Philosophy Word/Phrase of the Week

Phenomenology (fee-nom-en-ol-ogy)
Phenomenology began in the philosophical reflections of Edmund Husserl in Germany during the mid-1890s and is thus over a century old.The diversity of concepts that Husserl himself expressed by the word "phenomenology" has been a source of diverse usages among thinkers who came under his influence and are often referred to as "the phenomenological school."

Husserl himself always meant by "phenomenology" a science of the subjective and its intended objects qua intentional.Four successively dominant and sometimes overlapping philosophical tendencies and stages can be recognized:
1. The phenomenological movement began with Husserl's Logische Untersuchungen (1900-1901).
2. Realistic phenomenology emphasizes the search for the universal essences of various sorts of matters, including human actions, motives, and selves.
3. Constitutive phenomenology extends Husserl's scope to include philosophy of the natural sciences.
4. Existential phenomenology is often traced back to Martin Heidegger's Sein und Zeit of 1927, the project of which was actually to use an analysis of human being as a means to a fundamental ontology that went beyond the regional ontologies described by Husserl.

[condensed from]http://www.phenomenologycenter.org/phenom.htm [which itself is from] Encyclopedia of Phenomenology http://www.springer.com/philosophy/book/978-0-7923-2956-5
or see Dictionary of Philosophy; Runes; 1942 http://www.ditext.com/runes/p.html
For a breakdown of "The Phenomenological Reduction," see
The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy http://www.iep.utm.edu/p/phen-red.htm