. Literally, the description or study of appearances. Any description of how things appear, especially if sustained and penetrating, can be called a phenomenology. The close attention given by linguistic PHILOSOPHY to the actual workings of language is sometimes called linguistic phenomenology. But more specifically ‘phenomenology’ refers to a movement starting with Brentano and associated especially with Husserl. This at first emphasized the description of human experience as directed onto objects, in the sense in which thoughts or wishes have objects, even if unreal ones (‘intentional objects’; see INTENSIONALITY). In Husserl the emphasis shifted away from the mere description of experience towards a description of the objects of experience, which he called phenomena. Phenomena were things which appear. He saw them in fact as essences which the mind intuited, and the task of phenomenology was to describe them. This, however, was not an empirical task, but an a priori one. It resembled in fact what was later called conceptual analysis (see PHILOSOPHY), though it insisted that the essences were real things, not, for example, ways in which words were used. (We can still think of unreal things like unicorns; the essence of unicorn is real on this view). Phenomenology also led on to the study of being, associated with EXISTENTIALISM.
Husserl thought that studying essences as they were intuited involved laying aside various preconceptions derived from science; this laying aside was called reduction, epoche, or bracketing the world.
D.Bell, Husserl, Routledge, 1990. (General discussion of his philosophy.)
E.Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 1931 (French), 1950 (German), Nijhoff, 1960 (English). Cf. also his The Idea of Phenomenology, 1907, Nijhoff, trans. 1964, and The Paris Lectures, 1929, trans. 1964.
G.Ryle, Collected Papers, vol. 1, Hutchinson, 1971. (Includes several relevant items. Chapter 10 brings out some connexions with conceptual analysis, and chapter 12 some with existentialism.)
H.Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement, Nijhoff, 1960. (Extended history, ending with philosophical summary.)
M.Warnock, Existentialism, Oxford UP, 1970. (Includes chapter on Husserl.)
This is the complete article, containing 322 words
(approx. 1 page at 300 words per page).
