Is Phenomenology Alive and Well?

Day before yesterday I received a post on the discussion I started at Amazon.com regarding the promise of phenomenology. I posed the questions:

- Does phenomenology hold out the promise of a different mode of perception?
- Does it deliver on that promise?
- Is phenomenology as logical analysis a dead end?

The responder from a couple of days ago, Sean Hartford, answered:

- No, phenomenology doesn't hold out the promise of a different mode of perception.
- Question is moot.
- Phenomenology as logical analysis is alive and well - just read the works of Heidegger, Gadamer, Ricoeur, Sartre, etc..

Sean is dead wrong on the first question. His own answer belies this. But the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty belies this as well, and monumentally. So does the work of many other thinkers, alive and dead. David Abram, whose book I mentioned before, The Spell of the Sensuous, is contemporary, and is a development of Merleau-Ponty's work.

So the answers to questions 1 and 2 are, in my opinion: Yes. And Yes.

My answer to question three is also: Yes. In fact, Sean's answer itself hardens my suspicion. That he mentions only Heidegger, Gadamer, Ricoeur, Sartre, etc., when answering the question, 'Is phenomenology alive and well?' tells me a great deal. I do grant that the work of these men is being developed, but that's what's more important to me - the development of that work. If I have to keep going back to Heidegger, and always ONLY going back to Heidegger, then that isn't development to me. Yes, I had to learn basic geometry, and those axioms come into play when I solve complex geometrical and trigonometric problems, but the emphasis is on the complex problems, not on the axioms.

Yes?