I was young. I simply knew that I was curious. I noticed things. I wondered about people, places, conversations, family stories and the world around me. Growing up in Parchester Village in Richmond, California, I was surrounded by people living their everyday lives. My father worked as a cement mason during the tremendous building of track homes in the Santa Clara Valley. My mother was involved in the PTA and community life. There was food, gardenin...

Cotton, Faith and the Land: What I Found in Médina Gounass When I began looking into cotton production in Senegal, I thought I was going to learn about agriculture. I wanted to know where cotton was grown, which communities produced it, what role cotton played in the rural economy, and whether there was an organic cotton movement that might connect with the sustainable agriculture work I have been interested in for many years. But the more I learned, the more I realized that cotton in Senegal is not simply a story about a crop. It is also a story about people, land, faith, labor, community and memory. One of the places that brought all of these things together for me was Médina Gounass, in the Kolda region of southeastern Senegal. A Fulbe community and the land Médina Gounass was founded in 1936 by Mamadou Seydou Ba, a religious leader associated with the Umarian branch of the Tijaniyya Sufi tradition. The community was largely made up of Fulbe, or Fulani, people, many of whom spoke Pu...

  Who Gets to Tell the Story? In Search of the Stories We Almost Lost While reading James Baldwin's Princes and Powers, I found myself thinking about something that happened seventy years after the 1956 Conference of Negro-African Writers and Artists. In September 1956, Black writers, artists, and intellectuals gathered at the Sorbonne in Paris to discuss culture, history, colonialism, assimilation, and the political circumstances that shaped the lives of African and Black peoples. Today, I find myself asking a related question: Who gets to create the record of human knowledge? The technology has changed. The problem has not disappeared. From Paris in 1956 to Wikipedia today Baldwin described a gathering of people from many different cultures. They did not all have the same histories. They did not speak with one voice. They did not necessarily agree about the future. But they recognized that something had happened to their histories through colonialism. Their cultures had often bee...

  Princes and Powers:  James Baldwin and the 1956 Conference of Negro-African Writers and Artists On September 19, 1956, the First Congress of Negro Writers and Artists opened at the Sorbonne in Paris, in the Amphithéâtre Descartes. Among those gathered were writers, artists, intellectuals, and political thinkers from different parts of Africa, the Caribbean, and the Black world. James Baldwin later wrote about the conference in his essay Princes and Powers . What strikes me about Baldwin's account is that he did not describe the gathering simply as an intellectual conference. He saw something much larger taking place. He began by describing Paris itself—the streets, the people walking along the Seine, and the remarkable presence of Black people in the city. Then he entered the conference hall. At the front of the room was a table where eight Black men were seated. Baldwin identified several of them: Richard Wright, Alioune Diop, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Aimé Césaire, Jacques S...