Phenomenology

Phenomenology is the study of experience, how things appear to us. The word comes from the Greek but was elaborated in the early nineteenth century on the basis of Immanuel Kant's conception of the world as phenomenon, the world of our experience (as opposed to the world as noumenon, the world as it is "in itself"). Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel famously employed the term in Phänomenologie des Geistes (1807; The Phenomenology of Spirit), suggesting that all knowledge was a matter of appearance with no world "in itself" other than the one we know. But phenomenology came of age with Edmund Husserl, who turned the Hegelian perspective into a rigorous philosophical method. Husserl in turn gave birth to a number of remarkable students, who together would set the tone for much of European philosophy in the twentieth century. Among them are Martin Heidegger, Max Scheler, Emmanuel Lévinas, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.