Phenomenology and Social Theory.

This article focuses on phenomology and social theory. The troubled relationship between phenomenology and social theory throughout the twentieth century renders dangerously misleading the seamless phenomenological social theory. Throughout the modern period the region of fascinating monstrosities gradually shrank into nothingness while the sphere of an internally orderly and predictable domain of observable events expanded, in principle, to become coterminous with the infinity of empirical reality. Phenomenology is an essentially modern perspective on the human world and it is the philosophical movement most closely associated with the twentieth century. Its origins like all Western philosophical movements can be traced in exemplary ancient texts and, more significantly, has roots in medieval Scholasticism. In its most general form, then, phenomenology is simply the 'subjective turn' which characterizes all modern thinking and brings clearly into awareness the insight that human consciousness is trapped in an endlessly self-referential system of representations; that consciousness is a system of signs.