Phenomenology
Describe how experience presents itself before imposing an explanatory theory.
What it claims
Phenomenology investigates how things are given in experience from a first-person perspective. Husserl's call to return to the things themselves involves bracketing assumptions through epoché, rather than immediately replacing experience with a third-person explanation. Its central argument concerns explanatory priority: an explanation presupposes a phenomenon to explain, and careful description clarifies what that is.
Nearby positions
Goes together with
Key thinkers
Edmund Husserl · Martin Heidegger · Maurice Merleau-Ponty · Jean-Paul Sartre · Dan Zahavi