Giovanni Piana and the Doctrine of Experience

This essay presents the main points of Giovanni Piana’s interpretation of phenomenology as a “doctrine of experience” aimed at conceptual clarification. It shows how genetic-constitutive analyses become crucial in this interpretation and therefore how phenomenology comes to be close to its empiricist ancestors (except for its anti-psychologism) and how far from authors like Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. Moreover, the essay highlights that such a “doctrine of experience” deliberately assumes only the “analytic” parts of the tasks that Husserl assigned to philosophy, while refusing the ideological (i.e. the ethical-foundational) ones. Finally, some details are given of the applications of such a devoted-to-analysis-phenomenology to musical experience, one of the fields in which Giovanni Piana’s work has been more influential on the Italian philosophical culture.