What is Phenomenology?

The Philosophy of Husserl and Heidegger

Phenomenology is a school of philosophy that originated in the late 19th century and early 20th century with the writing of the German philosopher Edmund Husserl. It was a radical new development in philosophy.

What phenomenology offers is an alternative approach to the truth to the one philosophy has been applying for the past two and half thousand years. It is as if Husserl went all the way back to Plato and took a different turnoff along the path to truth. This turnoff has resulted in Phenomenology’s having much more in common with the Eastern schools of philosophy than any other school of the Western tradition.

In this article we are going to look at the history and method of Phenomenology and explore its kinship with Eastern philosophy in more depth.

The historical background

The seeds of phenomenology can be traced back to the 18th century and Immanuel Kant’s distinction between the noumenal world of things-in-themselves and the phenomenal world of reality as experienced through our senses. This thread was picked up in the early 19th century by Georg Wilhelm Hegel with his Phenomenology of Spirit but the birth of Phenomenology as a distinctive philosophical school dates to the works of German philosopher Edmund…