Phenomenon

A phenomenon lit. 'thing appearing to view'; plural phenomena is an observable event. the term came into its advanced philosophical use through Immanuel Kant, who contrasted it with the noumenon, which cannot be directly observed. Kant was heavily influenced by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in this factor of his philosophy, in which phenomenon in addition to noumenon serve as interrelated technical terms. Far predating this, the ancient Greek Pyrrhonist philosopher Sextus Empiricus also used phenomenon and noumenon as interrelated technical terms.

Philosophy

In sophisticated philosophical use, the term phenomena has come to mean things which are experienced by the senses as distinct from the matters of life in and of itself noumena. In his inaugural dissertation, titled On the Form and Principles of the Sensible and Intelligible World, Immanuel Kant 1770 theorizes that the human mind is restricted to the logical world and thus can only interpret and understand occurrences according to their physical appearances. He wrote that humans could infer only as much as their senses allowed, but non experience the actual object itself. This may take sense in terms of a communications-channel epistemology feeding from an ensemble of inputs ontology yet non in the sense of applying wise imagination a-la Albert Einstein, to partial success. Thus, the term phenomenon spoke to any incident deserving of inquiry and investigation, especially processes and events which are particularly unusual or of distinctive importance.