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Phenomenology is a philosophical method developed in the early years of the twentieth century by Edmund Husserl and a circle of followers at the universities of Göttingen and Munich in Germany. Subsequently, phenomenological themes were taken up by philosophers in France, the United States, and elsewhere, often in contexts far removed from Husserl's work.

"Phenomenology" comes from the Greek words phainómenon, meaning "that which appears", and lógos, meaning "study". In Husserl's conception, phenomenology is primarily concerned with making the structures of consciousness, and the phenomena which appear in acts of consciousness, objects of systematic reflection and analysis. Such reflection was to take place from a highly modified "first person" viewpoint, studying phenomena not as they appear to "my" consciousness, but to any consciousness whatsoever. Husserl believed that phenomenology could thus provide a firm basis for all human knowledge, including scientific knowledge, and could establish philosophy as a "rigorous science".

Husserl's conception of phenomenology has been criticised and developed not only by himself, but also by his student and assistant Martin Heidegger, by existentialists, such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, and by other philosophers, such as Paul Ricoeur, Emmanuel Levinas, and Dietrich von Hildebrand.

Contents 1 The idea of Phenomenology 2 Special terminology 2.1 Intentionality 2.2 Intuition 2.3 Evidence 2.4 Noesis and Noema 2.5 Empathy and Intersubjectivity 2.6 Lifeworld 3 Husserl's Logische Untersuchungen (1900/1901) 4 Transcendental phenomenology after the Ideen (1913) 5 Realist phenomenology 6 Existential phenomenology 7 Phenomenology and Eastern thought 8 Criticisms of phenomenology 9 Historical overview of the use of the term 10 List of important phenomenologists and phenomenology-derived theorists 11 See also 12 Further reading 12.1 Journals 12.2 Book Series 13 References 14 External links

[edit] The idea of Phenomenology

In its most basic form, phenomenology attempts to create conditions for the objective study of topics usually regarded as subjective: consciousness and the content of conscious experiences such as judgments, perceptions and emotions. Although phenomenology seeks to be scientific, it does not attempt to study consciousness from the perspective of clinical psychology or neurology. Instead, it seeks through systematic reflection to determine the essential properties and structures of consciousness and conscious experience.

Husserl derived many important concepts central to phenomenology from the works and lectures of his teachers, the philosophers and psychologists Franz Brentano and Carl Stumpf.^[1] An important element of phenomenology that Husserl borrowed from Brentano was intentionality (often described as "aboutness"), the notion that consciousness always is consciousness of something. The object of consciousness is called the intentional object, and this object is constituted for consciousness in many different ways, through for instance perception, memory, protention, retention, signification, etc. Throughout these different intentionalities, though they have different structures and different ways of being "about" the object, an object is still constituted as the same identical object; consciousness is directed at the same intentional object in direct perception as it is in the immediately following retention of this object and the eventual remembering of it.

Though many of the phenomenological methods involve various reductions, phenomenology is essentially anti-reductionistic; the reductions are mere tools to better understand and describe the workings of consciousness, not to reduce any phenomenon to these descriptions. In other words, when a reference is made to a thing's essence or idea, or when one details the constitution of an identical coherent thing by describing what one "really" sees as being only these sides and aspects, these surfaces, it does not mean that the thing is only and exclusively what is described here: The ultimate goal of these reductions is to understand how these different aspects are constituted into the actual thing as experienced by the person experiencing it. Phenomenology is a direct reaction to the psychologism and physicalism of Husserl's time.

Although previously employed by Hegel, it was Husserl’s adoption of this term (circa 1900) that propelled it into becoming the designation of a philosophical school. As a philosophical perspective, phenomenology is its method, though the specific meaning of the term varies according to how it is conceived by a given philosopher. As envisioned by Husserl, phenomenology is a method of philosophical inquiry that rejects the rationalist bias that has dominated Western thought since Plato in favor of a method of reflective attentiveness that discloses the individual’s “lived experience.” Loosely rooted in a epistemological device, with Sceptic roots, called epoché, Husserl’s method which entails the suspension of judgment while relying on the intuitive grasp of knowledge, free of presuppositions and intellectualizing. Sometimes depicted as the “science of experience,” the phenomenological method is rooted in intentionality, Husserl’s theory of consciousness (developed from Brentano). Intentionality represents an alternative to the representational theory of consciousness which holds that reality cannot be grasped directly because it is available only through perceptions of reality which are representations of it in the mind. Husserl countered that consciousness is not “in” the mind but rather conscious of something other than itself (the intentional object), whether the object is a substance or a figment of imagination (i.e. the real processes associated with and underlying the figment). Hence the phenomenological method relies on the description of phenomena as they are given to consciousness, in their immediacy.

According to Natanson (1973, p. 63), “The radicality of the phenomenological method is both continuous and discontinuous with philosophy’s general effort to subject experience to fundamental, critical scrutiny: to take nothing for granted and to show the warranty for what we claim to know.” In practice, it entails an unusual combination of discipline and detachment to suspend, or bracket, theoretical explanations and second-hand information while determining ones “naive” experience of the matter. The phenomenological method serves to momentarily erase the world of speculation by returning the subject to his or her primordial experience of the matter, whether the object of inquiry is a feeling, an idea, or a perception. According to Husserl the suspension of belief in what we ordinarily take for granted or infer by conjecture diminishes the power of what we customarily embrace as objective reality. According to Safranski (1998, 72), “[Husserl and his followers’] great ambition was to disregard anything that had until then been thought or said about consciousness or the world [while] on the lookout for a new way of letting the things [they investigated] approach them, without covering them up with what they already knew.”

Heidegger modified Husserl’s conception of phenomenology because of (what he perceived as) his subjectivist tendencies. Whereas Husserl conceived of human beings as having been constituted by states of consciousness, Heidegger countered that consciousness is peripheral to the primacy of one’s existence (i.e., Being) which cannot be reduced to one’s consciousness of it. From this angle, one’s state of mind is an “effect” rather than a determinant of existence, including those aspects of existence that one is not conscious of. By shifting the center of gravity from consciousness (psychology) to existence (ontology), Heidegger altered the subsequent direction of phenomenology, making it at once both personal and mysterious. One of the consequences of Heidegger’s modification of Husserl’s conception of phenomenology was its increased relevance to psychoanalysis. Whereas Husserl gave priority to a depiction of consciousness that was fundamentally alien to the psychoanalytic conception of the unconscious, Heidegger offered a way to conceptualize experience that could accommodate those aspects of one’s existence that lie on the periphery of sentient awareness.^[2][3]

[edit] Special terminology

[edit] Intentionality

Intentionality refers to the notion that consciousness is always consciousness of something. The word itself should not be confused with the "ordinary" use of the word intentional, but should rather be taken as playing on the etymological roots of the word. Originally, intention referred to a "stretching out" ("in tension," lat. intendere[3][4]), and in this context it refers to consciousness "stretching out" towards its object. Intentionality is often summed up as "aboutness."

Whether this something that consciousness is about is in direct perception or in fantasy is inconsequential to the concept of intentionality itself; whatever consciousness is directed at, that is what consciousness is consciousness of. This means that the object of consciousness doesn't have to be a physical object apprehended in perception: It can just as well be a fantasy or a memory. Consequently, these "structures" of consciousness, perception, memory, fantasy, etc., are called intentionalities.

The cardinal principle of phenomenology, the term intentionality originated with the Scholastics in the medieval period and was resurrected by Brentano who in turn influenced Husserl’s conception of phenomenology, who refined the term and made it the cornerstone of his theory of consciousness. The meaning of the term is complex and depends entirely on how it is conceived by a given philosopher. The term should not be confused with “intention” or the psychoanalytic conception of unconscious “motive” or “gain.”

[edit] Intuition

Intuition in phenomenology refers to those cases where the intentional object is directly present to the intentionality at play; if the intention is "filled" by the direct apprehension of the object, you have an intuited object. Having a cup of coffee in front of you, for instance, seeing it, feeling it, or even imagining it - these are all filled intentions, and the object is then intuited. The same goes for the apprehension of mathematical formulae or a number. If you do not have the object as referred to directly, the object is not intuited, but still intended, but then emptily. Examples of empty intentions can be signitive intentions - intentions that only imply or refer to their objects.

[edit] Evidence

In everyday language, we use the word evidence to signify a special sort of relation between a state of affairs and a proposition: State A is evidence for the proposition "A is true." In phenomenology, however, the concept of evidence is meant to signify the "subjective achievement of truth." ^[4] This is not an attempt to reduce the objective sort of evidence to subjective "opinion," but rather an attempt to describe the structure of having something present in intuition with the addition of having it present as intelligible: "Evidence is the successful presentation of an intelligible object, the successful presentation of something whose truth becomes manifest in the evidencing itself." ^[5]

[edit] Noesis and Noema

This pair, both derived from the Greek nous (mind), designate the act and the object of consciousness. The Noesis is the act of the consciousness, the intentionality, that "stretches towards" the Noema, the thing. The reason for introducing these two concepts instead of "intention" and "object" could, arguably, be said to be because the words subject and object would be misleading when it comes to these kinds of things: The subject's experience of the object cannot, in any case, be objective in the sense that he has a direct perception of the in-itself (this would imply him being able to see all sides, profiles and aspects of the thing at the same time, which is impossible to a situated consciousness who will only be able to experience something from its own perspective). In short, the noesis is the intention, the structure of consciousness, and the noema is the intentional object, the object as intended by the consciousness.

[edit] Empathy and Intersubjectivity

In phenomenology, empathy refers to the experience of another human body as another subjectivity: In one sense, you see another body, but what you immediately perceive or experience is another subject. In Husserl's original account, this was done by a sort of apperception built on the experiences of your own lived-body. The lived-body is your own body as experienced by yourself, as yourself. Your own body manifests itself to you mainly as your possibilities of acting in the world. It is what lets you reach out and grab something, for instance, but it also, and more importantly, allows for the possibility of changing your point of view. This helps you differentiate one thing from another by the experience of moving around it, seeing new aspects of it (often referred to as making the absent present and the present absent), and still retaining the notion that this is the same thing that you saw other aspects of just a moment ago (it is identical). Your body is also experienced as a duality, both as object (you can touch your own hand) and as your own subjectivity (you are being touched).

The experience of your own body as your own subjectivity is then applied to the experience of another's body, which, through apperception, is constituted as another subjectivity. You can thus recognise the Other's intentions, emotions, etc. This experience of empathy is important in the phenomenological account of intersubjectivity. In phenomenology, intersubjectivity is what constitutes objectivity (i.e., what you experience as objective is experienced as being intersubjectively available - available to all other subjects. This does not imply that objectivity is reduced to subjectivity nor does it imply a relativist position, cf. for instance intersubjective verifiability).

In the experience of intersubjectivity, one also experiences oneself as being a subject among other subjects, and one experiences oneself as existing objectively for these Others; one experiences oneself as the noema of Others' noeses, or as a subject in another's empathic experience. As such, one experiences oneself as objectively existing subjectivity. Intersubjectivity is also a part in the constitution of one's lifeworld, especially as "homeworld."

[edit] Lifeworld

The lifeworld (German: Lebenswelt) is the "world" each one of us lives in. One could call it the "background" or "horizon" of all experience, and it is that on which each object stands out as itself (as different) and with the meaning it can only hold for us. The lifeworld is both personal and intersubjective (it is then called a "homeworld," and it is shared by "homecomerades"), and, as such, it does not enclose each one of us in a solus ipse.

[edit] Husserl's Logische Untersuchungen (1900/1901)

In the first edition of the Logical Investigations, still under the influence of Brentano, Husserl describes his position as "descriptive psychology." Husserl analyzes the intentional structures of mental acts and how they are directed at both real and ideal objects. The first volume of the Logical Investigations, the Prolegomena to Pure Logic, begins with a devastating critique of psychologism, i.e., the attempt to subsume the a priori validity of the laws of logic under psychology. Husserl establishes a separate field for research in logic, philosophy, and phenomenology, independently from the empirical sciences.^[6]

[edit] Transcendental phenomenology after the Ideen (1913)

Some years after the publication of the Logical Investigations, Husserl made some key elaborations which led him to the distinction between the act of consciousness (noesis) and the phenomena at which it is directed (the noemata).

• "noetic" refers to the intentional act of consciousness (believing, willing, etc.)
• "noematic" refers to the object or content (noema) which appears in the noetic acts (the believed, wanted, hated, and loved ...).

What we observe is not the object as it is in itself, but how and inasmuch it is given in the intentional acts. Knowledge of essences would only be possible by "bracketing" all assumptions about the existence of an external world and the inessential (subjective) aspects of how the object is concretely given to us. This procedure Husserl called epoché.

Husserl in a later period concentrated more on the ideal, essential structures of consciousness. As he wanted to exclude any hypothesis on the existence of external objects, he introduced the method of phenomenological reduction to eliminate them. What was left over was the pure transcendental ego, as opposed to the concrete empirical ego. Now (transcendental) phenomenology is the study of the essential structures that are left in pure consciousness: this amounts in practice to the study of the noemata and the relations among them. The philosopher Theodor Adorno criticised Husserl's concept of phenomenological epistemology in his metacritique Against Epistemology, which is anti-foundationalist in its stance.

Transcendental phenomenologists include Oskar Becker, Aron Gurwitsch, and Alfred Schutz.

[edit] Realist phenomenology

After Husserl's publication of the Ideen in 1913, many phenomenologists took a critical stance towards his new theories. Especially the members of the Munich group distanced themselves from his new transcendental phenomenology and preferred the earlier realist phenomenology of the first edition of the Logical Investigations.

Realist phenomenologists include Adolf Reinach, Alexander Pfänder, Johannes Daubert, Max Scheler, Roman Ingarden, Nicolai Hartmann, Dietrich von Hildebrand.

[edit] Existential phenomenology

Existential phenomenology differs from transcendental phenomenology by its rejection of the transcendental ego. Merleau-Ponty objects to the ego's transcendence of the world, which for Husserl leaves the world spread out and completely transparent before the conscious. Heidegger thinks of a conscious being as always already in the world. Transcendence is maintained in existential phenomenology to the extent that the method of phenomenology must take a presuppositionless starting point - transcending claims about the world arising from, for example, natural or scientific attitudes or theories of the ontological nature of the world.

While Husserl thought of philosophy as a scientific discipline that had to be founded on a phenomenology understood as epistemology, Heidegger held a radically different view. Heidegger himself states their differences this way:

For Husserl, the phenomenological reduction is the method of leading phenomenological vision from the natural attitude of the human being whose life is involved in the world of things and persons back to the transcendental life of consciousness and its noetic-noematic experiences, in which objects are constituted as correlates of consciousness. For us, phenomenological reduction means leading phenomenological vision back from the apprehension of a being, whatever may be the character of that apprehension, to the understanding of the Being of this being (projecting upon the way it is unconcealed).^[7]

According to Heidegger, philosophy was not at all a scientific discipline, but more fundamental than science itself. According to him science is only one way of knowing the world with no special access to truth. Furthermore, the scientific mindset itself is built on a much more "primordial" foundation of practical, everyday knowledge. Husserl was skeptical of this approach, which he regarded as quasi-mystical, and it contributed to the divergence in their thinking.

Instead of taking phenomenology as prima philosophia or a foundational discipline, Heidegger took it as a metaphysical ontology: "being is the proper and sole theme of philosophy... this means that philosophy is not a science of beings but of being.".^[7] Yet to confuse phenomenology and ontology is an obvious error. Phenomena are not the foundation or Ground of Being. Neither are they appearances, for as Heidegger argues in Being and Time, an appearance is "that which shows itself in something else," while a phenomenon is "that which shows itself in itself."

While for Husserl, in the epochè, being appeared only as a correlate of consciousness, for Heidegger being is the starting point. While for Husserl we would have to abstract from all concrete determinations of our empirical ego, to be able to turn to the field of pure consciousness, Heidegger claims that "the possibilities and destinies of philosophy are bound up with man's existence, and thus with temporality and with historicality."^[7]

However, ontological being and existential being are different categories, so Heidegger's conflation of these categories is, according to Husserl's view, the root of Heidegger's error. Husserl charged Heidegger with raising the question of ontology but failing to answer it, instead switching the topic to the Dasein, the only being for whom Being is an issue. That is neither ontology nor phenomenology, according to Husserl, but merely abstract anthropology. To clarify, perhaps, by abstract anthropology, as a non-existentialist searching for essences, Husserl rejected the existentialism implicit in Heidegger's distinction between being (sein) as things in reality and Being (Da-sein) as the encounter with being, as when being becomes present to us, that is, is unconcealed.^[8]

Existential phenomenologists include: Martin Heidegger (1889 – 1976), Hannah Arendt (1906 – 1975), Emmanuel Levinas (1906 – 1995), Gabriel Marcel (1889 – 1973), Jean-Paul Sartre (1905 – 1980), Paul Ricoeur (1913 - 2005) and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908 – 1961).

[edit] Phenomenology and Eastern thought

Some researchers in phenomenology (particularly in reference to Heidegger's legacy) see possibilities of establishing dialogues with traditions of thought outside of the so-called Western philosophy, particularly with respect to East-Asian thinking, and despite perceived differences between "Eastern" and "Western".^[9] Furthermore, it has been claimed that a number of elements within phenomenology (mainly Heidegger's thought) have some resonance with Eastern philosophical ideas, particularly with Zen Buddhism and Taoism.^[10] According to Tomonubu Imamichi, the concept of Dasein was inspired — although Heidegger remains silent on this — by Okakura Kakuzo's concept of das-in-dem-Welt-sein (being in the world) expressed in The Book of Tea to describe Zhuangzi's philosophy, which Imamichi's teacher had offered to Heidegger in 1919, after having studied with him the year before.^[11]

There are also recent signs of the reception of phenomenology (and Heidegger's thought in particular) within scholarly circles focused on studying the impetus of metaphysics in the history of ideas in Islam and Early Islamic philosophy;^[12] perhaps under the indirect influence of the tradition of the French Orientalist and philosopher Henri Corbin.^[13]

In addition, the work of Jim Ruddy in the field of comparative philosophy, combined the concept of Transcendental Ego in Husserl's phenomenology with the concept of the primacy of self-consciousness in the work of Sankaracharya. In the course of this work, Ruddy uncovered a wholly new eidetic pheomenological science which he called "convergent phenomenology." This new phenomenology takes over where Husserl left off, and deals with the constitution of relation-like, rather than merely thing-like, or "intentional" objectivity.^[14]

[edit] Criticisms of phenomenology

This section requires expansion.

Daniel Dennett has criticized phenomenology on the basis that its explicitly first-person approach is incompatible with the scientific third-person approach, going so far as to coin the term "autophenomenology" to emphasize this aspect and to contrast it with his own alternative, which he calls heterophenomenology. Dennett's criticism reflects a more general attitude among analytic philosophers of mind. Phenomenologists, however, are often quick to point out that the relationship between phenomenological and natural scientific methods has been a major theme in phenomenology since at least Husserl's Crisis of the European Sciences, though Dennett makes no real attempt to engage with the work of phenomenologists on this issue. Many proponents of phenomenology argue that natural science can make sense only as a human activity, i.e., an activity which presupposes the fundamental structures of the 'first-person perspective.' While not hostile to the natural sciences per se, many thinkers in the Heideggerian tradition would regard criticisms such as Dennett's metaphysical rather than purely scientific claims, and thus susceptible to the usual criticisms directed at metaphysical theories of all kinds.Defenses of the phenomenological approach against science-inspired reductive naturalism have been made by Hubert Dreyfus and Charles Taylor among others.

As part of an ongoing debate with Hubert Dreyfus, John Searle has argued that much of the work done by phenomenologists on the philosophy of mind suffers from what he terms the 'Phenomenological Illusion'.^[15] Searle defines the Phenomenological Illusion as the mistake of assuming that what is not phenomenologically present is not real, and that what is phenomenologically present is an adequate description of how things really are. According to Searle, this leads some phenomenologists to make mistaken claims about subjects such as meaning, social reality, functions, and causal self referentiality. Searle himself makes explicit that, defined as the examination of consciousness, he has no problem with phenomenology itself.

[edit] Historical overview of the use of the term

Phenomenology has at least three main meanings in philosophical history: one in the writings of G.W.F. Hegel, another in the writings of Edmund Husserl in 1920, and a third, deriving from Husserl's work, in the writings of his former research assistant Martin Heidegger in 1927.

• For G.W.F. Hegel, phenomenology is an approach to philosophy that begins with an exploration of phenomena (what presents itself to us in conscious experience) as a means to finally grasp the absolute, logical, ontological and metaphysical Spirit that is behind phenomena. This has been called a "dialectical phenomenology".
• For Edmund Husserl, phenomenology is "the reflective study of the essence of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view."^[16] Phenomenology takes the intuitive experience of phenomena (what presents itself to us in phenomenological reflexion) as its starting point and tries to extract from it the essential features of experiences and the essence of what we experience. When generalized to the essential features of any possible experience, this has been called "transcendental phenomenology". Husserl's view was based on aspects of the work of Franz Brentano and was developed further by philosophers such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Max Scheler, Edith Stein, Dietrich von Hildebrand and Emmanuel Levinas.
• Martin Heidegger believed that Husserl's approach overlooked basic structural features of both the subject and object of experience (what he called their "being"), and expanded phenomenological enquiry to encompass our understanding and experience of Being itself, thus making phenomenology the method (in the first phase of his career at least) of the study of being, ontology.

The difference in approach between Husserl and Heidegger influenced the development of existential phenomenology and existentialism in France, as is seen in the work of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Munich phenomenologists (Johannes Daubert, Adolf Reinach, Alexander Pfänder in Germany and Alfred Schütz in Austria), and Paul Ricoeur have all been influenced. Readings of Husserl and Heidegger have also been crucial elements of the philosophies of Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler.

Although the term "phenomenology" was used occasionally in the history of philosophy before Husserl, modern use ties it more explicitly to his particular method. Following is a list of thinkers in rough chronological order who used the term "phenomenology" in a variety of ways, with brief comments on their contributions:^[17]

• Friedrich Christoph Oetinger (1702 - 1782) German pietist, for the study of the "divine system of relations"^[18]
• David Hume (1711 – 1776) Scottish philosopher, called variably a skeptic or a common sense advocate. While this connection is somewhat tenuous, Hume, in A Treatise of Human Nature, does seem to take a phenomenological or psychological approach by describing the process of reasoning causality in psychological terms. This is also the inspiration for the Kantian distinction between phenomenal and noumenal reality.^[19]
• Johann Heinrich Lambert (1728–1777) (mathematician, physician and philosopher) known for the theory of appearances underlying empirical knowledge.^[20]
• Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), in the Critique of Pure Reason, distinguished between objects as phenomena, which are objects as shaped and grasped by human sensibility and understanding, and objects as things-in-themselves or noumena, which do not appear to us in space and time and about which we can make no legitimate judgments.
• G.W.F. Hegel (1770–1831) challenged Kant's doctrine of the unknowable thing-in-itself, and declared that by knowing phenomena more fully we can gradually arrive at a consciousness of the absolute and spiritual truth of Divinity. Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, published in 1807, prompted many opposing views, including the existential work of Søren Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger, and Jean-Paul Sartre, as well as the materialist work of Marx and his many followers.
• Franz Brentano (1838-1917) seems to have used the term in some of his lectures at Vienna, where Edmund Husserl studied with him and came under his influence.
• Carl Stumpf (1848-1936), student of Brentano and mentor to Husserl, used "phenomenology" to refer to an ontology of sensory contents.
• Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) established phenomenology at first as a kind of "descriptive psychology" and later as a transcendental and eidetic science of consciousness. He is considered to be the founder of contemporary phenomenology.
• Max Scheler (1874-1928) developed further the phenomenological method of Edmund Husserl and extended it to include also a reduction of the scientific method. He influenced the thinking of Pope John Paul II, Dietrich von Hildebrand, and Edith Stein.
• Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) criticized Husserl's theory of phenomenology and attempted to develop a theory of ontology that led him to his original theory of Dasein, the non-dualistic human being.
• Alfred Schütz (1899-1959) developed a phenomenology of the social world on the basis of everyday experience which has influenced major sociologists such as Harold Garfinkel, Peter Berger, and Thomas Luckmann.
• Graham Harman (1968 - ) Although working from within phenomenology, Harman finds the broad history of phenomenology to be deficient in that it constantly subordinates the independent life of objects to our (human) access to them. His radical break with the traditional use of terms such as intentionality as well as a fresh approach to metaphysics, stems from his greatest influences by such as the great phenomenologists Alphonso Lingis, Husserl, Ortega y Gasset, Zubiri, and Heidegger. Harman's thought is perhaps the first to combine phenomenology with speculative philosophers such as Whitehead, Leibniz, and the sort of radical thinking typified by Speculative Realism.

Later usage is mostly based on or (critically) related to Husserl's introduction and use of the term. This branch of philosophy differs from others in that it tends to be more "descriptive" than "prescriptive".

[edit] List of important phenomenologists and phenomenology-derived theorists

Peter Berger Maurice Blanchot Hans Blumenberg Stanley Cavell Jacques Derrida Mikel Dufrenne Hubert Dreyfus James M. Edie Lester Embree Shepard Fairey Hans-Georg Gadamer Shaun Gallagher Amedeo Giorgi Aron Gurwitsch

Ibn al-Haytham Martin Heidegger Michel Henry Dietrich von Hildebrand Edmund Husserl Miguel García-Baró Roman Ingarden Michael Jackson (anthropology) Karl Jaspers Mark Johnson (professor) Ludwig Landgrebe Richard Lanigan Emmanuel Levinas Thomas Luckmann

Gabriel Marcel Abraham Maslow Maurice Merleau-Ponty Eugene Minkowski Christian Norberg-Schulz Jose Ortega y Gasset Jan Patočka Alexander Pfänder Georges Poulet Adolf Reinach Paul Ricoeur Jean-Paul Sartre Max Scheler Alfred Schütz

Herbert Spiegelberg Edith Stein Jacob Moreno Pierre Thevenaz Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka Herman Van Breda Karol Wojtyła Dan Zahavi Felix Kalinowski Robert Sokolowski Hannah Arendt Wilfrid Desan

[edit] See also

Phenomenology of religion Hermeneutics Geneva School Structuralism Poststructuralism Social constructionism Gestalt therapy Philosophical Anthropology Psychodrama

Existentialism Deconstruction Phenomenography Philosophy of technology Emergy Personhood Theory Phenomenology (psychology) Important publications in phenomenological psychology

[edit] Further reading

• The IAP LIBRARY offers very fine sources for Phenomenology.
• The London Philosophy Study Guide offers many suggestions on what to read, depending on the student's familiarity with the subject: Phenomenology
• Dermot Moran, Introduction to Phenomenology (Oxford: Routledge, 2000) - Charting phenomenology from Brentano, through Husserl and Heidegger, to Gadamer, Arendt, Levinas, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and Derrida.
• Robert Sokolowski, "Introduction to Phenomenology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2000) - An excellent non-historical introduction to phenomenology.
• Herbert Spiegelberg, "The Phenomenological Movement: A Historical Introduction," 3rd ed. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1983). The most comprehensive source on the development of the phenomenological movement.
• David Stewart and Algis Mickunas, "Exploring Phenomenology: A Guide to the Field and its Literature" (Athens: Ohio University Press 1990)
• Michael Hammond, Jane Howarth, and Russell Kent, "Understanding Phenomenology" (Oxford: Blackwell 1995)
• Christopher Macann, Four Phenomenological Philosophers: Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty (New York: Routledge: 1993)
• Jan Patočka, "Qu'est-ce que la phénoménologie?" In: Qu'est-ce que la phénoménologie?, ed. and trans. E. Abrams (Grenoble: J. Millon 1988), pp. 263–302. An answer to the question, What is phenomenology?, from a student of both Husserl and Heidegger and one of the most important phenomenologists of the latter half of the twentieth century.
• William A. Luijpen and Henry J. Koren, "A First Introduction to Existential Phenomenology" (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press 1969)
• Richard M. Zaner, "The Way of Phenomenology" (Indianapolis: Pegasus 1970)
• Hans Köchler, Die Subjekt-Objekt-Dialektik in der transzendentalen Phänomenologie. Das Seinsproblem zwischen Idealismus und Realismus. (Meisenheim a.G.: Anton Hain, 1974) (German)
• Hans Köchler, Phenomenological Realism: Selected Essays (Frankfurt a. M./Bern: Peter Lang, 1986)
• Mark Jarzombek, The Psychologizing of Modernity (Cambridge University Press, 2000).
• Pierre Thévenaz, "What is Phenomenology?" (Chicago: Quadrangle Books 1962)
• ed. James M. Edie, "An Invitation to Phenomenology" (Chicago: Quadrangle Books 1965) - A collection of seminal phenomenological essays.
• ed. R. O. Elveton, "The Phenomenology of Husserl: Selected Critical Readings" (Seattle: Noesis Press 2000) - Key essays about Husserl's phenomenology.
• ed. Laura Doyle, Bodies of Resistance: New Phenomenologies of Politics, Agency, and Culture. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2001.
• eds. Richard Zaner and Don Ihde, "Phenomenology and Existentialism" (New York: Putnam 1973) - Contains many key essays in existential phenomenology.
• Robert Magliola, Phenomenology and Literature (Purdue University Press, 1977; 1978) systematically describes, in Part One, the influence of Husserl, Heidegger, and the French Existentialists on the Geneva School and other forms of what becomes known as "phenomenological literary criticism"; and in Part Two describes phenomenological literary theory in Roman Ingarden and Mikel Dufrenne.
• Albert Borgmann and his work in philosophy of technology.
• eds. Natalie Depraz, Francisco Varela, Pierre Vermersch, On Becoming Aware: A Pragmatics of Experiencing (Amsterdam: John Benjamins 2003) - searches for the sources and the means for a disciplined practical approach to exploring human experience.
• Don Idhe, "Experimental Phenomenology: An Introduction" (Albany, NY: SUNY Press)
• Sara Ahmed, "Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects Others" (Durham: Duke University Press 2006)
• Michael Jackson, Existential Anthropology
• Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness. 
• Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi,The Phenomenological Mind. London: Routledge, 2007.
• Steinbock, A. J. (1995). Home and Beyond, Generative Phenomenology After Husserl. Northwestern University Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy. [5]

[edit] Journals

• Bulletin d'analyse phénoménologique
• Janus Head: Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature, Continental Philosophy, Phenomenological Psychology, and the Arts
• Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology
• Research in Phenomenology
• Newsletter of Phenomenology (online-newsletter)
• Studia Phaenomenologica ISSN 1582-5647
• Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology
• The Roman Ingarden Philosophical Research Centre
• Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
• Continental Philosophy Review
• Human Studies
• Husserl Studies
• Phenomenology & Practice

Look up phenomenology (philosophy) in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

[edit] Book Series

• Edmund Husserl: Gesammelte Werke
• Edmund Husserl: Collected Works
• Edmund Husserl: Dokumente
• Edmund Husserl: Materialien
• Analecta Husserliana
• Phaenomenologica
• Contributions to Phenomenology
• Studies in German Idealism

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• What is Phenomenology?
• About Edmund Husserl
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry
• Organization of Phenomenology Organizations
• Romanian Society for Phenomenology
• Phenomenology Online
• Dialectical Phenomenology
• The New Phenomenology
• Springer's academic Phenomenology program

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