Phenomenology (philosophy)
Phenomenology is a philosophical study and movement largely associated with the early 20th century that seeks to objectively investigate the nature of subjective, conscious experience.
The application of phenomenology in these fields aims to gain a deeper understanding of subjective experience, rather than focusing on behavior.
[6] In particular, transcendental phenomenology, as outlined by Edmund Husserl, aims to arrive at an objective understanding of the world via the discovery of universal logical structures in human subjective experience.
For example, according to Martin Heidegger, truths are contextually situated and dependent on the historical, cultural, and social context in which they emerge.
It entered the English language around the turn of the 18th century and first appeared in direct connection to Husserl's philosophy in a 1907 article in The Philosophical Review.
[24] According to phenomenologist Maurice Natanson, "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.
"[30] Husserl says that the suspension of belief in what is ordinarily taken for granted or inferred by conjecture diminishes the power of what is customarily embraced as objective reality.
In the words of philosopher Rüdiger Safranski, "[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.
"[31] Edmund Husserl "set the phenomenological agenda" for even those who did not strictly adhere to his teachings, such as Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, to name just the foremost.
"[34] 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.
"[37] Loosely rooted in an epistemological device called epoché, Husserl's method 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, rooted in intentionality, represents an alternative to the representational theory of consciousness.
[41] This is one point of nearly unanimous agreement among phenomenologists: "a minimal form of self-consciousness is a constant structural feature of conscious experience.
Noematic refers to the object or content (noema), which appears in the noetic acts (the believed, wanted, hated, loved, etc.).
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.
As he wanted to exclude any hypothesis on the existence of external objects, he introduced the method of phenomenological reduction to eliminate them.
Members of the Munich group, such as Max Scheler and Roman Ingarden, distanced themselves from Husserl's new transcendental phenomenology.
By shifting the center of gravity to existence in what he calls fundamental ontology, Heidegger altered the subsequent direction of phenomenology.
This emphasis on the fundamental status of a person's pre-cognitive, practical orientation in the world, sometimes called "know-how", would be adopted by both Sartre and Merleau-Ponty.
Paradigmatic examples of comportment can be found in the unreflective dealing with equipment that presents itself as simply "ready-to-hand" in what Heidegger calls the normally circumspect mode of engagement within the world.
While Being and Time and other early works are clearly engaged with Husserlian issues, Heidegger's later philosophy has little relation to the problems and methods of classical phenomenology.
[32] Maurice Merleau-Ponty develops his distinctive mode of phenomenology by drawing, in particular, upon Husserl's unpublished writings, Heidegger's analysis of being-in-the-world, Gestalt theory, and other contemporary psychology research.
In his most famous work, The Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty critiques empiricist and intellectualist accounts to chart a "third way" that avoids their metaphysical assumptions about an objective, pre-given world.
Merleau-Ponty reinterprets concepts like intentionality, the phenomenological reduction, and the eidetic method to capture our inherence in the perceived world, that is, our embodied coexistence with things through a kind of reciprocal exchange.
"[68] It is in this realm of phenomenological givenness, Husserl claims, that the search begins for "indubitable evidence that will ultimately serve as the foundation for every scientific discipline.
The correct interpretation of what Husserl meant by the noema has long been controversial, but the noematic sense is generally understood as the ideal meaning of the act.
While people often identify others with their physical bodies, this type of phenomenology requires that they focus on the subjectivity of the other, as well as the intersubjective engagement with them.
For a classical critical point of view, Daniel Dennett argues for the wholesale uselessness of phenomenology considering phenomena as qualia, which cannot be the object of scientific research or do not exist in the first place.
Liliana Albertazzi counters such arguments by pointing out that empirical research on phenomena has been successfully carried out employing modern methodology.
Other likewise controversial approaches aim to explain life-world experience on a sociological or anthropological basis despite phenomenology being mostly considered descriptive rather than explanatory.
