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Difference Between Case Study and Phenomenology

Main difference – case study vs phenomenology.

Case study and phenomenology are two terms that are often used in the field of social science s and research. Both these terms refer to types of research methods ; however, phenomenology is also a concept in philosophical studies. As a research methodology, the main difference between case study and phenomenology is that case study is an in-depth and detailed investigation of the development of a single event, situation, or an individual over a period of time whereas phenomenology is a study that is designed to understand the subjective, lived experiences and perspectives of participants.

In this article, we will be discussing,

     1. What is a Case Study           – Definition, Use, Data Collection, Limitations      2. What is Phenomenology           – Definition, Use, Data Collection, Limitations      3. What is the difference between Case Study and Phenomenology

What is a Case Study

A case study is defined as “an empirical inquiry that investigates a contemporary phenomenon within its real-life context; when the boundaries between phenomenon and context are not clearly evident; and in which multiple sources of evidence are used” (Yin,1984).  In simple terms, it is an in-depth and detailed investigation of the development of a single event, situation, or an individual over a period of time. Case studies are often used to explore and unearth complex issues such as social issues, medical conditions, etc. Many researchers use case study method to explore social issues like prostitution, drug addiction, unemployment, and poverty. Case studies can be qualitative and/or quantitative in nature.

A case study commences with identifying and defining the research problem; then the researcher has to select the cases and decide techniques for data collection and analysis. This is followed by collecting data in the field and evaluating and analyzing the data. The final step in a case study involves preparing the research report.  Data collection methods in a case study involve observations, questionnaires, interviews, analysis of recorded data, etc. A successful case study is always context-sensitive, holistic, systematic, layered and comprehensive.

Case studies are sometimes classified into three categories known as exploratory, descriptive and explanatory case studies. Ethnographies are also considered as a type of case studies.

Although case studies offer detailed and in-depth information about a particular phenomenon, it is difficult to use this information to form generalization since they only focus on a single phenomenon.

Figure 1: Questionnaires can be used to collect data for case studies.

What is Phenomenology

Phenomenology is both a philosophy and a research method. As a philosophical study, phenomenology refers to the study of the structures of experience and consciousness. In the field of research, it refers to a study that is designed to understand the subjective, lived experiences and perspectives of participants. Phenomenology is based on the principle that a single experience can be interpreted in multiple ways and that reality consists of each participant’s interpretation of the said experience. Thus, phenomenology provides information about unique individual experiences, offering a rich and complete description of human experiences and meanings.

Data is collected in phenomenology through long and intensive, semi-structured or unstructured personal interviews. The researcher may also have to conduct several interview sessions with each participant since phenomenology relies heavily on interviews. However, the information gathered through these interviews may also depend on the interviewing skills of the researcher and the articulate skills of the participants. This is a limitation of this method.

Figure 2: Phenomenology often involves long personal interviews.

Case Study: Case study is an in-depth and detailed investigation of the development of a single event, situation, or an individual over a period of time.

Phenomenology: Phenomenology is a study that is designed to understand the subjective, lived experiences and perspectives of participants.

Data Collection

Case Study: Data collection methods include observations, interviews, questionnaires, etc.

Phenomenology: Interviews are the main method of data collection.

Case Study: Case studies focus on a single incident, event, organization, or an individual.

Phenomenology: Phenomenology focus on various individuals and their experiences.

Limitations

Case Study: The information obtained from a case study cannot be used to make generalizations.

Phenomenology: Information relies heavily on the interviewing skills of the researcher and the articulate skills of the participants.

Reference: 1. Yin, Robert. “Case study research. Beverly Hills.” (1984).

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Case Study vs. Phenomenology

What's the difference.

Case study and phenomenology are both research methods used in social sciences to gain a deeper understanding of a particular phenomenon. However, they differ in their approach and focus. Case study involves an in-depth analysis of a specific case or individual, aiming to provide a detailed description and explanation of the phenomenon under investigation. It often involves collecting and analyzing various types of data, such as interviews, observations, and documents. On the other hand, phenomenology focuses on understanding the lived experiences and subjective perspectives of individuals. It aims to uncover the essence and meaning of a phenomenon by exploring the thoughts, feelings, and perceptions of those involved. Phenomenology often involves interviews and reflective analysis to gain insights into the subjective experiences of individuals. Overall, while case study emphasizes detailed analysis of a specific case, phenomenology focuses on understanding the subjective experiences and meanings associated with a phenomenon.

Further Detail

Introduction.

Research methodologies play a crucial role in understanding and exploring various phenomena in different fields. Two commonly used methodologies are case study and phenomenology. While both approaches aim to gain insights and generate knowledge, they differ in their focus, data collection methods, and analysis techniques. In this article, we will compare the attributes of case study and phenomenology, highlighting their similarities and differences.

Case study is a research method that involves an in-depth investigation of a particular individual, group, or phenomenon within its real-life context. It aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of the subject under study by examining multiple variables and their interrelationships. Case studies often utilize a combination of qualitative and quantitative data, including interviews, observations, documents, and archival records.

One of the key strengths of case study research is its ability to provide rich and detailed descriptions of complex phenomena. By focusing on a specific case, researchers can explore the intricacies and nuances that may not be captured by broader research designs. Case studies also allow for the examination of rare or unique cases, providing valuable insights that can contribute to theory development or inform practical applications.

However, case studies also have limitations. Due to their in-depth nature, they may be time-consuming and resource-intensive. Generalizability can be a concern, as findings from a single case may not be applicable to other contexts or populations. Additionally, the subjective interpretation of data by the researcher can introduce bias, potentially impacting the validity and reliability of the study.

Phenomenology

Phenomenology is a qualitative research approach that focuses on understanding the lived experiences of individuals and the meanings they attribute to those experiences. It aims to explore the essence and structure of a phenomenon as it is perceived by the participants. Phenomenological research often involves in-depth interviews, participant observations, and analysis of personal narratives or texts.

One of the main strengths of phenomenology is its emphasis on capturing the subjective experiences of individuals. By delving into the lived experiences, emotions, and perspectives of participants, researchers can gain a deeper understanding of the phenomenon under investigation. Phenomenology also allows for the exploration of complex and abstract concepts, shedding light on the underlying meanings and motivations.

However, phenomenology also has its limitations. The findings may be highly subjective and context-dependent, limiting their generalizability. The researcher's interpretation and biases can influence the analysis and findings. Additionally, the process of phenomenological analysis can be time-consuming and require significant expertise in qualitative research methods.

While case study and phenomenology differ in their focus and approach, they share some commonalities. Both methodologies involve an in-depth exploration of a particular subject, aiming to gain a comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon under study. They both utilize qualitative data collection methods, such as interviews and observations, to gather rich and detailed information.

However, there are also notable differences between case study and phenomenology. Case study research often examines multiple variables and their interrelationships, while phenomenology focuses on the subjective experiences and meanings attributed by individuals. Case studies aim to provide a holistic view of a complex phenomenon within its real-life context, whereas phenomenology aims to uncover the essence and structure of a phenomenon as it is perceived by the participants.

Another difference lies in the analysis techniques employed. In case study research, data analysis often involves a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods, allowing for a comprehensive examination of the subject. Phenomenological analysis, on the other hand, focuses on identifying themes, patterns, and structures within the qualitative data, aiming to uncover the underlying meanings and essences.

Furthermore, case studies are often used in applied fields, such as psychology, business, and education, where practical implications and real-life contexts are of particular interest. Phenomenology, on the other hand, is commonly employed in fields such as sociology, anthropology, and philosophy, where understanding subjective experiences and exploring abstract concepts are central to the research objectives.

Case study and phenomenology are two distinct research methodologies that offer valuable insights into various phenomena. While case study research provides a comprehensive understanding of complex phenomena within their real-life contexts, phenomenology focuses on exploring the subjective experiences and meanings attributed by individuals. Both approaches have their strengths and limitations, and the choice between them depends on the research objectives, the nature of the phenomenon under study, and the available resources. By understanding the attributes of case study and phenomenology, researchers can make informed decisions about the most appropriate methodology to employ in their studies.

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Case Study vs. Phenomenology: What's the Difference?

Key Differences

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Marked Similarities and Key Differences between Case Study and Phenomenological Research Design

Case study and phenomenological research design share commonalities as qualitative research methods. Both approaches seek to provide in-depth insights into the complexities of human experiences and phenomena. They emphasize a qualitative nature, prioritizing rich, detailed exploration through methods like interviews, observations, and document analysis. Additionally, both approaches acknowledge the importance of context in understanding the subject matter and often involve flexible research designs that adapt to evolving insights. Moreover, they share a participant-centered focus, valuing the perspectives and experiences of those involved. In terms of analysis, both methodologies often employ inductive approaches, deriving themes and patterns from the collected data rather than imposing pre-existing theories.

Despite these similarities, key distinctions exist between case study and phenomenological research design. The primary focus of case studies is on a specific instance or bounded system, aiming for a holistic understanding within its real-life context. In contrast, phenomenological research design centers on uncovering the essence of lived experiences, exploring how individuals interpret and make sense of their encounters. The unit of analysis differs, with case studies examining a case itself (individual, group, organization), while phenomenological research focuses on the lived experiences of individuals.

Generalization is not the primary goal for either, but case studies may contribute to theory development, whereas phenomenological research is more inclined towards describing experiences rather than theory building. The role of the researcher also varies, with case study researchers often actively engaging with the case, while phenomenological researchers adopt a more neutral stance, bracketing preconceptions to facilitate a direct exploration of participants’ experiences.

These differences underscore the importance of choosing the most appropriate approach based on the specific research objectives and questions at hand. In this blog post, we highlight some of the noticeable similarities and stark differences between case study and phenomenological research design. But first of all, let us discuss the similarities between the two research designs.

Similarities between Case Study and Phenomenological Research Design

  While case study and phenomenological research design have distinct characteristics, there are some very profound similarities between the two qualitative research approaches:

• Qualitative nature:
• Both case study and phenomenological research are qualitative research designs. They aim to explore and understand the complexities of human experiences and phenomena in depth.
• In-depth exploration:
• Both methods involve an in-depth exploration of the subject matter. Whether it’s a specific case or the lived experiences of individuals, researchers using these approaches seek to uncover rich, detailed information.
• Emphasis on context:
• Both approaches acknowledge the importance of context in understanding the phenomenon under investigation. Case studies often examine a case within its real-life context, while phenomenological research explores the subjective experiences within the context in which they occur.
• Flexible research design:
• Both case study and phenomenological research design allow for flexibility in their research design. Researchers have the freedom to adapt their methods and data collection techniques based on the evolving understanding of the phenomenon.
• Holistic approach:
• Both approaches often take a holistic perspective. Case studies aim to provide a comprehensive understanding of the entire case, considering various aspects and relationships. Phenomenological research seeks to capture the essence of the lived experience as a whole.
• Use of qualitative data collection methods:
• Both methodologies typically rely on qualitative data collection methods, such as interviews, observations, and document analysis. These methods allow researchers to gather rich, detailed information directly from participants.
• Participant-centered:
• Both approaches prioritize the experiences and perspectives of participants. Whether studying a case or exploring lived experiences, the goal is to capture the participant’s viewpoint and make sense of their unique context.
• Inductive analysis:
• Both case study and phenomenological research often involve inductive analysis. Researchers aim to derive themes, patterns, and insights from the data rather than imposing pre-existing theories or frameworks.
• Rich descriptions:
• Both methodologies value the production of rich, detailed descriptions. Whether describing the intricacies of a case or the nuances of individual experiences, researchers aim to provide a thorough account of the subject of study.
• Subjectivity of Researcher:
• Both methods recognize the subjectivity of the researcher and the influence they may have on the research process. Researchers in both case study and phenomenological research design often engage in reflexivity to acknowledge and address their own biases.

While these similarities exist, it’s essential to recognize the differences as well, as they shape the specific goals, methods, and outcomes of each approach. Researchers should carefully consider their research questions and objectives when choosing between case study and phenomenological research design. In the next section of the write-up, we discuss key differences between case study and phenomenological research design

Key differences between Case Study and Phenomenological Research Design

Case study and phenomenological research design are two distinct qualitative research approaches, each with its own set of characteristics and purposes. Here are the key differences between them:

• Focus and purpose:
• Focuses on a particular instance or a bounded system (the “case”).
• Aims to provide an in-depth understanding of a specific phenomenon, often within its real-life context.
• Emphasizes a holistic approach to exploring the complexities of a case.
• Focuses on understanding and describing the essence of lived experiences.
• Aims to explore how individuals make sense of and interpret their experiences.
• Emphasizes the subjective nature of the phenomenon under investigation.
• Nature of data:
• Involves a rich and detailed description of the case, including various sources of data such as interviews, observations, documents, and artifacts.
• Seeks to capture the complexity and uniqueness of the case.
• Involves gathering in-depth descriptions of participants’ experiences through methods like interviews and sometimes participant observations.
• Focuses on the meanings individuals attribute to their experiences.
• Unit of analysis:
• The unit of analysis is the case itself, which could be an individual, a group, an organization, or a community.
• The unit of analysis is the lived experience of individuals who have directly encountered the phenomenon being studied.
• Generalization:
• Generalization is typically not the primary goal; instead, the emphasis is on providing detailed insights into a specific case.
• Generalization is often not the main objective, as phenomenological research aims to explore the depth and richness of individual experiences rather than making broad generalizations.
• Analysis approach:
• Analysis often involves pattern recognition, exploring relationships between different elements within the case, and deriving meaningful insights.
• Analysis is focused on identifying and describing the essential themes and structures that characterize the lived experiences of participants.
• Theory development:
• May contribute to theory development, especially when patterns and relationships observed in the case have broader implications. However, it is not the sole and prime aim of the research endeavour
• Emphasizes the description of experiences rather than theory development. However, findings can inform or contribute to existing theories.
• Role of Researcher:
• The researcher often plays an active role, engaging with the case and collecting multiple forms of data.
• The researcher aims for a more neutral stance, trying to bracket their preconceptions to allow for a more direct exploration of participants’ experiences.

Conclusion:

In summary, while both case study and phenomenological research are qualitative approaches that delve into the richness of human experiences, they differ in their focus, purpose, unit of analysis, and the nature of data they collect and analyze. The choice between the two depends on the research question, objectives, and the nature of the phenomenon under investigation.

Dr Syed Hafeez Ahmad

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Difference Between Case Study and Phenomenology

• Categorized under Miscellaneous | Difference Between Case Study and Phenomenology

Both case study and phenomenology are involved with research processes. They are also concerned with in-depth investigations of their respective subjects. Regarding their distinctions, a case study is a research method while phenomenology is a methodology as well as a philosophical movement. More of their differences are discussed below. 

What is a Case Study?

A case study is an in-depth investigation of an individual, group, institution, or event. It is a research method which examines a particular case in detail and answers the questions “why”, “how”, and “what”. Researchers who utilize this method may employ interviews, observations, document analysis, psychological testing, and other pertinent techniques in gathering information. The case-study method is believed to be first introduced by Frederic Le Play, a French engineer, sociologist, and economist, in 1829. Le Play had a comprehensive study on family budgeting (2017, Sclafani).  

The following are the different types of case studies: 

• Explanatory 

This type focuses on an explanation for a phenomenon or research question. It answers the questions “how” and “why”.  

• Exploratory 

This often leads to a large-scale research since it aims to prove that further investigation is essential. Exploratory case studies answer the questions “what” and “how”. 

• Comparative

This type focuses on the comparison of cases and answers questions such as, “How are cases different?” and “How are the cases alike?”. 

This type uses data from various studies to frame the new study. It uses past research to find more information without spending more money and time. 

This type focuses on a more comprehensive understanding of a very specific case. Intrinsic case studies aim to answer the questions “what”, “how”, and “why”. 

• Instrumental

This type aims to help refine a theory or generate more insights. Instrumental case studies play supportive roles.

What is Phenomenology?

“Phenomenology” came from the Ancient Greek word, “phainómenon” which means “thing appearing to view”. It is the study of conscious experiences from the first-person point of view (Gallagher, 2012). As a methodology, it is generally a qualitative approach which centers on the collection of research participants’ descriptions of their lived experiences. 

It is also a philosophical movement founded by Edmund Husserl, a German philosopher, in the early 20 th century. Phenomenology is based on the principle that a certain experience can be perceived in various ways, that an individual’s reality is different from another’s. For instance, you and your friend watched the same movie at the same time and place; however, the feelings and thoughts that you have experienced during the film are generally more positive than those of your friend’s. 

 There are two main approaches to phenomenology (Sloan, & Bowe, 2014): 

• Descriptive Phenomenology 

This is also known as transcendental phenomenology and was developed by Husserl. In this approach, the observer takes a global view of the phenomena. Its focus is on what is being experienced and on how it is being experienced. 

• Interpretive Phenomenology

This is also known as hermeneutic phenomenology or existential phenomenology; this was developed by Martin Heidegger, Husserl’s student, and later his academic assistant.  In this approach, the observer is one with the phenomena and is involved in interpreting meanings. As compared to descriptive phenomenology, interpretive phenomenology is more complex as it takes time and interaction with the environment into consideration. 

Difference between Case Study and Phenomenology

Definition .

A case study is an in-depth investigation of an individual, group, institution, or event. It is a research method which examines a particular case in detail and answers the questions “why”, “how”, and “what”. In comparison, “phenomenology” came from the Ancient Greek word, “phainómenon” which means “thing appearing to view”. It is the study of conscious experiences from the first-person point of view. It is also a philosophical movement based on the principle that a certain experience can be perceived in various ways.

The case-study method is believed to be first introduced by Frederic Le Play, a French engineer, sociologist, and economist, in 1829. Le Play had a comprehensive study on family budgeting. On the other hand, descriptive phenomenology, also known as transcendental phenomenology, was founded by Edmund Husserl, a German philosopher, in the early 20 th century. Consequently, interpretive phenomenology, hermeneutic phenomenology, or existential phenomenology was developed by Martin Heidegger, Husserl’s student, and later his academic assistant.  

Types or Approaches 

The types of case studies include explanatory, exploratory, comparative, collective, intrinsic, and instrumental. In comparison, the two main approaches to phenomenology are descriptive phenomenology and interpretive phenomenology. 

Data Collection Methods

Researchers who conduct case studies may employ interviews, observations, document analysis, psychological testing, and other pertinent techniques in gathering information. As for the phenomenological approach, the main data gathering technic is interviews. 

Research Population 

Case studies focus on an individual, a group, an institution, or an event while phenomenology research looks into the lived experiences of several individuals.   

Case Study vs Phenomenology

Summary 

• A case study is an in-depth investigation of an individual, group, institution, or event.
• Phenomenology is the study of conscious experiences from the first-person point of view.
• The case-study method is believed to be first introduced by Le Play while descriptive phenomenology was founded by Husserl. 
• Researchers who conduct case studies may employ interviews, observations, document analysis, and psychological testing while those who conduct phenomenological research mainly use interviews. 
• Case studies generally focus on an individual or group while phenomenological research delves into the experiences of several individuals. 
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Home » Phenomenology – Methods, Examples and Guide

Phenomenology – Methods, Examples and Guide

Table of Contents

Phenomenology

Definition:

Phenomenology is a branch of philosophy that is concerned with the study of subjective experience and consciousness. It is based on the idea that the essence of things can only be understood through the way they appear to us in experience, rather than by analyzing their objective properties or functions.

Phenomenology is often associated with the work of philosopher Edmund Husserl, who developed a method of phenomenological inquiry that involves suspending one’s preconceptions and assumptions about the world and focusing on the pure experience of phenomena as they present themselves to us. This involves bracketing out any judgments, beliefs, or theories about the phenomena, and instead attending closely to the subjective qualities of the experience itself.

Phenomenology has been influential not only in philosophy but also in other fields such as psychology, sociology, and anthropology, where it has been used to explore questions of perception, meaning, and human experience.

History of Phenomenology

Phenomenology is a philosophical movement that began in the early 20th century, primarily in Germany. It was founded by Edmund Husserl, a German philosopher who is often considered the father of phenomenology.

Husserl’s work was deeply influenced by the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, particularly his emphasis on the importance of subjective experience. However, Husserl sought to go beyond Kant’s transcendental idealism by developing a rigorous method of inquiry that would allow him to examine the structures of consciousness and the nature of experience in a systematic way.

Husserl’s first major work, Logical Investigations (1900-1901), laid the groundwork for phenomenology by introducing the idea of intentional consciousness, or the notion that all consciousness is directed towards objects in the world. He went on to develop a method of “bracketing” or “epoche,” which involved setting aside one’s preconceptions and assumptions about the world in order to focus on the pure experience of phenomena as they present themselves.

Other philosophers, such as Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre, built on Husserl’s work and developed their own versions of phenomenology. Heidegger, in particular, emphasized the importance of language and the role it plays in shaping our understanding of the world, while Sartre focused on the relationship between consciousness and freedom.

Today, phenomenology continues to be an active area of philosophical inquiry, with many contemporary philosophers drawing on its insights to explore questions of perception, meaning, and human experience.

Types of Phenomenology

There are several types of phenomenology that have emerged over time, each with its own focus and approach. Here are some of the most prominent types of phenomenology:

Transcendental Phenomenology

This is the type of phenomenology developed by Edmund Husserl, which aims to investigate the structures of consciousness and experience in a systematic way by using the method of epoche or bracketing.

Existential Phenomenology

This type of phenomenology, developed by philosophers such as Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre, focuses on the subjective experience of individual existence, emphasizing the role of freedom, authenticity, and the search for meaning in human life.

Hermeneutic Phenomenology

This type of phenomenology, developed by philosophers such as Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur, emphasizes the role of interpretation and understanding in human experience, particularly in the context of language and culture.

Phenomenology of Perception

This type of phenomenology, developed by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, emphasizes the embodied and lived nature of perception, arguing that perception is not simply a matter of passive reception but is instead an active and dynamic process of engagement with the world.

Phenomenology of Sociality

This type of phenomenology, developed by philosophers such as Alfred Schutz and Emmanuel Levinas, focuses on the social dimension of human experience, exploring how we relate to others and how our understanding of the world is shaped by our interactions with others.

Methods of Phenomenology

Here are some of the key methods that phenomenologists use to investigate human experience:

Epoche (Bracketing)

This is a key method in phenomenology, which involves setting aside one’s preconceptions and assumptions about the world in order to focus on the pure experience of phenomena as they present themselves. By bracketing out any judgments, beliefs, or theories about the phenomena, one can attend more closely to the subjective qualities of the experience itself.

Introspection

Phenomenologists often rely on introspection, or a careful examination of one’s own mental states and experiences, as a way of gaining insight into the nature of consciousness and subjective experience.

Descriptive Analysis

Phenomenology also involves a careful description and analysis of subjective experiences, paying close attention to the way things appear to us in experience, rather than analyzing their objective properties or functions.

Another method used in phenomenology is the variation technique, in which one systematically varies different aspects of an experience in order to gain a deeper understanding of its structure and meaning.

Phenomenological Reduction

This method involves reducing a phenomenon to its essential features or structures, in order to gain a deeper understanding of its nature and significance.

Epoché Variations

This method involves examining different aspects of an experience through the process of epoché or bracketing, to gain a more nuanced understanding of its subjective qualities and significance.

Applications of Phenomenology

Phenomenology has a wide range of applications across many fields, including philosophy, psychology, sociology, education, and healthcare. Here are some of the key applications of phenomenology:

• Philosophy : Phenomenology is primarily a philosophical approach, and has been used to explore a wide range of philosophical issues related to consciousness, perception, identity, and the nature of reality.
• Psychology : Phenomenology has been used in psychology to study human experience and consciousness, particularly in the areas of perception, emotion, and cognition. It has also been used to develop new forms of psychotherapy, such as existential and humanistic psychotherapy.
• Sociology : Phenomenology has been used in sociology to study the subjective experience of individuals within social contexts, particularly in the areas of culture, identity, and social change.
• Education : Phenomenology has been used in education to explore the subjective experience of students and teachers, and to develop new approaches to teaching and learning that take into account the individual experiences of learners.
• Healthcare : Phenomenology has been used in healthcare to explore the subjective experience of patients and healthcare providers, and to develop new approaches to patient care that are more patient-centered and focused on the individual’s experience of illness.
• Design : Phenomenology has been used in design to better understand the subjective experience of users and to create more user-centered products and experiences.
• Business : Phenomenology has been used in business to better understand the subjective experience of consumers and to develop more effective marketing strategies and user experiences.

Purpose of Phenomenology

The purpose of phenomenology is to understand the subjective experience of human beings. Phenomenology is concerned with the way things appear to us in experience, rather than their objective properties or functions. The goal of phenomenology is to describe and analyze the essential features of subjective experience, and to gain a deeper understanding of the nature of consciousness, perception, and human existence.

Phenomenology is particularly concerned with the ways in which subjective experience is structured, and with the underlying meanings and significance of these structures. Phenomenologists seek to identify the essential features of subjective experience, such as intentionality, embodiment, and lived time, and to explore the ways in which these features give rise to meaning and significance in human life.

Phenomenology has a wide range of applications across many fields, including philosophy, psychology, sociology, education, healthcare, and design. In each of these fields, phenomenology is used to gain a deeper understanding of human experience, and to develop new approaches and strategies that are more focused on the subjective experiences of individuals.

Overall, the purpose of phenomenology is to deepen our understanding of human experience and to provide insights into the nature of consciousness, perception, and human existence. Phenomenology offers a unique perspective on the subjective aspects of human life, and its insights have the potential to transform our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.

Examples of Phenomenology

Phenomenology has many real-life examples across different fields. Here are some examples of phenomenology in action:

• Psychology : In psychology, phenomenology is used to study the subjective experience of individuals with mental health conditions. For example, a phenomenological study might explore the experience of anxiety in individuals with generalized anxiety disorder, or the experience of depression in individuals with major depressive disorder.
• Healthcare : In healthcare, phenomenology is used to explore the subjective experience of patients and to develop more patient-centered approaches to care. For example, a phenomenological study might explore the experience of chronic pain in patients, in order to develop more effective pain management strategies that are based on the patient’s individual experience of pain.
• Education : In education, phenomenology is used to study the subjective experience of students and to develop more effective teaching and learning strategies. For example, a phenomenological study might explore the experience of learning in students, in order to develop teaching methods that are more focused on the individual needs and experiences of learners.
• Business : In business, phenomenology is used to better understand the subjective experience of consumers, and to develop more effective marketing strategies and user experiences. For example, a phenomenological study might explore the experience of using a particular product or service, in order to identify areas for improvement and to create a more user-centered experience.
• Design : In design, phenomenology is used to better understand the subjective experience of users, and to create more user-centered products and experiences. For example, a phenomenological study might explore the experience of using a particular app or website, in order to identify ways to improve the user interface and user experience.

When to use Phenomenological Research

Here are some situations where phenomenological research might be appropriate:

• When you want to explore the meaning and significance of an experience : Phenomenological research is particularly useful when you want to gain a deeper understanding of the subjective experience of individuals and the meanings and significance that they attach to their experiences. For example, if you want to understand the experience of being a first-time parent, phenomenological research can help you explore the various emotions, challenges, and joys that are associated with this experience.
• When you want to develop more patient-centered healthcare: Phenomenological research can be useful in healthcare settings where there is a need to develop more patient-centered approaches to care. For example, if you want to improve pain management strategies for patients with chronic pain, phenomenological research can help you gain a better understanding of the individual experiences of pain and the different ways in which patients cope with this experience.
• When you want to develop more effective teaching and learning strategies : Phenomenological research can be used in education settings to explore the subjective experience of students and to develop more effective teaching and learning strategies that are based on the individual needs and experiences of learners.
• When you want to improve the user experience of a product or service: Phenomenological research can be used in design settings to gain a deeper understanding of the subjective experience of users and to develop more user-centered products and experiences.

Characteristics of Phenomenology

Here are some of the key characteristics of phenomenology:

• Focus on subjective experience: Phenomenology is concerned with the subjective experience of individuals, rather than objective facts or data. Phenomenologists seek to understand how individuals experience and interpret the world around them.
• Emphasis on lived experience: Phenomenology emphasizes the importance of lived experience, or the way in which individuals experience the world through their own unique perspectives and histories.
• Reduction to essence: Phenomenology seeks to reduce the complexities of subjective experience to their essential features or structures, in order to gain a deeper understanding of the nature of consciousness, perception, and human existence.
• Emphasis on description: Phenomenology is primarily concerned with describing the features and structures of subjective experience, rather than explaining them in terms of underlying causes or mechanisms.
• Bracketing of preconceptions: Phenomenology involves bracketing or suspending preconceptions and assumptions about the world, in order to approach subjective experience with an open and unbiased perspective.
• Methodological approach: Phenomenology is both a philosophical and methodological approach, which involves a specific set of techniques and procedures for studying subjective experience.
• Multiple approaches: Phenomenology encompasses a wide range of approaches and variations, including transcendental phenomenology, hermeneutic phenomenology, and existential phenomenology, among others.

Advantages of Phenomenology

Phenomenology offers several advantages as a research approach, including:

• Provides rich, in-depth insights: Phenomenology is focused on understanding the subjective experiences of individuals in a particular context, which allows for a rich and in-depth exploration of their experiences, emotions, and perceptions.
• Allows for participant-centered research: Phenomenological research prioritizes the experiences and perspectives of the participants, which makes it a participant-centered approach. This can help to ensure that the research is relevant and meaningful to the participants.
• Provides a flexible approach: Phenomenological research offers a flexible approach that can be adapted to different research questions and contexts. This makes it suitable for use in a wide range of fields and research areas.
• Can uncover new insights : Phenomenological research can uncover new insights into subjective experience and can challenge existing assumptions and beliefs about a particular phenomenon or experience.
• Can inform practice and policy: Phenomenological research can provide insights that can be used to inform practice and policy decisions in fields such as healthcare, education, and design.
• Can be used in combination with other research approaches : Phenomenological research can be used in combination with other research approaches, such as quantitative methods, to provide a more comprehensive understanding of a particular phenomenon or experience.

Limitations of Phenomenology

Despite the many advantages of phenomenology, there are also several limitations that should be taken into account, including:

• Subjective nature: Phenomenology is focused on subjective experience, which means that it can be difficult to generalize findings to a larger population or to other contexts.
• Limited external validity: Because phenomenological research is focused on a specific context or experience, the findings may have limited external validity or generalizability.
• Potential for researcher bias: Phenomenological research relies heavily on the researcher’s interpretations and analyses of the data, which can introduce potential for bias and subjectivity.
• Time-consuming and resource-intensive: Phenomenological research is often time-consuming and resource-intensive, as it involves in-depth data collection and analysis.
• Difficulty with data analysis: Phenomenological research involves a complex process of data analysis, which can be difficult and time-consuming.
• Lack of standardized procedures: Phenomenology encompasses a range of approaches and variations, which can make it difficult to compare findings across studies or to establish standardized procedures.

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Researcher, Academic Writer, Web developer

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Phenomenological Research: Methods And Examples

Ravi was a novice, finding it difficult to select the right research design for his study. He joined a program…

Ravi was a novice, finding it difficult to select the right research design for his study. He joined a program to improve his understanding of research. As a part of his assignment, he was asked to work with a phenomenological research design. To execute good practices in his work, Ravi studied examples of phenomenological research. This let him understand what approaches he needed and areas he could apply the phenomenological method.

What Is Phenomenological Research?

Phenomenological research method, examples of phenomenological research.

A qualitative research approach that helps in describing the lived experiences of an individual is known as phenomenological research. The phenomenological method focuses on studying the phenomena that have impacted an individual. This approach highlights the specifics and identifies a phenomenon as perceived by an individual in a situation. It can also be used to study the commonality in the behaviors of a group of people.  

Phenomenological research has its roots in psychology, education and philosophy. Its aim is to extract the purest data that hasn’t been attained before. Sometimes researchers record personal notes about what they learn from the subjects. This adds to the credibility of data, allowing researchers to remove these influences to produce unbiased narratives. Through this method, researchers attempt to answer two major questions:

• What are the subject’s experiences related to the phenomenon?
• What factors have influenced the experience of the phenomenon?

A researcher may also use observations, art and documents to construct a universal meaning of experiences as they establish an understanding of the phenomenon. The richness of the data obtained in phenomenological research opens up opportunities for further inquiry.

Now that we know what is phenomenological research , let’s look at some methods and examples.

Phenomenological research can be based on single case studies or a pool of samples. Single case studies identify system failures and discrepancies. Data from multiple samples highlights many possible situations. In either case, these are the methods a researcher can use:

• The researcher can observe the subject or access written records, such as texts, journals, poetry, music or diaries
• They can conduct conversations and interviews with open-ended questions, which allow researchers to make subjects comfortable enough to open up
• Action research and focus workshops are great ways to put at ease candidates who have psychological barriers

To mine deep information, a researcher must show empathy and establish a friendly rapport with participants. These kinds of phenomenological research methods require researchers to focus on the subject and avoid getting influenced.

Phenomenological research is a way to understand individual situations in detail. The theories are developed transparently, with the evidence available for a reader to access. We can use this methodology in situations such as:

• The experiences of every war survivor or war veteran are unique. Research can illuminate their mental states and survival strategies in a new world.
• Losing family members to Covid-19 hasn’t been easy. A detailed study of survivors and people who’ve lost loved ones can help understand coping mechanisms and long-term traumas.
• What’s it like to be diagnosed with a terminal disease when a person becomes a parent? The conflict of birth and death can’t be generalized, but research can record emotions and experiences.

Phenomenological research is a powerful way to understand personal experiences. It provides insights into individual actions and motivations by examining long-held assumptions. New theories, policies and responses can be developed on this basis. But, the phenomenological research design will be ineffective if subjects are unable to communicate due to language, age, cognition or other barriers. Managers must be alert to such limitations and sharp to interpret results without bias.

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Phenomenology

Phenomenology is the study of structures of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view. The central structure of an experience is its intentionality, its being directed toward something, as it is an experience of or about some object. An experience is directed toward an object by virtue of its content or meaning (which represents the object) together with appropriate enabling conditions.

Phenomenology as a discipline is distinct from but related to other key disciplines in philosophy, such as ontology, epistemology, logic, and ethics. Phenomenology has been practiced in various guises for centuries, but it came into its own in the early 20th century in the works of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and others. Phenomenological issues of intentionality, consciousness, qualia, and first-person perspective have been prominent in recent philosophy of mind.

1. What is Phenomenology?

2. the discipline of phenomenology, 3. from phenomena to phenomenology, 4. the history and varieties of phenomenology, 5. phenomenology and ontology, epistemology, logic, ethics, 6. phenomenology and philosophy of mind, 7. phenomenology in contemporary consciousness theory, classical texts, contemporary studies, other internet resources, related entries.

Phenomenology is commonly understood in either of two ways: as a disciplinary field in philosophy, or as a movement in the history of philosophy.

The discipline of phenomenology may be defined initially as the study of structures of experience, or consciousness. Literally, phenomenology is the study of “phenomena”: appearances of things, or things as they appear in our experience, or the ways we experience things, thus the meanings things have in our experience. Phenomenology studies conscious experience as experienced from the subjective or first person point of view. This field of philosophy is then to be distinguished from, and related to, the other main fields of philosophy: ontology (the study of being or what is), epistemology (the study of knowledge), logic (the study of valid reasoning), ethics (the study of right and wrong action), etc.

The historical movement of phenomenology is the philosophical tradition launched in the first half of the 20 th century by Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, et al . In that movement, the discipline of phenomenology was prized as the proper foundation of all philosophy—as opposed, say, to ethics or metaphysics or epistemology. The methods and characterization of the discipline were widely debated by Husserl and his successors, and these debates continue to the present day. (The definition of phenomenology offered above will thus be debatable, for example, by Heideggerians, but it remains the starting point in characterizing the discipline.)

In recent philosophy of mind, the term “phenomenology” is often restricted to the characterization of sensory qualities of seeing, hearing, etc.: what it is like to have sensations of various kinds. However, our experience is normally much richer in content than mere sensation. Accordingly, in the phenomenological tradition, phenomenology is given a much wider range, addressing the meaning things have in our experience, notably, the significance of objects, events, tools, the flow of time, the self, and others, as these things arise and are experienced in our “life-world”.

Phenomenology as a discipline has been central to the tradition of continental European philosophy throughout the 20 th century, while philosophy of mind has evolved in the Austro-Anglo-American tradition of analytic philosophy that developed throughout the 20 th century. Yet the fundamental character of our mental activity is pursued in overlapping ways within these two traditions. Accordingly, the perspective on phenomenology drawn in this article will accommodate both traditions. The main concern here will be to characterize the discipline of phenomenology, in a contemporary purview, while also highlighting the historical tradition that brought the discipline into its own.

Basically, phenomenology studies the structure of various types of experience ranging from perception, thought, memory, imagination, emotion, desire, and volition to bodily awareness, embodied action, and social activity, including linguistic activity. The structure of these forms of experience typically involves what Husserl called “intentionality”, that is, the directedness of experience toward things in the world, the property of consciousness that it is a consciousness of or about something. According to classical Husserlian phenomenology, our experience is directed toward—represents or “intends”—things only through particular concepts, thoughts, ideas, images, etc. These make up the meaning or content of a given experience, and are distinct from the things they present or mean.

The basic intentional structure of consciousness, we find in reflection or analysis, involves further forms of experience. Thus, phenomenology develops a complex account of temporal awareness (within the stream of consciousness), spatial awareness (notably in perception), attention (distinguishing focal and marginal or “horizonal” awareness), awareness of one’s own experience (self-consciousness, in one sense), self-awareness (awareness-of-oneself), the self in different roles (as thinking, acting, etc.), embodied action (including kinesthetic awareness of one’s movement), purpose or intention in action (more or less explicit), awareness of other persons (in empathy, intersubjectivity, collectivity), linguistic activity (involving meaning, communication, understanding others), social interaction (including collective action), and everyday activity in our surrounding life-world (in a particular culture).

Furthermore, in a different dimension, we find various grounds or enabling conditions—conditions of the possibility—of intentionality, including embodiment, bodily skills, cultural context, language and other social practices, social background, and contextual aspects of intentional activities. Thus, phenomenology leads from conscious experience into conditions that help to give experience its intentionality. Traditional phenomenology has focused on subjective, practical, and social conditions of experience. Recent philosophy of mind, however, has focused especially on the neural substrate of experience, on how conscious experience and mental representation or intentionality are grounded in brain activity. It remains a difficult question how much of these grounds of experience fall within the province of phenomenology as a discipline. Cultural conditions thus seem closer to our experience and to our familiar self-understanding than do the electrochemical workings of our brain, much less our dependence on quantum-mechanical states of physical systems to which we may belong. The cautious thing to say is that phenomenology leads in some ways into at least some background conditions of our experience.

The discipline of phenomenology is defined by its domain of study, its methods, and its main results.

Phenomenology studies structures of conscious experience as experienced from the first-person point of view, along with relevant conditions of experience. The central structure of an experience is its intentionality, the way it is directed through its content or meaning toward a certain object in the world.

We all experience various types of experience including perception, imagination, thought, emotion, desire, volition, and action. Thus, the domain of phenomenology is the range of experiences including these types (among others). Experience includes not only relatively passive experience as in vision or hearing, but also active experience as in walking or hammering a nail or kicking a ball. (The range will be specific to each species of being that enjoys consciousness; our focus is on our own, human, experience. Not all conscious beings will, or will be able to, practice phenomenology, as we do.)

Conscious experiences have a unique feature: we experience them, we live through them or perform them. Other things in the world we may observe and engage. But we do not experience them, in the sense of living through or performing them. This experiential or first-person feature—that of being experienced—is an essential part of the nature or structure of conscious experience: as we say, “I see / think / desire / do …” This feature is both a phenomenological and an ontological feature of each experience: it is part of what it is for the experience to be experienced (phenomenological) and part of what it is for the experience to be (ontological).

How shall we study conscious experience? We reflect on various types of experiences just as we experience them. That is to say, we proceed from the first-person point of view. However, we do not normally characterize an experience at the time we are performing it. In many cases we do not have that capability: a state of intense anger or fear, for example, consumes all of one’s psychic focus at the time. Rather, we acquire a background of having lived through a given type of experience, and we look to our familiarity with that type of experience: hearing a song, seeing a sunset, thinking about love, intending to jump a hurdle. The practice of phenomenology assumes such familiarity with the type of experiences to be characterized. Importantly, also, it is types of experience that phenomenology pursues, rather than a particular fleeting experience—unless its type is what interests us.

Classical phenomenologists practiced some three distinguishable methods. (1) We describe a type of experience just as we find it in our own (past) experience. Thus, Husserl and Merleau-Ponty spoke of pure description of lived experience. (2) We interpret a type of experience by relating it to relevant features of context. In this vein, Heidegger and his followers spoke of hermeneutics, the art of interpretation in context, especially social and linguistic context. (3) We analyze the form of a type of experience. In the end, all the classical phenomenologists practiced analysis of experience, factoring out notable features for further elaboration.

These traditional methods have been ramified in recent decades, expanding the methods available to phenomenology. Thus: (4) In a logico-semantic model of phenomenology, we specify the truth conditions for a type of thinking (say, where I think that dogs chase cats) or the satisfaction conditions for a type of intention (say, where I intend or will to jump that hurdle). (5) In the experimental paradigm of cognitive neuroscience, we design empirical experiments that tend to confirm or refute aspects of experience (say, where a brain scan shows electrochemical activity in a specific region of the brain thought to subserve a type of vision or emotion or motor control). This style of “neurophenomenology” assumes that conscious experience is grounded in neural activity in embodied action in appropriate surroundings—mixing pure phenomenology with biological and physical science in a way that was not wholly congenial to traditional phenomenologists.

What makes an experience conscious is a certain awareness one has of the experience while living through or performing it. This form of inner awareness has been a topic of considerable debate, centuries after the issue arose with Locke’s notion of self-consciousness on the heels of Descartes’ sense of consciousness ( conscience , co-knowledge). Does this awareness-of-experience consist in a kind of inner observation of the experience, as if one were doing two things at once? (Brentano argued no.) Is it a higher-order perception of one’s mind’s operation, or is it a higher-order thought about one’s mental activity? (Recent theorists have proposed both.) Or is it a different form of inherent structure? (Sartre took this line, drawing on Brentano and Husserl.) These issues are beyond the scope of this article, but notice that these results of phenomenological analysis shape the characterization of the domain of study and the methodology appropriate to the domain. For awareness-of-experience is a defining trait of conscious experience, the trait that gives experience a first-person, lived character. It is that lived character of experience that allows a first-person perspective on the object of study, namely, experience, and that perspective is characteristic of the methodology of phenomenology.

Conscious experience is the starting point of phenomenology, but experience shades off into less overtly conscious phenomena. As Husserl and others stressed, we are only vaguely aware of things in the margin or periphery of attention, and we are only implicitly aware of the wider horizon of things in the world around us. Moreover, as Heidegger stressed, in practical activities like walking along, or hammering a nail, or speaking our native tongue, we are not explicitly conscious of our habitual patterns of action. Furthermore, as psychoanalysts have stressed, much of our intentional mental activity is not conscious at all, but may become conscious in the process of therapy or interrogation, as we come to realize how we feel or think about something. We should allow, then, that the domain of phenomenology—our own experience—spreads out from conscious experience into semi-conscious and even unconscious mental activity, along with relevant background conditions implicitly invoked in our experience. (These issues are subject to debate; the point here is to open the door to the question of where to draw the boundary of the domain of phenomenology.)

To begin an elementary exercise in phenomenology, consider some typical experiences one might have in everyday life, characterized in the first person:

• I see that fishing boat off the coast as dusk descends over the Pacific.
• I hear that helicopter whirring overhead as it approaches the hospital.
• I am thinking that phenomenology differs from psychology.
• I wish that warm rain from Mexico were falling like last week.
• I imagine a fearsome creature like that in my nightmare.
• I intend to finish my writing by noon.
• I walk carefully around the broken glass on the sidewalk.
• I stroke a backhand cross-court with that certain underspin.
• I am searching for the words to make my point in conversation.

Here are rudimentary characterizations of some familiar types of experience. Each sentence is a simple form of phenomenological description, articulating in everyday English the structure of the type of experience so described. The subject term “I” indicates the first-person structure of the experience: the intentionality proceeds from the subject. The verb indicates the type of intentional activity described: perception, thought, imagination, etc. Of central importance is the way that objects of awareness are presented or intended in our experiences, especially, the way we see or conceive or think about objects. The direct-object expression (“that fishing boat off the coast”) articulates the mode of presentation of the object in the experience: the content or meaning of the experience, the core of what Husserl called noema. In effect, the object-phrase expresses the noema of the act described, that is, to the extent that language has appropriate expressive power. The overall form of the given sentence articulates the basic form of intentionality in the experience: subject-act-content-object.

Rich phenomenological description or interpretation, as in Husserl, Merleau-Ponty et al ., will far outrun such simple phenomenological descriptions as above. But such simple descriptions bring out the basic form of intentionality. As we interpret the phenomenological description further, we may assess the relevance of the context of experience. And we may turn to wider conditions of the possibility of that type of experience. In this way, in the practice of phenomenology, we classify, describe, interpret, and analyze structures of experiences in ways that answer to our own experience.

In such interpretive-descriptive analyses of experience, we immediately observe that we are analyzing familiar forms of consciousness, conscious experience of or about this or that. Intentionality is thus the salient structure of our experience, and much of phenomenology proceeds as the study of different aspects of intentionality. Thus, we explore structures of the stream of consciousness, the enduring self, the embodied self, and bodily action. Furthermore, as we reflect on how these phenomena work, we turn to the analysis of relevant conditions that enable our experiences to occur as they do, and to represent or intend as they do. Phenomenology then leads into analyses of conditions of the possibility of intentionality, conditions involving motor skills and habits, background social practices, and often language, with its special place in human affairs.

The Oxford English Dictionary presents the following definition: “Phenomenology. a. The science of phenomena as distinct from being (ontology). b. That division of any science which describes and classifies its phenomena. From the Greek phainomenon , appearance.” In philosophy, the term is used in the first sense, amid debates of theory and methodology. In physics and philosophy of science, the term is used in the second sense, albeit only occasionally.

In its root meaning, then, phenomenology is the study of phenomena : literally, appearances as opposed to reality. This ancient distinction launched philosophy as we emerged from Plato’s cave. Yet the discipline of phenomenology did not blossom until the 20th century and remains poorly understood in many circles of contemporary philosophy. What is that discipline? How did philosophy move from a root concept of phenomena to the discipline of phenomenology?

Originally, in the 18th century, “phenomenology” meant the theory of appearances fundamental to empirical knowledge, especially sensory appearances. The Latin term “Phenomenologia” was introduced by Christoph Friedrich Oetinger in 1736. Subsequently, the German term “Phänomenologia” was used by Johann Heinrich Lambert, a follower of Christian Wolff. Immanuel Kant used the term occasionally in various writings, as did Johann Gottlieb Fichte. In 1807, G. W. F. Hegel wrote a book titled Phänomenologie des Geistes (usually translated as Phenomenology of Spirit ). By 1889 Franz Brentano used the term to characterize what he called “descriptive psychology”. From there Edmund Husserl took up the term for his new science of consciousness, and the rest is history.

Suppose we say phenomenology studies phenomena: what appears to us—and its appearing. How shall we understand phenomena? The term has a rich history in recent centuries, in which we can see traces of the emerging discipline of phenomenology.

In a strict empiricist vein, what appears before the mind are sensory data or qualia: either patterns of one’s own sensations (seeing red here now, feeling this ticklish feeling, hearing that resonant bass tone) or sensible patterns of worldly things, say, the looks and smells of flowers (what John Locke called secondary qualities of things). In a strict rationalist vein, by contrast, what appears before the mind are ideas, rationally formed “clear and distinct ideas” (in René Descartes’ ideal). In Immanuel Kant’s theory of knowledge, fusing rationalist and empiricist aims, what appears to the mind are phenomena defined as things-as-they-appear or things-as-they-are-represented (in a synthesis of sensory and conceptual forms of objects-as-known). In Auguste Comte’s theory of science, phenomena ( phenomenes ) are the facts ( faits , what occurs) that a given science would explain.

In 18 th and 19 th century epistemology, then, phenomena are the starting points in building knowledge, especially science. Accordingly, in a familiar and still current sense, phenomena are whatever we observe (perceive) and seek to explain.

As the discipline of psychology emerged late in the 19 th century, however, phenomena took on a somewhat different guise. In Franz Brentano’s Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (1874), phenomena are what occur in the mind: mental phenomena are acts of consciousness (or their contents), and physical phenomena are objects of external perception starting with colors and shapes. For Brentano, physical phenomena exist “intentionally” in acts of consciousness. This view revives a Medieval notion Brentano called “intentional in-existence”, but the ontology remains undeveloped (what is it to exist in the mind, and do physical objects exist only in the mind?). More generally, we might say, phenomena are whatever we are conscious of: objects and events around us, other people, ourselves, even (in reflection) our own conscious experiences, as we experience these. In a certain technical sense, phenomena are things as they are given to our consciousness, whether in perception or imagination or thought or volition. This conception of phenomena would soon inform the new discipline of phenomenology.

Brentano distinguished descriptive psychology from genetic psychology. Where genetic psychology seeks the causes of various types of mental phenomena, descriptive psychology defines and classifies the various types of mental phenomena, including perception, judgment, emotion, etc. According to Brentano, every mental phenomenon, or act of consciousness, is directed toward some object, and only mental phenomena are so directed. This thesis of intentional directedness was the hallmark of Brentano’s descriptive psychology. In 1889 Brentano used the term “phenomenology” for descriptive psychology, and the way was paved for Husserl’s new science of phenomenology.

Phenomenology as we know it was launched by Edmund Husserl in his Logical Investigations (1900–01). Two importantly different lines of theory came together in that monumental work: psychological theory, on the heels of Franz Brentano (and also William James, whose Principles of Psychology appeared in 1891 and greatly impressed Husserl); and logical or semantic theory, on the heels of Bernard Bolzano and Husserl’s contemporaries who founded modern logic, including Gottlob Frege. (Interestingly, both lines of research trace back to Aristotle, and both reached importantly new results in Husserl’s day.)

Husserl’s Logical Investigations was inspired by Bolzano’s ideal of logic, while taking up Brentano’s conception of descriptive psychology. In his Theory of Science (1835) Bolzano distinguished between subjective and objective ideas or representations ( Vorstellungen ). In effect Bolzano criticized Kant and before him the classical empiricists and rationalists for failing to make this sort of distinction, thereby rendering phenomena merely subjective. Logic studies objective ideas, including propositions, which in turn make up objective theories as in the sciences. Psychology would, by contrast, study subjective ideas, the concrete contents (occurrences) of mental activities in particular minds at a given time. Husserl was after both, within a single discipline. So phenomena must be reconceived as objective intentional contents (sometimes called intentional objects) of subjective acts of consciousness. Phenomenology would then study this complex of consciousness and correlated phenomena. In Ideas I (Book One, 1913) Husserl introduced two Greek words to capture his version of the Bolzanoan distinction: noesis and noema , from the Greek verb noéō (νοέω), meaning to perceive, think, intend, whence the noun nous or mind. The intentional process of consciousness is called noesis , while its ideal content is called noema . The noema of an act of consciousness Husserl characterized both as an ideal meaning and as “the object as intended”. Thus the phenomenon, or object-as-it-appears, becomes the noema, or object-as-it-is-intended. The interpretations of Husserl’s theory of noema have been several and amount to different developments of Husserl’s basic theory of intentionality. (Is the noema an aspect of the object intended, or rather a medium of intention?)

For Husserl, then, phenomenology integrates a kind of psychology with a kind of logic. It develops a descriptive or analytic psychology in that it describes and analyzes types of subjective mental activity or experience, in short, acts of consciousness. Yet it develops a kind of logic—a theory of meaning (today we say logical semantics)—in that it describes and analyzes objective contents of consciousness: ideas, concepts, images, propositions, in short, ideal meanings of various types that serve as intentional contents, or noematic meanings, of various types of experience. These contents are shareable by different acts of consciousness, and in that sense they are objective, ideal meanings. Following Bolzano (and to some extent the platonistic logician Hermann Lotze), Husserl opposed any reduction of logic or mathematics or science to mere psychology, to how people happen to think, and in the same spirit he distinguished phenomenology from mere psychology. For Husserl, phenomenology would study consciousness without reducing the objective and shareable meanings that inhabit experience to merely subjective happenstances. Ideal meaning would be the engine of intentionality in acts of consciousness.

A clear conception of phenomenology awaited Husserl’s development of a clear model of intentionality. Indeed, phenomenology and the modern concept of intentionality emerged hand-in-hand in Husserl’s Logical Investigations (1900–01). With theoretical foundations laid in the Investigations , Husserl would then promote the radical new science of phenomenology in Ideas I (1913). And alternative visions of phenomenology would soon follow.

Phenomenology came into its own with Husserl, much as epistemology came into its own with Descartes, and ontology or metaphysics came into its own with Aristotle on the heels of Plato. Yet phenomenology has been practiced, with or without the name, for many centuries. When Hindu and Buddhist philosophers reflected on states of consciousness achieved in a variety of meditative states, they were practicing phenomenology. When Descartes, Hume, and Kant characterized states of perception, thought, and imagination, they were practicing phenomenology. When Brentano classified varieties of mental phenomena (defined by the directedness of consciousness), he was practicing phenomenology. When William James appraised kinds of mental activity in the stream of consciousness (including their embodiment and their dependence on habit), he too was practicing phenomenology. And when recent analytic philosophers of mind have addressed issues of consciousness and intentionality, they have often been practicing phenomenology. Still, the discipline of phenomenology, its roots tracing back through the centuries, came to full flower in Husserl.

Husserl’s work was followed by a flurry of phenomenological writing in the first half of the 20 th century. The diversity of traditional phenomenology is apparent in the Encyclopedia of Phenomenology (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997, Dordrecht and Boston), which features separate articles on some seven types of phenomenology. (1) Transcendental constitutive phenomenology studies how objects are constituted in pure or transcendental consciousness, setting aside questions of any relation to the natural world around us. (2) Naturalistic constitutive phenomenology studies how consciousness constitutes or takes things in the world of nature, assuming with the natural attitude that consciousness is part of nature. (3) Existential phenomenology studies concrete human existence, including our experience of free choice or action in concrete situations. (4) Generative historicist phenomenology studies how meaning, as found in our experience, is generated in historical processes of collective experience over time. (5) Genetic phenomenology studies the genesis of meanings of things within one’s own stream of experience. (6) Hermeneutical phenomenology studies interpretive structures of experience, how we understand and engage things around us in our human world, including ourselves and others. (7) Realistic phenomenology studies the structure of consciousness and intentionality, assuming it occurs in a real world that is largely external to consciousness and not somehow brought into being by consciousness.

The most famous of the classical phenomenologists were Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty. In these four thinkers we find different conceptions of phenomenology, different methods, and different results. A brief sketch of their differences will capture both a crucial period in the history of phenomenology and a sense of the diversity of the field of phenomenology.

In his Logical Investigations (1900–01) Husserl outlined a complex system of philosophy, moving from logic to philosophy of language, to ontology (theory of universals and parts of wholes), to a phenomenological theory of intentionality, and finally to a phenomenological theory of knowledge. Then in Ideas I (1913) he focused squarely on phenomenology itself. Husserl defined phenomenology as “the science of the essence of consciousness”, centered on the defining trait of intentionality, approached explicitly “in the first person”. (See Husserl, Ideas I, ¤¤33ff.) In this spirit, we may say phenomenology is the study of consciousness—that is, conscious experience of various types—as experienced from the first-person point of view. In this discipline we study different forms of experience just as we experience them, from the perspective of the subject living through or performing them. Thus, we characterize experiences of seeing, hearing, imagining, thinking, feeling (i.e., emotion), wishing, desiring, willing, and also acting, that is, embodied volitional activities of walking, talking, cooking, carpentering, etc. However, not just any characterization of an experience will do. Phenomenological analysis of a given type of experience will feature the ways in which we ourselves would experience that form of conscious activity. And the leading property of our familiar types of experience is their intentionality, their being a consciousness of or about something, something experienced or presented or engaged in a certain way. How I see or conceptualize or understand the object I am dealing with defines the meaning of that object in my current experience. Thus, phenomenology features a study of meaning, in a wide sense that includes more than what is expressed in language.

In Ideas I Husserl presented phenomenology with a transcendental turn. In part this means that Husserl took on the Kantian idiom of “transcendental idealism”, looking for conditions of the possibility of knowledge, or of consciousness generally, and arguably turning away from any reality beyond phenomena. But Husserl’s transcendental turn also involved his discovery of the method of epoché (from the Greek skeptics’ notion of abstaining from belief). We are to practice phenomenology, Husserl proposed, by “bracketing” the question of the existence of the natural world around us. We thereby turn our attention, in reflection, to the structure of our own conscious experience. Our first key result is the observation that each act of consciousness is a consciousness of something, that is, intentional, or directed toward something. Consider my visual experience wherein I see a tree across the square. In phenomenological reflection, we need not concern ourselves with whether the tree exists: my experience is of a tree whether or not such a tree exists. However, we do need to concern ourselves with how the object is meant or intended. I see a Eucalyptus tree, not a Yucca tree; I see that object as a Eucalyptus, with a certain shape, with bark stripping off, etc. Thus, bracketing the tree itself, we turn our attention to my experience of the tree, and specifically to the content or meaning in my experience. This tree-as-perceived Husserl calls the noema or noematic sense of the experience.

Philosophers succeeding Husserl debated the proper characterization of phenomenology, arguing over its results and its methods. Adolf Reinach, an early student of Husserl’s (who died in World War I), argued that phenomenology should remain allied with a realist ontology, as in Husserl’s Logical Investigations . Roman Ingarden, a Polish phenomenologist of the next generation, continued the resistance to Husserl’s turn to transcendental idealism. For such philosophers, phenomenology should not bracket questions of being or ontology, as the method of epoché would suggest. And they were not alone. Martin Heidegger studied Husserl’s early writings, worked as Assistant to Husserl in 1916, and in 1928 succeeded Husserl in the prestigious chair at the University of Freiburg. Heidegger had his own ideas about phenomenology.

In Being and Time (1927) Heidegger unfurled his rendition of phenomenology. For Heidegger, we and our activities are always “in the world”, our being is being-in-the-world, so we do not study our activities by bracketing the world, rather we interpret our activities and the meaning things have for us by looking to our contextual relations to things in the world. Indeed, for Heidegger, phenomenology resolves into what he called “fundamental ontology”. We must distinguish beings from their being, and we begin our investigation of the meaning of being in our own case, examining our own existence in the activity of “Dasein” (that being whose being is in each case my own). Heidegger resisted Husserl’s neo-Cartesian emphasis on consciousness and subjectivity, including how perception presents things around us. By contrast, Heidegger held that our more basic ways of relating to things are in practical activities like hammering, where the phenomenology reveals our situation in a context of equipment and in being-with-others.

In Being and Time Heidegger approached phenomenology, in a quasi-poetic idiom, through the root meanings of “logos” and “phenomena”, so that phenomenology is defined as the art or practice of “letting things show themselves”. In Heidegger’s inimitable linguistic play on the Greek roots, “ ‘phenomenology’ means …—to let that which shows itself be seen from itself in the very way in which it shows itself from itself.” (See Heidegger, Being and Time , 1927, ¦ 7C.) Here Heidegger explicitly parodies Husserl’s call, “To the things themselves!”, or “To the phenomena themselves!” Heidegger went on to emphasize practical forms of comportment or better relating ( Verhalten ) as in hammering a nail, as opposed to representational forms of intentionality as in seeing or thinking about a hammer. Much of Being and Time develops an existential interpretation of our modes of being including, famously, our being-toward-death.

In a very different style, in clear analytical prose, in the text of a lecture course called The Basic Problems of Phenomenology (1927), Heidegger traced the question of the meaning of being from Aristotle through many other thinkers into the issues of phenomenology. Our understanding of beings and their being comes ultimately through phenomenology. Here the connection with classical issues of ontology is more apparent, and consonant with Husserl’s vision in the Logical Investigations (an early source of inspiration for Heidegger). One of Heidegger’s most innovative ideas was his conception of the “ground” of being, looking to modes of being more fundamental than the things around us (from trees to hammers). Heidegger questioned the contemporary concern with technology, and his writing might suggest that our scientific theories are historical artifacts that we use in technological practice, rather than systems of ideal truth (as Husserl had held). Our deep understanding of being, in our own case, comes rather from phenomenology, Heidegger held.

In the 1930s phenomenology migrated from Austrian and then German philosophy into French philosophy. The way had been paved in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time , in which the narrator recounts in close detail his vivid recollections of past experiences, including his famous associations with the smell of freshly baked madeleines. This sensibility to experience traces to Descartes’ work, and French phenomenology has been an effort to preserve the central thrust of Descartes’ insights while rejecting mind-body dualism. The experience of one’s own body, or one’s lived or living body, has been an important motif in many French philosophers of the 20 th century.

In the novel Nausea (1936) Jean-Paul Sartre described a bizarre course of experience in which the protagonist, writing in the first person, describes how ordinary objects lose their meaning until he encounters pure being at the foot of a chestnut tree, and in that moment recovers his sense of his own freedom. In Being and Nothingness (1943, written partly while a prisoner of war), Sartre developed his conception of phenomenological ontology. Consciousness is a consciousness of objects, as Husserl had stressed. In Sartre’s model of intentionality, the central player in consciousness is a phenomenon, and the occurrence of a phenomenon just is a consciousness-of-an-object. The chestnut tree I see is, for Sartre, such a phenomenon in my consciousness. Indeed, all things in the world, as we normally experience them, are phenomena, beneath or behind which lies their “being-in-itself”. Consciousness, by contrast, has “being-for-itself”, since each consciousness is not only a consciousness-of-its-object but also a pre-reflective consciousness-of-itself ( conscience de soi ). Yet for Sartre, unlike Husserl, the “I” or self is nothing but a sequence of acts of consciousness, notably including radically free choices (like a Humean bundle of perceptions).

For Sartre, the practice of phenomenology proceeds by a deliberate reflection on the structure of consciousness. Sartre’s method is in effect a literary style of interpretive description of different types of experience in relevant situations—a practice that does not really fit the methodological proposals of either Husserl or Heidegger, but makes use of Sartre’s great literary skill. (Sartre wrote many plays and novels and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.)

Sartre’s phenomenology in Being and Nothingness became the philosophical foundation for his popular philosophy of existentialism, sketched in his famous lecture “Existentialism is a Humanism” (1945). In Being and Nothingness Sartre emphasized the experience of freedom of choice, especially the project of choosing one’s self, the defining pattern of one’s past actions. Through vivid description of the “look” of the Other, Sartre laid groundwork for the contemporary political significance of the concept of the Other (as in other groups or ethnicities). Indeed, in The Second Sex (1949) Simone de Beauvoir, Sartre’s life-long companion, launched contemporary feminism with her nuanced account of the perceived role of women as Other.

In 1940s Paris, Maurice Merleau-Ponty joined with Sartre and Beauvoir in developing phenomenology. In Phenomenology of Perception (1945) Merleau-Ponty developed a rich variety of phenomenology emphasizing the role of the body in human experience. Unlike Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre, Merleau-Ponty looked to experimental psychology, analyzing the reported experience of amputees who felt sensations in a phantom limb. Merleau-Ponty rejected both associationist psychology, focused on correlations between sensation and stimulus, and intellectualist psychology, focused on rational construction of the world in the mind. (Think of the behaviorist and computationalist models of mind in more recent decades of empirical psychology.) Instead, Merleau-Ponty focused on the “body image”, our experience of our own body and its significance in our activities. Extending Husserl’s account of the lived body (as opposed to the physical body), Merleau-Ponty resisted the traditional Cartesian separation of mind and body. For the body image is neither in the mental realm nor in the mechanical-physical realm. Rather, my body is, as it were, me in my engaged action with things I perceive including other people.

The scope of Phenomenology of Perception is characteristic of the breadth of classical phenomenology, not least because Merleau-Ponty drew (with generosity) on Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre while fashioning his own innovative vision of phenomenology. His phenomenology addressed the role of attention in the phenomenal field, the experience of the body, the spatiality of the body, the motility of the body, the body in sexual being and in speech, other selves, temporality, and the character of freedom so important in French existentialism. Near the end of a chapter on the cogito (Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am”), Merleau-Ponty succinctly captures his embodied, existential form of phenomenology, writing:

Insofar as, when I reflect on the essence of subjectivity, I find it bound up with that of the body and that of the world, this is because my existence as subjectivity [= consciousness] is merely one with my existence as a body and with the existence of the world, and because the subject that I am, when taken concretely, is inseparable from this body and this world. [408]

In short, consciousness is embodied (in the world), and equally body is infused with consciousness (with cognition of the world).

In the years since Husserl, Heidegger, et al . wrote, phenomenologists have dug into all these classical issues, including intentionality, temporal awareness, intersubjectivity, practical intentionality, and the social and linguistic contexts of human activity. Interpretation of historical texts by Husserl et al . has played a prominent role in this work, both because the texts are rich and difficult and because the historical dimension is itself part of the practice of continental European philosophy. Since the 1960s, philosophers trained in the methods of analytic philosophy have also dug into the foundations of phenomenology, with an eye to 20 th century work in philosophy of logic, language, and mind.

Phenomenology was already linked with logical and semantic theory in Husserl’s Logical Investigations . Analytic phenomenology picks up on that connection. In particular, Dagfinn Føllesdal and J. N. Mohanty have explored historical and conceptual relations between Husserl’s phenomenology and Frege’s logical semantics (in Frege’s “On Sense and Reference”, 1892). For Frege, an expression refers to an object by way of a sense: thus, two expressions (say, “the morning star” and “the evening star”) may refer to the same object (Venus) but express different senses with different manners of presentation. For Husserl, similarly, an experience (or act of consciousness) intends or refers to an object by way of a noema or noematic sense: thus, two experiences may refer to the same object but have different noematic senses involving different ways of presenting the object (for example, in seeing the same object from different sides). Indeed, for Husserl, the theory of intentionality is a generalization of the theory of linguistic reference: as linguistic reference is mediated by sense, so intentional reference is mediated by noematic sense.

More recently, analytic philosophers of mind have rediscovered phenomenological issues of mental representation, intentionality, consciousness, sensory experience, intentional content, and context-of-thought. Some of these analytic philosophers of mind hark back to William James and Franz Brentano at the origins of modern psychology, and some look to empirical research in today’s cognitive neuroscience. Some researchers have begun to combine phenomenological issues with issues of neuroscience and behavioral studies and mathematical modeling. Such studies will extend the methods of traditional phenomenology as the Zeitgeist moves on. We address philosophy of mind below.

The discipline of phenomenology forms one basic field in philosophy among others. How is phenomenology distinguished from, and related to, other fields in philosophy?

Traditionally, philosophy includes at least four core fields or disciplines: ontology, epistemology, ethics, logic. Suppose phenomenology joins that list. Consider then these elementary definitions of field:

• Ontology is the study of beings or their being—what is.
• Epistemology is the study of knowledge—how we know.
• Logic is the study of valid reasoning—how to reason.
• Ethics is the study of right and wrong—how we should act.
• Phenomenology is the study of our experience—how we experience.

The domains of study in these five fields are clearly different, and they seem to call for different methods of study.

Philosophers have sometimes argued that one of these fields is “first philosophy”, the most fundamental discipline, on which all philosophy or all knowledge or wisdom rests. Historically (it may be argued), Socrates and Plato put ethics first, then Aristotle put metaphysics or ontology first, then Descartes put epistemology first, then Russell put logic first, and then Husserl (in his later transcendental phase) put phenomenology first.

Consider epistemology. As we saw, phenomenology helps to define the phenomena on which knowledge claims rest, according to modern epistemology. On the other hand, phenomenology itself claims to achieve knowledge about the nature of consciousness, a distinctive kind of first-person knowledge, through a form of intuition.

Consider logic. As we saw, logical theory of meaning led Husserl into the theory of intentionality, the heart of phenomenology. On one account, phenomenology explicates the intentional or semantic force of ideal meanings, and propositional meanings are central to logical theory. But logical structure is expressed in language, either ordinary language or symbolic languages like those of predicate logic or mathematics or computer systems. It remains an important issue of debate where and whether language shapes specific forms of experience (thought, perception, emotion) and their content or meaning. So there is an important (if disputed) relation between phenomenology and logico-linguistic theory, especially philosophical logic and philosophy of language (as opposed to mathematical logic per se ).

Consider ontology. Phenomenology studies (among other things) the nature of consciousness, which is a central issue in metaphysics or ontology, and one that leads into the traditional mind-body problem. Husserlian methodology would bracket the question of the existence of the surrounding world, thereby separating phenomenology from the ontology of the world. Yet Husserl’s phenomenology presupposes theory about species and individuals (universals and particulars), relations of part and whole, and ideal meanings—all parts of ontology.

Now consider ethics. Phenomenology might play a role in ethics by offering analyses of the structure of will, valuing, happiness, and care for others (in empathy and sympathy). Historically, though, ethics has been on the horizon of phenomenology. Husserl largely avoided ethics in his major works, though he featured the role of practical concerns in the structure of the life-world or of Geist (spirit, or culture, as in Zeitgeist ), and he once delivered a course of lectures giving ethics (like logic) a basic place in philosophy, indicating the importance of the phenomenology of sympathy in grounding ethics. In Being and Time Heidegger claimed not to pursue ethics while discussing phenomena ranging from care, conscience, and guilt to “fallenness” and “authenticity” (all phenomena with theological echoes). In Being and Nothingness Sartre analyzed with subtlety the logical problem of “bad faith”, yet he developed an ontology of value as produced by willing in good faith (which sounds like a revised Kantian foundation for morality). Beauvoir sketched an existentialist ethics, and Sartre left unpublished notebooks on ethics. However, an explicitly phenomenological approach to ethics emerged in the works of Emannuel Levinas, a Lithuanian phenomenologist who heard Husserl and Heidegger in Freiburg before moving to Paris. In Totality and Infinity (1961), modifying themes drawn from Husserl and Heidegger, Levinas focused on the significance of the “face” of the other, explicitly developing grounds for ethics in this range of phenomenology, writing an impressionistic style of prose with allusions to religious experience.

Allied with ethics are political and social philosophy. Sartre and Merleau-Ponty were politically engaged in 1940s Paris, and their existential philosophies (phenomenologically based) suggest a political theory based in individual freedom. Sartre later sought an explicit blend of existentialism with Marxism. Still, political theory has remained on the borders of phenomenology. Social theory, however, has been closer to phenomenology as such. Husserl analyzed the phenomenological structure of the life-world and Geist generally, including our role in social activity. Heidegger stressed social practice, which he found more primordial than individual consciousness. Alfred Schutz developed a phenomenology of the social world. Sartre continued the phenomenological appraisal of the meaning of the other, the fundamental social formation. Moving outward from phenomenological issues, Michel Foucault studied the genesis and meaning of social institutions, from prisons to insane asylums. And Jacques Derrida has long practiced a kind of phenomenology of language, seeking social meaning in the “deconstruction” of wide-ranging texts. Aspects of French “poststructuralist” theory are sometimes interpreted as broadly phenomenological, but such issues are beyond the present purview.

Classical phenomenology, then, ties into certain areas of epistemology, logic, and ontology, and leads into parts of ethical, social, and political theory.

It ought to be obvious that phenomenology has a lot to say in the area called philosophy of mind. Yet the traditions of phenomenology and analytic philosophy of mind have not been closely joined, despite overlapping areas of interest. So it is appropriate to close this survey of phenomenology by addressing philosophy of mind, one of the most vigorously debated areas in recent philosophy.

The tradition of analytic philosophy began, early in the 20th century, with analyses of language, notably in the works of Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Then in The Concept of Mind (1949) Gilbert Ryle developed a series of analyses of language about different mental states, including sensation, belief, and will. Though Ryle is commonly deemed a philosopher of ordinary language, Ryle himself said The Concept of Mind could be called phenomenology. In effect, Ryle analyzed our phenomenological understanding of mental states as reflected in ordinary language about the mind. From this linguistic phenomenology Ryle argued that Cartesian mind-body dualism involves a category mistake (the logic or grammar of mental verbs—“believe”, “see”, etc.—does not mean that we ascribe belief, sensation, etc., to “the ghost in the machine”). With Ryle’s rejection of mind-body dualism, the mind-body problem was re-awakened: what is the ontology of mind vis-à-vis body, and how are mind and body related?

René Descartes, in his epoch-making Meditations on First Philosophy (1641), had argued that minds and bodies are two distinct kinds of being or substance with two distinct kinds of attributes or modes: bodies are characterized by spatiotemporal physical properties, while minds are characterized by properties of thinking (including seeing, feeling, etc.). Centuries later, phenomenology would find, with Brentano and Husserl, that mental acts are characterized by consciousness and intentionality, while natural science would find that physical systems are characterized by mass and force, ultimately by gravitational, electromagnetic, and quantum fields. Where do we find consciousness and intentionality in the quantum-electromagnetic-gravitational field that, by hypothesis, orders everything in the natural world in which we humans and our minds exist? That is the mind-body problem today. In short, phenomenology by any other name lies at the heart of the contemporary mind-body problem.

After Ryle, philosophers sought a more explicit and generally naturalistic ontology of mind. In the 1950s materialism was argued anew, urging that mental states are identical with states of the central nervous system. The classical identity theory holds that each token mental state (in a particular person’s mind at a particular time) is identical with a token brain state (in that person’s brain at that time). A stronger materialism holds, instead, that each type of mental state is identical with a type of brain state. But materialism does not fit comfortably with phenomenology. For it is not obvious how conscious mental states as we experience them—sensations, thoughts, emotions—can simply be the complex neural states that somehow subserve or implement them. If mental states and neural states are simply identical, in token or in type, where in our scientific theory of mind does the phenomenology occur—is it not simply replaced by neuroscience? And yet experience is part of what is to be explained by neuroscience.

In the late 1960s and 1970s the computer model of mind set in, and functionalism became the dominant model of mind. On this model, mind is not what the brain consists in (electrochemical transactions in neurons in vast complexes). Instead, mind is what brains do: their function of mediating between information coming into the organism and behavior proceeding from the organism. Thus, a mental state is a functional state of the brain or of the human (or animal) organism. More specifically, on a favorite variation of functionalism, the mind is a computing system: mind is to brain as software is to hardware; thoughts are just programs running on the brain’s “wetware”. Since the 1970s the cognitive sciences—from experimental studies of cognition to neuroscience—have tended toward a mix of materialism and functionalism. Gradually, however, philosophers found that phenomenological aspects of the mind pose problems for the functionalist paradigm too.

In the early 1970s Thomas Nagel argued in “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” (1974) that consciousness itself—especially the subjective character of what it is like to have a certain type of experience—escapes physical theory. Many philosophers pressed the case that sensory qualia—what it is like to feel pain, to see red, etc.—are not addressed or explained by a physical account of either brain structure or brain function. Consciousness has properties of its own. And yet, we know, it is closely tied to the brain. And, at some level of description, neural activities implement computation.

In the 1980s John Searle argued in Intentionality (1983) (and further in The Rediscovery of the Mind (1991)) that intentionality and consciousness are essential properties of mental states. For Searle, our brains produce mental states with properties of consciousness and intentionality, and this is all part of our biology, yet consciousness and intentionality require a “first-person” ontology. Searle also argued that computers simulate but do not have mental states characterized by intentionality. As Searle argued, a computer system has a syntax (processing symbols of certain shapes) but has no semantics (the symbols lack meaning: we interpret the symbols). In this way Searle rejected both materialism and functionalism, while insisting that mind is a biological property of organisms like us: our brains “secrete” consciousness.

The analysis of consciousness and intentionality is central to phenomenology as appraised above, and Searle’s theory of intentionality reads like a modernized version of Husserl’s. (Contemporary logical theory takes the form of stating truth conditions for propositions, and Searle characterizes a mental state’s intentionality by specifying its “satisfaction conditions”). However, there is an important difference in background theory. For Searle explicitly assumes the basic worldview of natural science, holding that consciousness is part of nature. But Husserl explicitly brackets that assumption, and later phenomenologists—including Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty—seem to seek a certain sanctuary for phenomenology beyond the natural sciences. And yet phenomenology itself should be largely neutral about further theories of how experience arises, notably from brain activity.

Since the late 1980s, and especially the late 1990s, a variety of writers working in philosophy of mind have focused on the fundamental character of consciousness, ultimately a phenomenological issue. Does consciousness always and essentially involve self-consciousness, or consciousness-of-consciousness, as Brentano, Husserl, and Sartre held (in varying detail)? If so, then every act of consciousness either includes or is adjoined by a consciousness-of-that-consciousness. Does that self-consciousness take the form of an internal self-monitoring? If so, is that monitoring of a higher order, where each act of consciousness is joined by a further mental act monitoring the base act? Or is such monitoring of the same order as the base act, a proper part of the act without which the act would not be conscious? A variety of models of this self-consciousness have been developed, some explicitly drawing on or adapting views in Brentano, Husserl, and Sartre. Two recent collections address these issues: David Woodruff Smith and Amie L. Thomasson (editors), Phenomenology and Philosophy of Mind (2005), and Uriah Kriegel and Kenneth Williford (editors), Self-Representational Approaches to Consciousness (2006).

The philosophy of mind may be factored into the following disciplines or ranges of theory relevant to mind:

• Phenomenology studies conscious experience as experienced, analyzing the structure—the types, intentional forms and meanings, dynamics, and (certain) enabling conditions—of perception, thought, imagination, emotion, and volition and action.
• Neuroscience studies the neural activities that serve as biological substrate to the various types of mental activity, including conscious experience. Neuroscience will be framed by evolutionary biology (explaining how neural phenomena evolved) and ultimately by basic physics (explaining how biological phenomena are grounded in physical phenomena). Here lie the intricacies of the natural sciences. Part of what the sciences are accountable for is the structure of experience, analyzed by phenomenology.
• Cultural analysis studies the social practices that help to shape or serve as cultural substrate of the various types of mental activity, including conscious experience, typically manifest in embodied action. Here we study the import of language and other social practices, including background attitudes or assumptions, sometimes involving particular political systems.
• Ontology of mind studies the ontological type of mental activity in general, ranging from perception (which involves causal input from environment to experience) to volitional action (which involves causal output from volition to bodily movement).

This division of labor in the theory of mind can be seen as an extension of Brentano’s original distinction between descriptive and genetic psychology. Phenomenology offers descriptive analyses of mental phenomena, while neuroscience (and wider biology and ultimately physics) offers models of explanation of what causes or gives rise to mental phenomena. Cultural theory offers analyses of social activities and their impact on experience, including ways language shapes our thought, emotion, and motivation. And ontology frames all these results within a basic scheme of the structure of the world, including our own minds.

The ontological distinction among the form, appearance, and substrate of an activity of consciousness is detailed in D. W. Smith, Mind World (2004), in the essay “Three Facets of Consciousness”.

Meanwhile, from an epistemological standpoint, all these ranges of theory about mind begin with how we observe and reason about and seek to explain phenomena we encounter in the world. And that is where phenomenology begins. Moreover, how we understand each piece of theory, including theory about mind, is central to the theory of intentionality, as it were, the semantics of thought and experience in general. And that is the heart of phenomenology.

Phenomenological issues, by any other name, have played a prominent role in very recent philosophy of mind. Amplifying the theme of the previous section, we note two such issues: the form of inner awareness that ostensibly makes a mental activity conscious, and the phenomenal character of conscious cognitive mental activity in thought, and perception, and action.

Ever since Nagel’s 1974 article, “What Is It Like to be a Bat?”, the notion of what-it-is-like to experience a mental state or activity has posed a challenge to reductive materialism and functionalism in theory of mind. This subjective phenomenal character of consciousness is held to be constitutive or definitive of consciousness. What is the form of that phenomenal character we find in consciousness?

A prominent line of analysis holds that the phenomenal character of a mental activity consists in a certain form of awareness of that activity, an awareness that by definition renders it conscious. Since the 1980s a variety of models of that awareness have been developed. As noted above, there are models that define this awareness as a higher-order monitoring, either an inner perception of the activity (a form of inner sense per Kant) or inner consciousness (per Brentano), or an inner thought about the activity. A further model analyzes such awareness as an integral part of the experience, a form of self-representation within the experience. (Again, see Kriegel and Williford (eds.) (2006).)

A somewhat different model comes arguably closer to the form of self-consciousness sought by Brentano, Husserl, and Sartre. On the “modal” model, inner awareness of an experience takes the form of an integral reflexive awareness of “this very experience”. That form of awareness is held to be a constitutive element of the experience that renders it conscious. As Sartre put the claim, self-consciousness is constitutive of consciousness, but that self-consciousness is “pre-reflective”. This reflexive awareness is not, then, part of a separable higher-order monitoring, but rather built into consciousness per se. On the modal model, this awareness is part of the way the experience unfolds: subjectively, phenomenally, consciously. This model is elaborated in D. W. Smith (2004), Mind World, in the essay “Return to Consciousness” (and elsewhere).

Whatever may be the precise form of phenomenal character, we would ask how that character distributes over mental life. What is phenomenal in different types of mental activity? Here arise issues of cognitive phenomenology. Is phenomenality restricted to the “feel” of sensory experience? Or is phenomenality present also in cognitive experiences of thinking such-and-such, or of perception bearing conceptual as well as sensory content, or also in volitional or conative bodily action? These issues are explored in Bayne and Montague (eds.) (2011), Cognitive Phenomenology.

A restrictive view holds that only sensory experience has a proper phenomenal character, a what-it-is-like. Seeing a color, hearing a tone, smelling an odor, feeling a pain—these types of conscious experience have a phenomenal character, but no others do, on this view. A stringent empiricism might limit phenomenal experience to pure sensations, though Hume himself presumably recognized phenomenal “ideas” beyond pure sense “impressions”. A somewhat more expansive view would hold that perceptual experience has a distinctive phenomenal character even where sensation is informed by concepts. Seeing that yellow canary, hearing that clear Middle C on a Steinway piano, smelling the sharp odor of anise, feeling a pain of the jab of the doctor’s needle in receiving an injection—these types of conscious experience have a character of what-it-is-like, a character informed by conceptual content that is also “felt”, on this view. A Kantian account of conceptual-sensory experience, or “intuition”, would endorse a phenomenal character in these types of experience. Indeed, “phenomena”, in the Kantian idiom, are precisely things as they appear in consciousness, so of course their appearance has a phenomenal character.

Now, a much more expansive view would hold that every conscious experience has a distinctive phenomenal character. Thinking that 17 is a prime number, thinking that the red in the sunset is caused by the sun’s light waves being bent by the atmosphere, thinking that Kant was more right than Hume about the grounds of knowledge, thinking that economic principles are also political—even such highly cognitive activities have a character of what-it-is-like to so think, according to this expansive view.

Classical phenomenologists like Husserl and Merleau-Ponty surely assumed an expansive view of phenomenal consciousness. As noted above, the “phenomena” that are the focus of phenomenology were assumed to present a rich character of lived experience. Even Heidegger, while de-emphasizing consciousness (the Cartesian sin!), dwelt on “phenomena” as what appears or shows up to us (to “Dasein”) in our everyday activities such as hammering a nail. Like Merleau-Ponty, Gurwitsch (1964) explicitly studies the “phenomenal field”, embracing all that is presented in our experience. Arguably, for these thinkers, every type of conscious experience has its distinctive phenomenal character, its “phenomenology”—and the task of phenomenology (the discipline) is to analyze that character. Note that in recent debates the phenomenal character of an experience is often called its “phenomenology”—whereas, in the established idiom, the term “phenomenology” names the discipline that studies such “phenomenology”.

Since intentionality is a crucial property of consciousness, according to Brentano, Husserl, et al., the character of intentionality itself would count as phenomenal, as part of what-it-is-like to experience a given type of intentional experience. But it is not only intentional perception and thought that have their distinctive phenomenal characters. Embodied action also would have a distinctive phenomenal character, involving “lived” characters of kinesthetic sensation as well as conceptual volitional content, say, in the feel of kicking a soccer ball. The “lived body” is precisely the body as experienced in everyday embodied volitional action such as running or kicking a ball or even speaking. Husserl wrote at length about the “lived body” (Leib), in Ideas II, and Merleau-Ponty followed suit with rich analyses of embodied perception and action, in Phenomenology of Perception. In Bayne and Montague (eds.) (2011) see the article on conative phenomenology by Terence Horgan, and in Smith and Thomasson (eds.) (2005) see articles by Charles Siewert and Sean Kelly.

But now a problems remains. Intentionality essentially involves meaning, so the question arises how meaning appears in phenomenal character. Importantly, the content of a conscious experience typically carries a horizon of background meaning, meaning that is largely implicit rather than explicit in experience. But then a wide range of content carried by an experience would not have a consciously felt phenomenal character. So it may well be argued. Here is a line of phenomenological theory for another day.

• Brentano, F., 1995, Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint , Trans. Antos C. Rancurello, D. B. Terrell, and Linda L. McAlister, London and New York: Routledge. From the German original of 1874. Brentano’s development of descriptive psychology, the forerunner of Husserlian phenomenology, including Brentano’s conception of mental phenomena as intentionally directed and his analysis of inner consciousness distinguished from inner observation.
• Heidegger, M., 1962, Being and Time , Trans. by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper & Row. From the German original of 1927. Heidegger’s magnum opus, laying out his style of phenomenology and existential ontology, including his distinction between beings and their being, as well as his emphasis on practical activity.
• Heidegger, M., 1982, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology . Trans. by Albert Hofstadter. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. From the German original of 1975. The text of a lecture course in 1927. Heidegger’s clearest presentation of his conception of phenomenology as fundamental ontology, addressing the history of the question of the meaning of being from Aristotle onward.
• Husserl, E., 2001, Logical Investigations . Vols. One and Two, Trans. J. N. Findlay. Ed. with translation corrections and with a new Introduction by Dermot Moran. With a new Preface by Michael Dummett. London and New York: Routledge. A new and revised edition of the original English translation by J. N. Findlay. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970. From the Second Edition of the German. First edition, 1900–01; second edition, 1913, 1920. Husserl’s magnum opus, laying out his system of philosophy including philosophy of logic, philosophy of language, ontology, phenomenology, and epistemology. Here are the foundations of Husserl’s phenomenology and his theory of intentionality.
• Husserl, E., 2001, The Shorter Logical Investigations . London and New York: Routledge. An abridged edition of the preceding.
• Husserl, E., 1963, Ideas: A General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology . Trans. W. R. Boyce Gibson. New York: Collier Books. From the German original of 1913, originally titled Ideas pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy , First Book. Newly translated with the full title by Fred Kersten. Dordrecht and Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1983. Known as Ideas I. Husserl’s mature account of transcendental phenomenology, including his notion of intentional content as noema.
• Husserl, E., 1989, Ideas pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy , Second Book. Trans. Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer. Dordrecht and Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers. From the German original unpublished manuscript of 1912, revised 1915, 1928. Known as Ideas II. Detailed phenomenological analyses assumed in Ideas I, including analyses of bodily awareness (kinesthesis and motility) and social awareness (empathy).
• Merleau-Ponty, M., 2012, Phenomenology of Perception , Trans. Donald A. Landes. London and New York: Routledge. Prior translation, 1996, Phenomenology of Perception , Trans. Colin Smith. London and New York: Routledge. From the French original of 1945. Merleau-Ponty’s conception of phenomenology, rich in impressionistic description of perception and other forms of experience, emphasizing the role of the experienced body in many forms of consciousness.
• Sartre, J.-P., 1956, Being and Nothingness . Trans. Hazel Barnes. New York: Washington Square Press. From the French original of 1943. Sartre’s magnum opus, developing in detail his conception of phenomenology and his existential view of human freedom, including his analysis of consciousness-of-consciousness, the look of the Other, and much more.
• Sartre, J.-P., 1964, Nausea . Trans. Lloyd Alexander. New York: New Directions Publishing. From the French original of 1938). A novel in the first person, featuring descriptions of how things are experienced, thereby illustrating Sartre’s conception of phenomenology (and existentialism) with no technical idioms and no explicit theoretical discussion.
• Block, N., Flanagan, O., and Güzeldere, G. (eds.), 1997, The Nature of Consciusness . Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. Extensive studies of aspects of consciousness, in analytic philosophy of mind, often addressing phenomenological issues, but with limited reference to phenomenology as such.
• Chalmers, D. (ed.), 2002, Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings . Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Core readings in philosophy of mind, largely analytic philosophy of mind, sometimes addressing phenomenological issues, with some reference to classical phenomenology, including selections from Descartes, Ryle, Brentano, Nagel, and Searle (as discussed in the present article).
• Dreyfus, H., with Hall, H. (eds.), 1982, Husserl, Intentionality and Cognitive Science . Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. Studies of issues in Husserlian phenomenology and theory of intentionality, with connections to early models of cognitive science, including Jerry Fodor’s discussion of methodological solipsism (compare Husserl’s method of bracketing or epoché), and including Dagfinn Føllesdal’s article, “Husserl’s Notion of Noema” (1969).
• Kriegel, U., and Williford, K. (eds.), 2006, Self-Representational Approaches to Consciusness . Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. Essays addressing the structure of self-consciousness, or consciousness-of-consciousness, some drawing on phenomenology explicitly.
• Mohanty, J. N., 1989, Transcendental Phenomenology: An Analytic Accoun t. Oxford and Cambridge, Massachusetts: Basil Blackwell. A study of structures of consciousness and meaning in a contemporary rendition of transcendental phenomenology, connecting with issues in analytic philosophy and its history.
• Mohanty, J. N., 2008, The Philosophy of Edmund Husserl: A Historical Development , New Haven and London: Yale University Press. A detailed study of the development of Husserl’s philosophy and his conception of transcendental phenomenology.
• Mohanty, J. N.,  2011, Edmund Husserl’s Freiburg Years: 1916–1938 . New Haven and London: Yale University Press. A close study of Husserl’s late philosophy and his conception of phenomenology involving the life-world.
• Moran, D., 2000, Introduction to Phenomenology . London and New York: Routledge. An extensive introductory discussion of the principal works of the classical phenomenologists and several other broadly phenomenological thinkers.
• Moran, D., 2005, Edmund Husserl: Founder of Phenomenology . Cambridge and Malden, Massachusetts: Polity Press. A study of Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology.
• Parsons, Charles, 2012, From Kant to Husserl: Selected Essays , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Studies of historical figures on philosophy of mathematics, including Kant, Frege, Brentano, and Husserl.
• Petitot, J., Varela, F. J., Pachoud, B., and Roy, J.-M., (eds.), 1999, Naturalizing Phenomenology: Issues in Contemporary Phenmenology and Cognitive Science . Stanford, California: Stanford University Press (in collaboration with Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York). Studies of issues of phenomenology in connection with cognitive science and neuroscience, pursuing the integration of the disciplines, thus combining classical phenomenology with contemporary natural science.
• Searle, J., 1983, Intentionality . Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Searle’s analysis of intentionality, often similar in detail to Husserl’s theory of intentionality, but pursued in the tradition and style of analytic philosophy of mind and language, without overtly phenomenological methodology.
• Smith, B., and Smith, D.W. (eds.), 1995, The Cambridge Companion to Husserl . Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Detailed studies of Husserl’s work including his phenomenology, with an introduction to his overall philosophy.
• Smith, D. W., 2013, Husserl , 2nd revised edition. London and New York: Routledge. (1st edition, 2007). A detailed study of Husserl’s philosophical system including logic, ontology, phenomenology, epistemology, and ethics, assuming no prior background.
• Smith, D. W., and McIntyre, R., 1982, Husserl and Intentionality: a Study of Mind, Meaning, and Language . Dordrecht and Boston: D. Reidel Publishing Company (now Springer). A book-length development of analytic phenomenology, with an interpretation of Husserl’s phenomenology, his theory of intentionality, and his historical roots, and connections with issues in logical theory and analytic philosophy of language and mind, assuming no prior background.
• Smith, D. W., and Thomasson, Amie L. (eds.), 2005, Phenomenology and Philosophy of Mind . Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Essays integrating phenomenology and analytic philosophy of mind.
• Sokolowski, R., 2000, Introduction to Phenomenology . Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. A contemporary introduction to the practice of transcendental phenomenology, without historical interpretation, emphasizing a transcendental attitude in phenomenology.
• Tieszen, R., 2005, Phenomenology, Logic, and the Philosophy of Mathematics . Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Essays relating Husserlian phenomenology with issues in logic and mathematics.
• Tieszen, R., 2005, Phenomenology, Logic, and the Philosophy of Mathematics . Cambridge and New York: Camabridge University Press. Essays relating Husserlian phenomenology with issues in logic and mathematics.
• Tieszen, R., 2011, After Gödel: Platonism and Rationalism in Mathematics and Logic . Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. A study of Gödel’s work in relation to, inter alia, Husserlian phenomenology in the foundations of logic and mathematics.
• Zahavi, D. (ed.), 2012, The Oxford Handbook on Contemporary Phenomenology . Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. A collection of contemporary essays on phenomenological themes (not primarily on historical figures).

How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

• Husserl.net : Open content source of Husserl’s writings and commentary.
• Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology : Information about phenomenology, centered at Florida Atlantic University.

bodily awareness | consciousness | consciousness: and intentionality | Husserl, Edmund | intentionality | intentionality: phenomenal | meaning, theories of | Merleau-Ponty, Maurice | Reinach, Adolf | Schutz, Alfred | self-consciousness: phenomenological approaches to

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An Introduction to Engaged Phenomenology

Jessica stanier.

Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health, Politics Department, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK

In this article, I introduce engaged phenomenology as an approach through which phenomenologists can more explicitly and critically consider the generative conditions and implications of their research. I make an explicit link between philosophical insights from critical and generative phenomenology and the ethical and methodological insights offered by engaged research methods—a community-oriented approach to the generation of shared understanding for the mutual benefit of all stakeholders in research. The article consists of (a) a review of these respective strands of inquiry, (b) an overview and critique of mainstream qualitative methodologies in phenomenology, and (c) suggestions for those interested in working through engaged phenomenology as an approach to both theory and research praxis.

In attending to phenomena as they are lived through in conscious experience, phenomenology is sometimes accused of naively eschewing analysis of the social, political, and historical structures which imbue experiences with shared meaning. 1 The phenomenological method can give the impression of an almost Cartesian project, bent on reconstructing philosophical grounds for reality from the perspective of a sole, independent, and autonomous subject. The apparent hubris of such an undertaking—not to mention its concomitant methodological limitations, occlusions, and foreclosures—has been strongly critiqued by opponents and proponents of the phenomenological approach alike. 2 In particular, phenomenologists have been accused of taking experience as a sole foundation for knowledge, framing experience problematically as ahistorical, assuming that experience is immediately accessible for analysis, and failing to take into account the interpretative dimension of experiential constitution. 3

To most working in the discipline today, however, it is clear that these critiques have not proved fatal to the phenomenological project, but have instead enlivened and enriched debate along these lines. 4 Though there is a long history of phenomenologists linking their work to other disciplines and to social and political issues, those who have perhaps most robustly responded to these critiques have tended to thematize the practice of phenomenology as participation in the very worldly phenomena it purports to describe. 5 The idea that the phenomenologist effects change in the world through phenomenological reflection—either inadvertently or deliberately, passively or actively—is as radically promising as ever. 6 Shifting away from an uncritical notion of the “now,” contemporary phenomenological approaches are increasingly engaging with their situated cultural and historical contexts, both through critical reflection and through interdisciplinary research collaborations. 7 These robust new theoretical avenues importantly integrate the contingency of the phenomenological approach, its very concepts, and its participation in intersubjective meaning-complexes into philosophical understanding.

These conceptions of phenomenology as activity have been recently underscored by pandemic-related disruption, during which the phenomenological method has been experienced as highly contingent on structural conditions of possibility. This disruption has revealed the extent to which it is easy for phenomenologists to take for granted the structures which ordinarily enable research activity to proceed according to academic norms and conventions; indeed, some have reported returning to their phenomenological studies “changed, stretched, [and] transformed” by these experiences. 8 These timely observations affirm how sense-making—both as active reflection and as passive constitution—is animated by specific historical and relational contexts, which are always incorporated into the foreground and background of experience as lived through. Crucially, we are reminded that phenomenology itself is a temporal process which happens somewhere and somewhen (for someone ). Everyone, including phenomenologists, are situated within particular contexts, and this inevitably affects how they make sense of experience or conduct their research. Indeed, very particular constellations of conditions and structures are necessary to enable and sustain academic studies of this kind.

While new approaches are beginning to take these structures into account in a theoretical sense, it is my contention that phenomenologists could carry these reflections to more radically engaged conclusions. In this regard, however, there is no need to reinvent the wheel. Drawing from engaged research literature—an approach which is already extensively established—I propose the notion of engaged phenomenology as an invitation for phenomenologists to more explicitly and critically consider the generative conditions and implications of their research. Engaged research, as I discuss in more detail later in this introductory article, is a community-oriented approach to the generation of shared understanding for the mutual benefit of all stakeholders. This connection with engaged research matters in more ways than one. There has been a proliferation of “named” approaches to phenomenology in recent years—including critical, applied, generative, neurophenomenological, and micro-phenomenological variants—and it is not my intention to needlessly muddy the waters with another neologism. 9 Indeed, the engaged approach is, in principle, applicable to any of these variants of phenomenology; one could undertake an engaged micro-phenomenological study or critical-phenomenological project, for example. As I explore in this introduction to engaged phenomenology, the name is intended to citationally orient those who may be interested in taking up this invitation on ethical, epistemological, and methodological levels. As Ahmed instructively points out, “[c]itation is how we acknowledge our debt to those who came before; those who helped us find our way when the way was obscured because we deviated from the paths we were told to follow”. 10 As self-styled “perpetual beginners,” I here invite phenomenologists to explore these alternative pathways and to realize the generative potential of engaged research as an approach.

1. Critical Generativity in Phenomenological Research

At least two branches of contemporary phenomenology have already offered important attempts to more explicitly thematize the project of research in the manner discussed above: to foreground the socio-historical specificity of researchers’ interests and commitments, and to value the transformative nature of research itself without recourse to the illusion of a neutral “now-point” from “no-where”. 11 Critical phenomenology is one of these branches. Critical phenomenologists respond to the fact that, in practising phenomenology, one already cares “about that within which one appears as phenomenon”—and this care is shaped by social and political structures pertaining to a situated context which one might seek to change. 12 In particular, the project arises out of the intersectional concerns of gender, critical race, queer, and disability scholarship and activism, 13 among others, where the combination of lived experience and theory has long been identified as a means of “collective liberation”. 14 In this context, the phenomenological toolkit has been inherited, appropriated, subverted, and otherwise fruitfully applied. 15 As Guenther summarizes, critical phenomenology seeks to expose and analyse the “norms of our lifeworld” which constitute “how we make sense of things” in order to effect “liberation from the structures that privilege, naturalize, and normalize certain experiences of the world while marginalizing, pathologizing and discrediting others”. 16 Indeed, Marx’s famous formulation in the Theses on Feuerbach —“philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it”—is paralleled by Weiss, Murphy, and Salamon in their definition of the critical-phenomenological enterprise as “an ameliorative phenomenology that seeks not only to describe but also to repair the world”. 17

The second branch worth mentioning here, as having constructively thematized research itself within the phenomenological endeavour, is that of generative phenomenology. This approach more closely stems from the traditional phenomenological canon, though some critical phenomenologists have also associated themselves with this branch. 18 Generative phenomenology, as Oksala puts it, “questions the traditional phenomenological assumption that sense-constitution begins with an individual subject rather than extending beyond him or her and stemming from tradition, culture, language and history”. 19 By incorporating these cultural and historical dimensions into phenomenological analysis, generative phenomenology is able to thematize collective sense-making; in this way, it exceeds static and genetic phenomenologies which focus on individual streams of consciousness, and therefore lack the capacity to take on more critical and political valances. 20 These generative phenomena of culture and history, among others, are never fully and directly “given to the individual subject in experience, nor can they ever concern only one person, yet they are constitutive features in world constitution”. 21 In short, the generative phenomenologist is “not concerned merely with the structure of generation, but with how one generates structure”. 22

In this way, generative phenomenological research is able to critically respond to its own conditions of possibility—since, as Steinbock notes, “the generative phenomenologist and phenomenology stand within a specific historicity,” and there is a “singularity or uniqueness” to any individual generative phenomenologist’s interests. 23 Generative phenomenologists are therefore called upon to regard their work as both critical description and normative participation; the activity of “doing phenomenology” is conceived as temporally integrated and ethically connected to the objects of description. Indeed, these considerations are of methodological importance on multiple levels, such that the “phenomenologist must continually account for the changes that he or she introduces into generativity”. 24

Approaches offered by critical and generative phenomenology thus allow the act of “doing phenomenology” to be conceived not simply as neutral description of the lifeworld and its modes of presentation, but rather as participation in the “things themselves” and thus situated within a specific socio-historical lifeworld. The phenomenologist here precisely does not purport to successfully take up an ahistorical and disinterested position in order to practice an abstraction of the world. 25 The phenomenologist interested in critical generativity instead understands that they respond to, employ, and redirect the generative meaning-complex within which they undertake their inquiry, and that their activities concretely effect change within the lifeworld that they inhabit. The very practice of undertaking a phenomenological inquiry, therefore, entails a transformation of relations; the phenomenologist renews their understanding of certain phenomena in the world—at a particular time and in a particular place—through the activity of critical reflection, and this reflection generates a new orientation and world-view with respect to the lifeworld. Crucially, I would add, this activity of critical reflection is precisely made possible by certain material conditions within the lifeworld, without which the practice of phenomenology would not be possible. These conditions of possibility must not be taken for granted, and indeed they require active attendance and maintenance. It seems to me that these two branches of contemporary phenomenology offer rich theoretical resources for taking these conditions of possibility into account in ways that can shed new light on the practice of phenomenological research.

There are, however, relatively few studies arising out of either critical or generative phenomenology to have combined these theoretical insights with methods that involve working together with research participants to collectively critique or generate meaning-complexes. 26 By contrast, there have been many researchers working through phenomenology who integrate qualitative research into their work. Before elaborating on the potential for engaged phenomenology, it is therefore worth summarizing these efforts, as well as their contributions, motivations, and relevance for an engaged phenomenological approach.

2. Mainstream Qualitative Methodology in Phenomenology

Phenomenology is sometimes reductively understood exclusively as a solo endeavour—an armchair exercise in adopting the epoché and the reduction while turning one’s attention to “the things themselves”. 27 On the contrary, however, as Gallagher notes, phenomenologists often explore the experiences of others since this may “may help avoid the presuppositions that phenomenology wants to avoid, since one’s own imaginative faculties are limited by various biases or lack of knowledge”. 28 To this end, phenomenologists have traditionally sought to learn about the experiences of others through the second-hand use of case studies. 29 However, while this certainly opens up the horizons of the phenomenological inquiry from a single researcher’s imagination, the re-use of case studies usually precludes the possibility of checking any phenomenological conclusions in dialogue with the people referenced therein. Phenomenologists therefore rely heavily on their own interpretation when incorporating case studies into their work—since the phenomenological “data” has been, in these cases, elicited from participants by other researchers whose methods may be unclear, or, in other cases, the “data” originates from autobiographical anecdotes. Without critical reflection on the cultural discourses, narratives, and processes that constructed the “experience” as presented in a given case study, the phenomenologist risks problematically distorting other people’s experiences in order to evidence their own phenomenological claims.

Perhaps supplanting the use of case studies, there are increasing efforts to combine qualitative research with phenomenology 30 and there are now numerous published accounts offering instructions on how to conduct a phenomenological interview firsthand. 31 Phenomenological interview methods have been developed to enable researchers to more effectively “bracket” their own presuppositions about particular experiences, and to directly learn about these experiences in dialogue with participants. In contrast to case studies, interviews make it possible on a basic level for participants to speak for themselves. There is much debate over the extent to which these different integrations of phenomenology and qualitative research are successful, which I will not expound here. 32 With a view to the potential of engaged phenomenology, however, I am especially concerned that some of these methods may inadvertently construct and overdetermine the very phenomenological descriptions or “data” that they seek, while seeming to sideline important ethical and epistemological considerations when working with participants. 33

In their recent article “Critical phenomenology and psychiatry”, Zahavi and Loidolt claim that it is

“a distinctive strength of the phenomenological approach that it doesn’t merely speak out against scientific attempts to reify the other, but as a result of its commitment to respect and understand the subjective perspective of the other, also promotes an ethically responsive dialogue”. 34

How exactly phenomenologists can concretely promote this “ethically responsive dialogue” remains an important methodological question, especially given this trend towards integrating qualitative research with phenomenology. There are consistent suggestions in phenomenological interview literature that “subjects” need to be better “skilled,” “trained,” “taught,” or “lead” through interviews. 35 This is presented as a means to ensure that researchers are able to capture memories as if they were present experiences 36 or as if they are “pristinely” free from normative construction. 37 It is, however, impossible to access a participant’s experience directly as it is lived through, since it is always already recollected as memory retrospectively and narrated to a researcher in a very particular interpersonal context. At best, this aspect of recollection seems to be glossed over. At worst, these suggestions seem to demonstrate a fundamental misunderstanding about what goes on during an interview encounter. Krueger, Bernini, and Wilkinson are also critical of these claims, and argue incisively that this kind of approach “constructs the ‘pristine’ mental phenomena it purports to discover”, and that therefore:

when subjects are made to adopt an artificially passive and observational stance on their experiences, and then issue reports (guided by the interviewer), they transform what are initially world-directed vehicles dynamically lived through into objectified contents abstracted from the concrete relations and context that are part of their essential nature. 38

Participants are always constructing a version of their experience for the interviewer, accommodating their expectations and following their direction. 39 This is an inescapable phenomenological condition of recollection and narration—something which interviewers must accept and for which they must take ethical responsibility. By asking participants to strip down their experiences, and indeed by insisting that this is possible only if participants can learn to deliver correctly, interviewers risk enacting precisely the kind of ethically and epistemically problematic practice which, as we will see, is critiqued by the engaged research approach. Participants are asked to do the impossible—to offer narration through the mediation of the interview encounter, and yet without any narrative mediation at all—and therefore will inevitably “fall short”. When participants are asked to defer to interviewers in these ways, inappropriate power dynamics can foreclose opportunities to explore personal experiences that are important to participants and which they may wish to narrate differently; this much is widely acknowledged in social science literature but commentary on these matters is far less common in phenomenological interview methodologies. 40 Not only does this run the risk that participants feel uncomfortable or unsafe in discussing sensitive experiences, but it also makes participation in interviews altogether inaccessible for many people who cannot “comply” with the demands of the interviewer. Many marginalized people can be thus excluded from research participation and academic knowledge creation. 41 It is not that phenomenological interviews can never be useful—indubitably important research has arisen from these endeavours—but rather that claims over what these interviews are able to deliver are sometimes severely overstated and often, it seems, at cost to participants through their discomfort or exclusion. In this sense, these methods can precisely enact the “scientific attempts to reify the other” to which Zahavi and Loidolt claim phenomenology can offer an ethical alternative. 42 So, while there is exciting promise in these attempts to integrate qualitative research and phenomenology, it is simply not sufficient to expect the phenomenological approach to deliver an ethical alternative without critical reflection on the broader context in which these interpersonal encounters are taking place.

It is my contention that, rather than being regarded as mere background to the phenomenological research process, the temporal dimensions and material conditions of the research process can be regarded as a generative locus of inquiry in multiple ways. Since researchers decide what aspects of complex phenomena matter most according to their normative research interests—to a greater or lesser extent, as influenced by the agendas of institutions and funders—this “introduces an unavoidable ethical component into our thinking” which must be addressed. 43 This is where I argue that an engaged research approach, as theory and praxis, can offer a radical intervention and open up new horizons for phenomenological research.

3. Engaged Research

The term “engaged research” can refer to a range of practices, through which

[…] research is embedded in communities from the outset, not through “outreach” or “consultation” but through continuous co-creation, where the social goods of research in the form of remuneration, data, cultural capital and access to decision makers are generated in participation with communities and, ideally, equitably shared. 44

It is an approach that has evolved out of participatory research, which first emerged from social movement and civil society structures in the global South and out of recognition for the importance and power of local post-colonial knowledge. 45 Both engaged and participatory approaches question priorities assumed by researchers and highlight the power dynamics at play in research agendas and practices. Both, in principle, recognise that, by instigating a dialogue with participants, researchers often already determine the terms of address, as well as the norms associated with any expected response, in advance. 46 Alongside this recognition of the interpellation involved in research, there is acknowledgement that researchers must nonetheless not turn away from the responsibility to produce, share, and act on situated knowledges to effect discursive and material change. 47 Ideally, the impetus in these frameworks is on researchers to learn how to listen, rather than on participants to make themselves understood. Indeed, it is understood that researchers’ attempts to theorize others’ experiences without considered engagement can risk fundamentally misconstruing the meaning of a particular context, especially across significant power differentials. 48 (Some theoretical acknowledgement of this can be found in critical-phenomenological literature).

Engaged research is an approach which has been especially taken up by researchers of health humanities and public participation, particularly with regard to cultural and political contexts of health and wellbeing. 49 Differing from “public engagement”, which more often involves a focus on dissemination of research findings to the “general public”, engaged research entails working with communities on shaping research from its outset through a continuous or iterative process, such that the research can most equitably serve and openly respond to their situated priorities and needs. 50 While engaged research is not synonymous with activism, it can provide an important basis for effecting change in communities both during and after the research process. 51 This approach to research is also increasingly encouraged from an institutional perspective to evidence value, utility, and innovation to funders—a dynamic which itself can present its own ethical and practical challenges. 52

The process of engagement with communities, who have lived experience that might inform research, necessitates a continual, evaluative, and self-reflexive dimension to projects. Engaged researchers necessarily come to understand their projects as enduring processes, made possible by dynamic networks of intersubjective relations and material infrastructures which culminate in “tide, flux and general unpredictability”. 53 These projects often involve many people and “participation has to be continually re-negotiated”. 54 By contrast, as discussed above, the conditions enabling phenomenological research as an activity can often recede into the background of the inquiry. It is nonetheless encouraging, as also discussed above, that critical and generative phenomenology already offer sophisticated means within the discipline with which to address these ethical and epistemological concerns as part of the process of phenomenological research. A cross-pollination with engaged research frameworks would, I contend, significantly help phenomenologists to better and more critically engage with the conditions out of which qualitative material has been rendered accessible to them, to “continually account for the changes that he or she introduces into generativity”, 55 and to “not only […] describe but also […] repair the world”. 56

4. Two Approaches to Engaged Phenomenology

To close this introduction to engaged phenomenology, I would like to here offer two concrete ways in which insights from engaged research might be put to work in the research agendas of phenomenologists today. Combined with the foregoing overview of relevant contemporary literature, it is my hope that these two approaches will help to orient those interested in taking up engaged phenomenology in their own work—or at least that this introduction will offer resources for critical self-reflection.

My first suggestion for those interested in taking up engaged phenomenology is to explicitly consider how a given phenomenological inquiry is situated within social, political, and institutional contexts that have made the research possible and which have framed its operative concepts and concerns. Not all phenomenologists are inclined to undertake or even collaborate on qualitative research, and, indeed, it is important that not everyone feels compelled to take this approach; most phenomenologists are, after all, trained in phenomenology first and foremost as a philosophical approach, and will quite understandably neither wish to nor feel prepared to depart from this kind of work. Nevertheless, this first approach to engaged phenomenology is just as applicable to more traditional phenomenologists as to more critically-minded researchers: “we all—no matter what our own expertise or topic of research—need to examine which sources, frameworks, and models we explicitly or implicitly foreground in the production, analysis, and dissemination” of research. 57 This is already encouraged and well established among those working through critical phenomenology, as discussed above. Additionally, however, philosophical phenomenologists can pay careful attention to their reliance on case studies, and can critically reflect on “which disciplines, which theoretical perspectives, and which kinds of expertise have most authority in determining how concepts are defined”. 58 This would involve reflecting on how operative concepts and key experiential structures have been foregrounded, and by whom, as well as questioning why methods or origins pertaining to a given experiential account remain tacit in a given source.

An engaged phenomenology of this sort would acknowledge explicitly that “[d]ifferent situations can alternately lead people to reveal or conceal their experiences, in turn altering what it is possible for others to recognise and receive” 59 and would “remain attentive to how power structures the ways in which these experiences are rendered, legitimized, or ignored as ‘evidence’” in the context of research agendas. 60 This approach would therefore also call for a consideration of how the phenomenological research itself, as an activity that affects change in the world, will influence discourses and serve particular interests (both within and beyond the academic sphere). 61 Interdisciplinary phenomenological work that engages with cognitive science, psychiatry, and psychopathology, for example, could similarly engage with the fact that categories and diagnoses are experienced as interpellation; as Fernandez writes in his critical-phenomenological reflections on mad pride, “[i]f we are genuinely committed to identifying, assessing, and suspending our prejudices, then we ought to listen to those most affected by them”. 62 Phenomenologists can in this way see themselves as “both influencing and influenced [by …] manifestations of cultural power,” can reflect on taken-for-granted parameters of their research, and can engage with their discursive effects more responsibly. 63

The second approach to engaged phenomenology I suggest here is much more radical, in that it calls upon phenomenologists to engage far more directly and purposefully with the communities whose experiences are shaping the research. A project of this kind would require a significant degree of power-sharing with these communities, and would therefore call for a direct mobilisation of insights from the field of engaged research as described above. As Roth and Tobin describe, one of the most powerful outcomes of this kind of research is that “what has been learned is then available as a resource for action, hence agency, in the lifeworlds of the participants”. 64 In other words, the fact that the research impacts the phenomena which it seeks to investigate is not simply an epistemological consideration; it actually becomes possible to design research that empowers those participating in the research through something like an “ethically responsive dialogue” as alluded to by Zahavi and Loidolt. 65

This is not actually a proposal for an entirely new way of undertaking phenomenological research. In their own ways, many researchers working through phenomenology have already been adapting methodologies and methods in ways that speak to the practically engaged research approach. Vera-Gray, for instance, has developed her own phenomenologically-inspired interview approach as an alternative to frameworks in which the “structure and content remains defined by an outside source”. 66 Recognizing that “for particular questions, settings and research relationships, conversation as method may gain the most robust data and generate the most useful knowledge,” Vera-Gray’s conversational approach takes the power dynamics of the interview situation into account and seeks to enable all participants to be involved in the “active construction of meaning”. 67

Above and beyond a serious consideration of the ethical and epistemological implications of the interview encounter, however, this latter approach to engaged phenomenology would explore how best to meaningfully shape and share the research together with communities whose experiences are foregrounded in the study. The phenomenologically-aligned Hearing the Voice research project, for example, has taken stock of how working in this way with the voice-hearing community has afforded these people “rich possibilities […] in making sense of their experiences outside the relatively narrow frameworks of conventional psychiatric frameworks,” as well as exploring how “an interdisciplinary approach that foregrounds and values multiple forms of expertise—professional and experiential—can be fully integrated into mainstream […] research". 68 By collaborating with participants—not only in the sharing of their experiences but also the interpretation of these experiences—it becomes possible to work together not only to critique and challenge but also to generate and co-create meaning-complexes. 69 This approach therefore takes seriously the situatedness of phenomenological research as an intersubjective process, and has the capacity to explicitly address the fact that experiences are shaped by key concepts and power relations already defined in advance. There would be major scope for an engaged phenomenology of this sort to address what many, through Fricker, refer to as epistemic (hermeneutical) injustice, 70 but that could be understood broadly through the impetus behind critical phenomenology to not only “describe but also to repair the world”. 71

The challenges associated with an undertaking of this second kind should not be underestimated. Considerable investment is vital for resourcing and supporting the careful process of engagement, rapport-building, and meaningfully reciprocal relationships. 72 Indeed, as researchers have considerable institutional influence and access to funds, this framework raises serious questions of ethical responsibility and accountability. Participation in engaged research projects is not always straightforwardly experienced as positively empowering, and can also be stressful, exhausting, and disappointing—particularly for participants whose time, health, and finances are more precarious, but also for researchers. 73 Moreover, there will be no one single replicable framework or method that can instruct researchers how to sensitively undertake engaged phenomenology; as with any engaged research, this will always depend on the particular circumstances, needs, and priorities of a given community. 74

To some extent, the contours of any overarching approach to engaged research will remain nebulous, and will necessitate attentive engagement with concrete relationships and conditions in practice. In the context of my own research, however, I ended up responding to this confluence of phenomenological currents—critical phenomenology, generative phenomenology, and engaged research—by writing something of a manifesto to describe how I envisaged engaged phenomenology in practice. 75

“Engaged phenomenology”, as an approach:   • heeds the situatedness of lived experiences across diverse cultural and environmental lifeworlds;   • invites us to hold this notion of plural lifeworlds together with wider phenomenological questions about lived possibility, power relations, and the condition of having and being in a lifeworld which feels open to us and to which we are open;   • challenges assumptions around narrativity and privileged articulacy in phenomenological methods, embracing new ways of listening and attending to people’s lived experiences in their specificity and relationality;   • is mindful of how experience is lived through constellations of relations with others, rather than only seeking individualised (depoliticised) first-hand accounts;   • considers the transformative potential of research participants sharing their experiences in meaningful ways, rather than merely assessing their “utility” in academic terms.

It is my sincere hope that this framework and overall introductory article will assist phenomenologists and practitioners in reflecting critically on their relational participation in the genesis of meaning for communities of many kinds—whatever path ultimately leads them towards the writing-table and its heretical Husserlian legacy. 76

Acknowledgements

I extend my special thanks to my supervisors—Robin Durie, Felicity Thomas, and Luna Dolezal—and to Veronica Heney and Nicole Miglio for their generous and insightful feedback on this piece. I would also like to express my gratitude to Hans-Georg Eilenberger, Rachel Purtell, Joseph Wahab, and Alexander Douglas as supportive interlocutors. This research was funded in whole by the Wellcome Trust [Grant number 203109/Z/16/Z].

1 Lukács 2008 [1949]; Scott 1992.

2 Cf. Apostolescu 2015, 24; Stoller 2009.

3 Thảo 1985, 39; Derrida 1973, 66-68; Scott 1992, 25; Foucault 1984, 2.

4 Mensch n.d.; Oksala 2014.

5 For examples of phenomenologists linking their work to other disciplines, see: Husserl 1977; Merleau-Ponty 1983; cf. Zahavi 2010. For examples of phenomenologists addressing social and political issues, see: Sartre 1974; Beauvoir 1996; Beauvoir 2010; Fanon 1970.

6 In a remarkably evocative end to his essay “Structure and Genesis in Husserl’s Phenomenology,” Welton (1977) suggests that “once perception is seen as a form of action, Husserlian phenomenology is on the way to an intellectual integration of perception and historical praxis” (67).

7 For examples discussing the critical phenomenological perspective, see: Weiss, Murphy, and Salamon 2020; Ferrari et al. 2018. For examples discussing interdisciplinary research collaboration, see: Burch 2021; Zahavi 2010; Gallagher 1997; Petitot et al. 1999.

8 Mason, Chowdhury, and Esner 2022, 31

9 For examples discussing these respective variants, see: Weiss, Murphy, and Salamon 2020; Zahavi 2021; Steinbock 2017, 1995; Varela 1996; Petitmengin, Remillieux, and Valenzuela-Moguillansky 2018.

10 Ahmed 2017, 15-16.

11 The two branches discussed here are illustrative of contemporary efforts to address these critical points, as pertaining to the conception of engaged phenomenology as an approach. It should be noted that these movements draw extensively from many predecessors whose work attempted to frame phenomenology as critique and praxis: see Fanon 1970, Sartre 1974, Merleau-Ponty 2014, Beauvoir 1996, and Thảo 1985, among others.

12 Davis 2020, 8.

13 Ibid; cf. Collins 2015.

14 hooks 1991, 2

15 Weiss, Murphy, and Salamon 2020.

16 Guenther 2020, 12-15.

17 Marx 1977 [1845], 158; Weiss, Murphy, and Salamon 2020, xiv.

18 Cf. Ferrari et al. 2018.

19 Oksala 2004, 20.

20 Cf. Rodemeyer 2006, 187.

21 Oksala 2004, 20.

22 Steinbock 2017, 90.

23 Ibid, 91.

25 For a critical-phenomenological analysis of the phenomenological method, including the status of the reduction and the epoché, see Davis (2020). As Merleau-Ponty (2014 [1945]) writes, rather than entirely separating the phenomenologist from the lifeworld, philosophical reflection “loosens the intentional threads that connect us to the world in order to make them appear” (Ixxvii).

26 For examples of phenomenological work heading in this direction, see discussion of Woods et al. 2014, Fernandez 2020, Stanier, Miglio, and Dolezal 2022, Miglio and Stanier 2022, and Vera-Gray 2020 in the section entitled “Two approaches to engaged phenomenology” below. While not necessarily amounting to collective critique or generation of meaning-complexes, it is also worth noting that critical and generative phenomenology are sometimes used as interpretative lenses by qualitative researchers: for instance, see Battalova et al. 2022 and Hvidt 2017.

27 Husserl 2001, 168.

28 Gallagher 2012, 308.

29 For example, see Merleau-Ponty 2014, 112; cf. Zahavi 2010.

30 Zahavi 2018; cf. Burch 2021.

31 For examples, see: Scholokhova, Bizzari, and Fuchs 2022; Køster and Fernandez 2021; Sass et al 2017; Høffding and Martiny 2015; Bevan 2014; Gallagher 2012; Petitmengin 2006; Parnas et al. 2005.

32 Zahavi 2018; Gallagher 2012.

33 Hurlbert and Schwitzgebel 2011; cf. Krueger, Bernini, and Wilkinson 2014; Alderson-Day and Fernyhough 2014.

34 Zahavi and Loidolt 2021, 27.

35 Petitmengin and Bitbol 2011; Hurlbert and Schwitzgebel 2011, 1; Gallagher and Francesconi 2012, 2

36 Petitmengin 2006, 248; Hulburt 2011, 66.

37 Hurlburt, Heavey, and Kelsey 2013.

38 Krueger, Bernini, and Wilkinson 2014, 9.

39 Levesque-Lopman 2000, 104.

40 For examples in social science literature, see: Iphofen and Tolich 2018; Riese 2019.

41 Cf. Dee-Price et al. 2021; Faulkner 2004.

42 Zahavi and Loidolt 2021, 27.

43 Woermann and Cilliers 2012, 448.

44 Heney and Poleykett 2022, 2.

45 Hall and Tandon 2017.

46 Spivak 1983, 90. Under such terms, marginalized people are often forced to only voice their own exclusion, echoing the voice of their interrogator, rather than speaking on and in their own terms. As Spivak puts it, the reflective orientation of a postcolonial intellectual would come from “seeking to learn to speak to (rather than listen to or speak for)” (ibid, 91)—not invoking others to speak for themselves, but rather by calling or appealing to them to respond.

47 Alcoff 1991; Haraway 1988. Lugones and Spelman (1983) describe the necessary ethical orientation towards research as an outsider in communities as follows: “This learning calls for circumspection, for questioning of yourselves and your roles in your own culture. It necessitates a striving to understand while in the comfortable position of not having an official calling card (as “scientific” observers of our communities have); it demands recognition that you do not have the authority of knowledge; it requires coming to the task without ready-made theories to frame our lives. This learning is then extremely hard because it requires openness (including openness to severe criticism of the white/Anglo world), sensitivity, concentration, self-questioning, circumspection. It should be clear that it does not consist in a passive immersion in our cultures, but in a striving to understand what it is that our voices are saying.” (581).

48 Mahmood 2011, 14-5.

49 Thomas et al. 2020; James n.d.; Williams et al. 2020a.

50 National Coordinating Centre for Public Engagement n.d.; Hinchliffe et al. 2018.

51 Durie, Wyatt, and Stuteley 2004.

52 Martin 2008; Rose 2014; Heney and Poleykett 2021, 9; Williams et al. 2020b.

53 Law 2004, 7.

54 Macmillan et al. 2012.

55 Steinbock 2017, 91.

56 Weiss, Murphy, and Salamon 2020, xiv.

57 Woods et al. 2014, S252.

58 Ibid. Here phenomenologists can perhaps follow critical historians (e.g. Goswami et al. 2014) and anthropologists (e.g. Harrison 1991) who have already developed methodologies pertaining to sensitive use of case studies from the context of their respective disciplinary approaches. Cf. Neale and Bishop 2012.

59 Stanier and Miglio 2021, 106.

60 Stanier, Miglio, and Dolezal 2022, 7.

61 Cf. Carel 2012.

62 Fernandez 2020, 21; cf. Callard et al. 2013; Miglio and Stanier 2022.

63 Rodemeyer 2006, 187.

64 Roth and Tobin 2004, 33.

65 Zahavi and Loidolt 2021, 27.

66 Vera-Gray 2020, 63.

67 Ibid; cf. Levesque-Lopman 2000, 104.

68 Woods et al. 2014, S252. See also work from the Life of Breath project, which also importantly foregrounds engaged and interdisciplinary methods: Malpass et al. 2019.

69 Beresford 2021.

70 Fricker 2007.

71 Weiss, Murphy, and Salamon 2020, xiv.

72 Heney and Poleykett 2021.

73 Attree et al. 2011.

74 Durie, Lundy, and Wyatt n.d.

75 This specific summary of engaged phenomenology was first published as the theme of the BSP Annual Conference in 2020, the Wolfe Mays Essay Prize in 2021, and the BSP Annual Conference again in 2022.

76 Ahmed 2006, 28.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

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Varieties of Qualitative Research Methods pp 377–382 Cite as

Phenomenological Studies

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Phenomenology, as both philosophy and research methodology, originated from the writings of a group of European philosophers with the movement championed by two German philosophers namely Franz Brentano (1838–1917) and Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) in the twentieth century.

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Additional Reading

Engelland, C. (2020). Phenomenology . MIT Press.

Manen, M., V. (2014). Phenomenology of practice: Meaning-giving methods in phenomenological research and writing . Routledge.

Priya, A. (2017). Phenomenological social research: Some observations from the field. Qualitative Research Journal , 17(4) 294–305. DOI https://doi.org/10.1108/QRJ-08-2016-0047

Online Resources

Qualitative Research Design: Phenomenology (15.32 Minutes). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3aYRlNrO6oA .

Phenomenological Research (7.24). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzDuxiALnCQ .

Creating an Effective Phenomenological Study (5.34). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrdgqkpDTGY .

Susan Kozel: Phenomenology—Practice Based Research in the Arts, Stanford University. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mv7Vp3NPKw4 .

Phenomenology—IPA and Narrative Analysis. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xU9S8aRL6ys .

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Ndame, T. (2023). Phenomenological Studies. In: Okoko, J.M., Tunison, S., Walker, K.D. (eds) Varieties of Qualitative Research Methods. Springer Texts in Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04394-9_58

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