Phenomenology is a method for treating consciousness as a theme of philosophical discussion. According to phenomenology, all description, analysis, explanation, or other dialectical activity must be understood as an interpretation that ultimately depends on, and refers to, human experience as it is lived. 'Experience', in this connection, means everything that happens of which one is aware, considered with respect to one's awareness of it. The method of phenomenology consists in describing events as they transpire in the first instance, without including prior prejudice or subsequent knowledge, without including idealized treatment and with due respect to those confusions, ambiguities, problems or surprises that are an unavoidable part of existence. Since what we want to understand is how we make experience intelligible, we have to treat it as presenting itself only partially determinate for the understanding in the first place.
Phenomenology depends on a preliminary "reduction", or "bracketing" of our assumptions. We suspend judgment on the way things "really are", as they might be considered in themselves independently of our minds, or without respect to how we perceive them. We also suspend our interpretations of our own experience, and take care not to treat posterior knowledge as prior. In particular, scientific entities (eg. pheromones, electrons, gravitational fields) have, at best, a restricted place in the description of any event – save, perhaps, the occasion of scientific theorization or discovery, and even then only as a problem, not as pre-given knowledge. This isn't because phenomenology is hostile to science, or indifferent; on the contrary, phenomenology is motivated by a desire that science be able to sustain the process of theoretical debate and revision. This is accomplished by offering due respect to the font from which all scientific theory takes its problems and discoveries, namely consciousness. What we concern ourselves with when we do phenomenology, is what it's like to see, know, or feel just what we do, when we do so, and nothing more; this is the essence of the experience.
Phenomenology understands consciousness as 'intentional'. This is a technical term inherited from Scholastic philosophy; it means that every way in which consciousness comes to be determined – every perception or feeling, every judgment, every desire – has someone for whom it is (its 'subject'), and something that it is about (its 'object'). Intentional objects may or may not be actual existing things, but however they may be, they are of interest to the phenomenologist. Anything we want to say about objects, or about the subject (the self), must be determined by the quality and content of experience.
Historically, phenomenology may be contrasted with the method previously common in modern philosophy, and still enjoying a predominant professional acceptance; that method is known as representationalism. This doctrine maintains that all consciousness consists in representations of a reality outside it. Phenomenology considers experience as ontologically primary, and subject and object as derivative; representationalism considers subject and object primary, and tries to derive experience from their mutual conformity. Representationalism must therefore be inherently dualistic: self and world, mind and nature, transcendent reality and unreal imagination – these are turned into cosmological ideas that, it is said, must structure all legitimate discourse. It is also prone to the worst skepticism, and even nihilism. Representationalism holds that knowledge is the accurate representation in consciousness of a transcendent world to which the representation corresponds. But how can we ever determine whether our representation is accurate? The object is held to be outside of my consciousness; how could I ever compare them? If what I have in my consciousness isn't even the "real world", but only my representation of it, how can I even know that there is a real world at all? Phenomenology obviates these questions, because any talk of "the world" only has sense for a human being when it is understood to mean exactly what it is that we perceive – in other words, if "world" is defined in terms of human intentionality.
Phenomenology is largely associated with what is known in the English-speaking world as "Continental philosophy", which is to say, German and French philosophy. Its most dramatic developments occurred in the first half of the twentieth century, but it remains of significant interest among philosophers. It influenced, and was influenced by, existentialism, and it continues to affect the development of postmodern thought. There are also some connections between phenomenology in its earliest stages, and American pragmatism, and those ties have been strongly renewed in recent years.
Arguably the three greatest early works of phenomenology, and the definitive sources for phenomenology as a method or as a tradition, are:
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