Phenomenology  

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1. A philosophy based on the intuitive experience of phenomena, and on the premise that reality consists of objects and events as consciously perceived by conscious beings.
2. A movement based on this, originated about 1905 by Edmund Husserl.

Phenomenology has at least three main meanings in philosophical history: one in the writings of G.W.F. Hegel, another in the writings of Edmund Husserl in 1920, and a third, deriving from Husserl's work, in the writings of his former research assistant Martin Heidegger in 1927:

• For G.W.F. Hegel, phenomenology is an approach to philosophy that begins with an exploration of phenomena (what presents itself to us in conscious experience) as a means to finally grasp the absolute, logical, ontological and metaphysical Spirit that is behind phenomena. This has been called a "dialectical phenomenology".

• For Edmund Husserl, phenomenology is "the reflective study of the essence of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view" Phenomenology takes the intuitive experience of phenomena (what presents itself to us in phenomenological reflexion) as its starting point and tries to extract from it the essential features of experiences and the essence of what we experience. When generalized to the essential features of any possible experience, this has been called "transcendental phenomenology".

• Martin Heidegger believed that Husserl's approach overlooked basic structural features of both the subject and object of experience - what he called their "being", and expanded phenomenological enquiry to encompass our understanding and experience of Being itself, thus making phenomenology the method (in the first phase of his career at least) of the study of being: ontology.

Phenomenology may refer to:

• Phenomenology (architecture), based on the experience of building materials and their sensory properties
• Phenomenology (archaeology), based upon understanding cultural landscapes from a sensory perspective
• Phenomenology (particle physics), the part of particle physics that deals with the application of theory to high energy experiments
• Phenomenology (philosophy), a philosophical method and school of philosophy founded by Edmund Husserl (1859 – 1938)
• Phenomenology (psychology), used in psychology to refer to subjective experiences or their study
• Phenomenology (science), used in science to describe a body of knowledge which relates empirical observations of phenomena to each other
• Phenomenology of management, a book by Bronisław Bombała
• Phenomenology of Perception, the magnum opus of French phenomenological philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty
• Phenomenology of religion, concerning the experiential aspect of religion in terms consistent with the orientation of the worshippers
• The Phenomenology of Spirit, a book by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
• Existential phenomenology, in the work of Husserl's student Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) and his followers