Phenomenology has at least three main meanings in
philosophical history: one in the writings of
G.W.F. Hegel, another in the writings of
Edmund Husserl in
1920, and a third, deriving from Husserl's work, in the writings of his former research assistant
Martin Heidegger in
1927:For
G.W.F. Hegel, phenomenology is an approach to
philosophy that begins with an exploration of
phenomena (what presents itself to us in conscious experience) as a means to finally grasp the absolute, logical, ontological and metaphysical Spirit that is behind phenomena. This has been called a "dialectical phenomenology".For
Edmund Husserl, phenomenology is "the reflective study of the essence of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view" Phenomenology takes the intuitive experience of
phenomena (what presents itself to us in phenomenological reflexion) as its starting point and tries to extract from it the essential features of experiences and the
essence of what we experience. When generalized to the essential features of any possible experience, this has been called "transcendental phenomenology". Husserl's view was based on aspects of the work of
Franz Brentano and was developed further by philosophers such as
Maurice Merleau-Ponty,
Max Scheler,
Edith Stein,
Dietrich von Hildebrand and
Emmanuel Levinas.
Martin Heidegger believed that Husserl's approach overlooked basic structural features of both the subject and object of experience (what he called their "being"), and expanded phenomenological enquiry to encompass our understanding and experience of Being itself, thus making phenomenology the method (in the first phase of his career at least) of the study of being:
ontology.
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