School of thought
Phenomenology
Movement
Classification
- Period
- c. 1900 CE onward
- Regions
- Europe (origin)
- Domains
- Epistemology, Philosophy of Mind
Overview
Phenomenology is a twentieth-century movement concerned with how things are given in experience. Husserl established its early programme, while Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and later phenomenologists transformed its questions and did not share one unchanged procedure.
Key ideas
- Intentionality: Consciousness is always consciousness of something. The mind is not a container: every mental act (perceiving, imagining, judging) is directed at an object.
- Phenomenological Reduction: Husserl's epoché and reduction, the Phenomenological Reduction, suspend use of ordinary commitments about existence in order to examine how objects are given to consciousness.
- Being-in-the-World: Heidegger argued that our primary relation to the world is not theoretical contemplation but practical engagement — we are always already situated in a meaningful context of tools, projects, and others.
Key figures
Edmund Husserl · Martin Heidegger · Maurice Merleau-Ponty · Emmanuel Levinas
Methods used
Influenced by
- British Empiricism
Husserl read Hume's analysis of experience as an unwitting anticipation of phenomenology, and inherited the notion of intentionality from Brentano's descriptive psychology, itself rooted in the empiricist attention to experience, before transforming it into an a priori science of consciousness.
- Kantian Critical Philosophy
- Neo-Kantianism
Later connections
- Critical Theory Influenced by this tradition
- Deconstruction Influenced by this tradition
- Existentialism Influenced by this tradition
This is the twentieth-century wing rather than Kierkegaard: Heidegger, Sartre and Beauvoir took over Husserl's descriptive study of lived experience and his account of consciousness as always directed at something, and turned both on concrete human existence. Sartre subtitled Being and Nothingness an essay in phenomenological ontology.
- Hermeneutics Influenced by this tradition
This is the twentieth-century phase rather than Schleiermacher's: Heidegger recast understanding as a basic way of being in the world rather than a technique for reading texts, and Gadamer built Truth and Method on that recasting.
- Kyoto School Influenced by this tradition
- Post-Structuralism Influenced by this tradition
- Speculative Realism Reacted to this tradition
References
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Phenomenology
- Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations (1900–01), Investigation V, §13 (intentional experiences are called 'acts', with all thought of activity excluded)
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edmund Husserl, §1 — Formation: Husserl wrote the Logical Investigations (1900–01) while at Halle.
- Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, Part II, §§23–24 (Hume as anticipating phenomenology)
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edmund Husserl, §1 'Life and work' (Husserl attended Brentano's lectures from 1884 to 1886)
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edmund Husserl
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Paul Natorp
- Husserl, Ideas I
- Ideas I — Edmund Husserl
- Being and Time — Martin Heidegger
- Phenomenology of Perception — Maurice Merleau-Ponty