Monday, February 14, 2011


Way back in 2005, I first heard of a wobbly-sounding word, phenomenology. Sounded like too much of a thing to swallow; big names bombarded my brain: Edmund Husserl, Franz Brentano, Paul Ricouer, etc. Plainly, it is the study of phenomena which color our conscious experience. But the finest practitioner of phenomenology seems to be Gian-Carlo Rota. Because Rota maybe the only thinker (and definitely, the only mathematician) who “strove to keep his eyes wide open and then tell it the way he saw it – without pretense and often without prejudice. With wit and flair”. That very well sumps up what phenomenology is about and strangely, through the man who best practiced it.

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