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 and world-disclosure.. It attempts to describe the universal features of consciousness while avoiding assumptions about the external world, aiming to describe phenomena as they appear, and to explore the meaning and significance of lived experience.

This approach, while philosophical, has found many applications in qualitative research across different scientific disciplines, especially in the social sciences, humanities, psychology, and cognitive science, but also in fields as diverse as health sciences, architecture, and human-computer interaction, among many others. The application of phenomenology in these fields aims to gain a deeper understanding of subjective experience, rather than focusing on behavior.

Phenomenology is contrasted with phenomenalism, which reduces mental states and physical objects to complexes of sensations, and with psychologism, which treats logical truths or epistemological principles as the products of human psychology. 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.

There are important differences in the ways that different branches of phenomenology approach subjectivity. For example, according to Martin Heidegger, truths are contextually situated and dependent on the historical, cultural, and social context in which they emerge. Other types include hermeneutic, genetic, and embodied phenomenology. All these different branches of phenomenology may be seen as representing different philosophies despite sharing the common foundational approach of phenomenological inquiry; that is, investigating things just as they appear, independent of any particular theoretical framework.

The term phenomenology derives from the Greek φαινόμενον, phainómenon ("that which appears") and λόγος, lógos ("study"). 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.

In philosophy, "phenomenology" refers to the tradition inaugurated by Edmund Husserl at the beginning of the 20th century. The term, however, had been used in different senses in other philosophy texts since the 18th century. These include those by Johann Heinrich Lambert (1728–1777), Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831), and Carl Stumpf (1848–1936), among others.

It was, however, the usage of Franz Brentano (and, as he later acknowledged, Ernst Mach) that would prove definitive for Husserl. From Brentano, Husserl took the conviction that philosophy must commit itself to description of what is "given in direct 'self-evidence'."

Central to Brentano's phenomenological project was his theory of intentionality, which he developed from his reading of Aristotle's On the Soul. According to the phenomenological tradition, "the central structure of an experience is its intentionality, it being directed towards something, as it is an experience of or about some object." Also, on this theory, every intentional act is implicitly accompanied by a secondary, pre-reflective awareness of the act as one's own.