Philosophy in Credo: Phenomenology

Edith Stein’s philosophical work falls into two parts, the earlier phenomenology which took its impetus from her years as personal assistant to Husserl, responsible for the editing and transcription of his notes, and her later, Thomist writings.

Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology, first came to prominence through the publication of his Logical Investigations.

Lithuanian-born French philosopher. He studied with the German philosophers Martin Heidegger and Edmund Husserl, and helped to introduce phenomenology into France in the 1930s.

Marcel’s philosophy is discursive and unsystematic: the expression of a reflective exploration rather than a record of conclusions reached.

German existentialist philosopher: he expounded his ontological system in Being and Time (1927). For Heidegger there was only one question, die Seinsfrage (the question of being).

Merleau-Ponty has been presented both as a phenomenologist and as an existentialist, but a study of his thought reveals the limited utility of general labels of this kind.

The early years of Scheler’s philosophical career were spent in Jena, which at that time was dominated by idealism of the neo-Kantian variety. However the study of Husserl’s Logical Investigations converted him to phenomenology, which he interpreted as essentially realist in character.

The first stage in Paul Ricoeur’s thought, reinforced by his study of the works of Jaspers in a prisoner of war camp in Germany during the Second World War, is existentialist.

French philosopher, novelist, and dramatist; chief French exponent of atheistic existentialism.

Nicolai Hartmann, a major German philosopher of the first half of the twentieth century, was primarily a metaphysician, but is best known in the English-speaking world for his monumental Ethics.

From The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy
The leading Polish phenomenologist, who taught in Lvov and Cracow and became prominent in the English-speaking world above all through his work in aesthetics and philosophy of literature.

French writer, existentialist, and feminist whose works include The Second Sex (1949) and The Coming of Age (1970), a study of how different cultures view old age.

Sellars’ published work includes significant contributions to metaphysics and epistemology, to the philosophies of mind, language and science, and to moral philosophy and the theory of action.

From The Penguin Dictionary of Sociology
This is a type of sociology derived from phenomenological philosophy. It takes as its main aim the analysis and description of everyday life.

From Encyclopedia of Consciousness
Phenomenology counts as one of the important philosophical traditions in the twentieth century. The following entry outlines and discusses some of its central contributions to the study of consciousness.

From Encyclopedia of Medical Anthropology: Health and Illness in the World's Cultures
The last quarter of the 20th century has seen a shift in the social sciences, especially in anthropology, from objectified descriptions of the body in health and illness to subjective, in-depth explications of the body as lived.

From Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science
Phenomenology is the study of how the world (material, mental, or cultural) appears to me. Given the common view of scientific observation as objective, unaffected by a point of view, it is natural that controversy exists over the role of phenomenology in science.

From Dictionary of Visual Discourse: A Dialectical Lexicon of Terms
In Husserl's hands, phenomenology became ‘Transcendental Phenomenology’, a foundational, descriptive science of act-correlates of intentional processes involved in the constitution of all possible meaning formations.

The state of being aware of oneself and one's surroundings, without hindrance from sleep, illness, drugs, or hypnotism. This awareness is not purely of external events or phenomena, but also of one's own feelings, beliefs, and mental events.

From The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy
Presence to the mind without intermediaries. The term ‘immediate’ and its cognates have been used extensively throughout the history of philosophy, generally without much explanation.

From The Edinburgh International Encyclopaedia of Psychoanalysis
The cardinal principle of phenomenology, the concept of intentionality originated with the Scholastics in the medieval period and was resurrected by Brentano in the nineteenth century.

From Key Concepts in Critical Social Theory
As the term suggests, ‘intersubjectivity’ denotes the existence of a between-world, connecting individual human subjectivities. Theories differ on the precise details of how this between-world is constituted.

In philosophy, way of knowing directly; immediate apprehension. The Greeks understood intuition to be the grasp of universal principles by the intelligence (nous), as distinguished from the fleeting impressions of the senses.

From The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy
Of or relating to apprehension by the intellect. In a strict sense the term refers to non-sensuous data given to the cognitive faculty, which discloses their intelligible meaning as distinguished from their sensible apprehension.

From Dictionary of Visual Discourse: A Dialectical Lexicon of Terms
The inverted positivism of phenomenological method which, in its passion for vivid immediacy (the ‘seeing of essences’, Wesensschau), forgets its inherent limits by failing to explicate its grounding assumption of the immediate access to lived experience and the life-world.