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Last Updated: Dec 27, 2024 • Article History
Key People: Jean-Paul Sartre Max Scheler Maurice Merleau-Ponty Alfred Schutz Edith Stein
Related Topics: phenomenology of religion phenomenological psychology life-world reduction Uppsala school
On the Web: OpenCourses at Atlantic International University – Husserl’s Phenomenology (Dec. 27, 2024)
phenomenology,
Phenomenology a philosophical movement originating in the 20th century, the primary objective of which is the direct investigation and description of phenomena as consciously experienced, without theories about their causal explanation and as free as possible from unexamined preconceptions and presuppositions. The word itself is much older, however, going back at least to the 18th century, when the Swiss German mathematician and philosopher Johann Heinrich Lambert applied it to that part of his theory of knowledge that distinguishes truth from illusion and error. In the 19th century the word became associated chiefly with the Phänomenologie des Geistes (1807; Phenomenology of Mind), by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who traced the development of the human spirit from mere sense experience to “absolute knowledge.” The so-called phenomenological movement did not get under way, however, until early in the 20th century. But even this new phenomenology included so many varieties that a comprehensive characterization of the subject requires their consideration.