Phenomenology

Phenomenology is the philosophical study of the structures of experience and consciousness.

The 'other'

The condition of Otherness is a person's non-conformity to the social norms of society; and political exclusion, affected either by the State or by the social institutions invested with the corresponding socio-political power. Therefore, the imposition of Otherness alienates the person labelled as "the Other" from the centre of society, and places him or her at the margins of society, for being the Other.

Examples of the ‘other’ include:

- The racist perspective of 19th-century Europe with the Othering of non-white peoples
- The exclusion of LGBTQ+ people in a society where heterosexuality is the sexual norm, the Other refers to and identifies homosexual as people whom society has othered as "sexually deviant" from the norms of binary-gender heterosexuality
- Women often refer to themselves as the social other to men: wife, mother etc… In feminist definition, women are the Other to men and are not existentially defined by masculine demands, because the gender identity of a woman is constitutionally different from the gender identity of a man. The harm of Othering is in the nature of unequal roles in sexual and gender relations.

ALIEN PHENOMENOLOGY OR WHAT IT’S LIKE TO BE A THING BY Ian bogost

The book explores the “understanding of the experience of things as things” by exploring various philosophical concepts as well as the possibility of extra-terrestrial life. One organisation that looks for extra-terrestrial life is Search for Extra-terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) who collects and analyses data using antennas of the Very Large Array (VLA) in the San Agustin Basin. They do this in a “search for electromagnetic transmissions suggestive of extra-terrestrial life. It's a field called astrobiology, one unique in the research community for possessing not a single confirmed object of study”.

Bogost claims that we consider all objects “only to ask how they relate to human productivity, culture and politics”. We decide something's value by the benefits and relevance it has to us.

One particularly interesting idea is Immanuel Kant's transcendental idealism - “Kant argues that space and time are merely formal features of how we perceive objects, not things in themselves that exist independently of us, or properties or relations among them. Objects in space and time are said to be “appearances”, and he argues that we know nothing of substance about the things in themselves of which they are appearances”. Then there is George Berkeley’s subjective idealism - “This form of idealism is “subjective” not because it denies that there is an objective reality, but because it asserts that this reality is completely dependent upon the minds of the subjects that perceive it.”