Phenomenology extracts the fundamental essence of conscious experience. It originated from Husserl’s work and discusses intentionality and mind/body dualism. Today, empirical science has eroded phenomenology, but philosophy still helps define useful experiments.
Phenomenology is a philosophical tendency that takes the intuitive sense of conscious experience – the ‘being’ of something – and attempts to extract or describe its fundamental essence. When I want or hate something, what is the exact relationship between me and it, regardless of external factors? The field derives largely from the turn-of-the-century work of German Jewish philosopher Edmund Husserl, and was discussed throughout most of the 20th century by thinkers including Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Max Scheler, Hannah Arendt, and Emmanuel Lévinas.
Characteristic of phenomenology are extensive discussions of intentionality, an allegedly unique quality of consciousness that distinguishes it from aconscious materials. Endemic to older discussions of phenomenology is mind/body dualism, the idea that psychic (mind-based) acts are somehow ontologically different from physical acts, an idea that modern cognitive science has shown to be false. Many of the questions addressed by phenomenology have been inherited and enhanced by the contemporary and more scientifically rigorous field of consciousness studies.
The field of phenomenology began in 1901 when Husserl published Logical Investigations, his first major work, which analyzed the relationships between mental acts and their external referents. For example, one might hate or love an object or an ideal. In later works he made distinctions between intentional acts (noesis) and aimed objects (noemata). In an attempt to get to the “core” of intentionality, he took examples and removed as many inessential details as possible, such as assumptions about the external world and the incidental qualities of the noemata.
Today we use experimental research and the biological sciences to determine the details of the relationship between the thinker and the objects he is thinking about. Philosophy provided a palliative for investigating the problem when it was difficult to structure detailed experiments around these relationships. The facts we have determined about these relationships, like the details of human symbolic representation, still require much work, and philosophy helps define which experiments can be useful. However, phenomenology represents a typical area of philosophy that has been eroded by the progress of empirical science.
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