Phenomenology asks how anything can be objective when all experience is subjective
Every perception you have is yours alone, yet we talk confidently about an objective world. Edmund Husserl founded phenomenology in the early 20th century to tackle that puzzle, by describing experience exactly as it shows up. The method now informs research in psychology, nursing, architecture and even interface design.
The word joins Greek terms for that which appears and for study. Lambert, Kant and Hegel all used it in other senses, but the tradition proper begins with Husserl, whose ideas reached English readers in a 1907 article in The Philosophical Review. He took from Franz Brentano, and by his own later admission Ernst Mach, the conviction that philosophy must describe what is given with direct self-evidence.
Brentano's central idea, drawn from Aristotle's On the Soul, is intentionality: experience is always of or about something. Seeing is seeing a tree; fearing is fearing a threat. Each such act also carries a quiet, pre-reflective sense that it is one's own. Phenomenology is not introspection or clinical psychology. It seeks the essential structures of experience, studying worldly things as they are given rather than inner mental states. It arose as a reaction against psychologism, which treated logic as a product of the mind, and against the physicalism of Husserl's day.
Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi describe a method in steps. The epoché brackets everyday and theoretical assumptions, what Husserl called the natural attitude, not to doubt reality but to see it more clearly. The reduction then traces how what appears depends on the structures of the experiencing subject. Eidetic variation imaginatively strips away features of a thing, or of an act like memory, to find which ones it cannot lose and still be itself; Husserl admitted such findings can be vague and revisable.
Later thinkers pulled in different directions. Martin Heidegger held that truths are embedded in their historical and cultural setting, and hermeneutic, genetic and embodied versions followed. Phenomenologists argue that the ideal of a purely detached, third-person science is a fantasy: a researcher's perspective and assumptions should be spelled out and built into experimental design, which they say can make empirical work better.
Source: Phenomenology (philosophy)
