ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PHENOMENOLOGY IN LATVIA: 1920–2020

Abstract

Looking over a hundred years, it should be acknowledged that phenomenological studies in Latvia were initially carried out in the twenties and thirties of the 20th century, starting with 1) Husserl’s studies and criticism of solipsism (T. Celms), 2) phenomenological analysis of forms of community (K. Stavenhagen), and 3) development of cognitive phenomenology in Ladusāns’ many-sided gnoseology. It was not possible to work on phenomenology during the harsher years of the Soviet regime (1945–1970), but in the mid-1970s, a phenomenological circle emerged in Riga under the influence of Nelly Motroshilova and Merab Mamardashvili. Its focus was on the issues of consciousness and language, on phenomenological ontology, communication, time-consciousness. Since 1990, phenomenological studies have been expanding, four international conferences have been held in Latvia in cooperation with the World Phenomenology Institute, nine monographs on phenomenology have been published, and 56 articles from Latvia have been published in Analecta Husserliana. Themes of papers and presentations included historicity, space and time, passions, teleology, educational philosophy, aesthetics. Since 2005, nine phenomenology-related doctoral theses have been defended in Riga. Over the last decade, greater focus has been given to applied phenomenology, its relationships with medicine, social media, violence research. Phenomenologists influenced a transformation of classical philosophy towards wider horizons and reflected the necessity to consider concepts of life, nature, body, we-consciousness, it also opened the way for contemporary perspective dialogue with cognitive sciences, linguistics, identity studies and psychoanalysis.