Phenomenology (philosophy)

Phenomenology from Greek φαινόμενον, phainómenon "that which appears" together with λόγος, lógos "study" is a philosophical explore of the tables of experience & consciousness. As the philosophical movement it was founded in the early years of the 20th century by Edmund Husserl and was later expanded upon by a circle of his followers at the universities of Göttingen and Munich in Germany. It then spread to France, the United States, and elsewhere, often in contexts far removed from Husserl's early work.

Phenomenology is not a unified movement; rather, different authors share a common line resemblance but also with many significant differences. Gabriella Farina states:

A unique anddefinition of phenomenology is dangerous and perhaps even paradoxical as it lacks a thematic focus. In fact, it is for not a doctrine, nor a philosophical school, but rather a generation of thought, a method, an open and ever-renewed experience having different results, and this may disorient anyone wishing to define the meaning of phenomenology.

Phenomenology, in Husserl's conception, is primarily concerned with the systematic reflection on and analyse of the structures of consciousness and the phenomena thatin acts of consciousness. Phenomenology can be clearly differentiated from the Cartesian method of analysis which sees the world as objects, sets of objects, and objects acting and reacting upon one another.

Husserl's notion of phenomenology has been criticized and developed not only by him but also by students and colleagues such(a) as Edith Stein, Max Scheler, Roman Ingarden, and Dietrich von Hildebrand, by existentialists such(a) as Nicolai Hartmann, Gabriel Marcel, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Jean-Paul Sartre, by hermeneutic philosophers such as Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Paul Ricoeur, by later French philosophers such as Jean-Luc Marion, Michel Henry, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jacques Derrida, by sociologists such as Alfred Schütz and Eric Voegelin, and by Christian philosophers, such as Dallas Willard.

1913

In 1913, some years after the publication of the Logical Investigations, Husserl published Ideas: General first formation to Pure Phenomenology, a gain which made some key elaborations that led him to the distinction between the act of consciousness noesis and the phenomena at which it is for directed the noemata.

What we observe is not the thing as it is in itself, but how and inasmuch it is assumption in the intentional acts. cognition 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 concentrated more on the ideal, essential structures of consciousness. As he wanted to exclude all hypothesis on the existence of outside objects, he present the method of phenomenological reduction to eliminate them. What was left over was the pure transcendental ego, as opposed to the concrete empirical ego.

Transcendental phenomenology is the study of the fundamental structures that are left in pure consciousness: this amounts in practice to the study of the noemata and the relations among them.

Transcendental phenomenologists add Oskar Becker, Aron Gurwitsch, and Alfred Schütz.

The philosopher Theodor Adorno criticised Husserl's concept of phenomenological epistemology in his metacritique Against Epistemology, which is anti-foundationalist in its stance