Portal:Philosophy/Selected article/2006-18

Phenomenology is a current in philosophy that takes the intuitive experience of phenomena (what presents itself to us in conscious experience) as its starting point and tries to extract from it the essential features of experiences and the essence of what we experience. It stems from the School of Brentano and was mostly based on the work of the 20th century philosopher Edmund Husserl, and was developed further by philosophers such as Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Max Scheler, Hannah Arendt, and Emmanuel Levinas. As such, phenomenological thought influenced the development of existential phenomenology and existentialism in France, as is clear from the work of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, and Munich phenomenology (Johannes Daubert, Adolf Reinach in Germany and Alfred Schütz in Austria).

While the term "phenomenology" was used several times in the history of philosophy before Husserl, modern use ties it more explicitly to his particular method.