The paper explores main components of the methodological device adopted by Blaustein in his analysis of selected types of mental phenomena. My task is here to determine aims, object and detailed procedures of Blaustein’s method. Blaustein was a student of Twardowski who also had an occasion to study under Husserl in the summer semester of 1925. Blaustein’s doctoral dissertation, defended in 1927, concerned parts of Husserl’s theory of intentionality and it bore the mark of Twardowski’s account of the object and content of presentations. In my paper, I discuss a thesis, popular in the scholarly literature, that Blaustein was a phenomenologists as he studied under Husserl and adopted his method.
By focusing on selected elements of Blaustein’s method, I will analyze the descriptive procedure he adopted in his writings. I will focus mainly on two of his texts: (1) his account of so-called imaginative presentations and (2) his examination of the cinema-goer’s experiences. Blaustein analyzes these phenomena by focusing on concrete mental phenomena which are decomposed by him in a descriptive procedure. Description is supplemented by abstraction which serves one to identify common features of the analyzed phenomena. The ultimate aim of such description is an attempt to determine laws which govern some types of certain phenomena. Different from Husserl, however, Blaustein is skeptical about eidetic claims of such an analysis. For Blaustein, any reference to essences is unjustified as it falls into the petitio princippi fallacy, and one should analyze concrete phenomena instead.
In conclusion, I will address the question to what extent phenomenology can be regarded as a sort of descriptive psychology. In this vein, I will emphasize main differences between Blaustein’s and Husserl’s account of the mental to verify the thesis that Blaustein can be regarded as a phenomenologist.