Phenomenology

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Phenomenology is commonly understood in either of two ways: as a disciplinary field in philosophy, or as a movement in the history of philosophy. It entered human geography in the early 1970 as a reaction to the reductive and objectivist approach of spatial science. It tries to explain the relationship between the scientific and the pre-scientific, the theoretical and the everyday. Phenomenology was designed to disclose the world as it shows itself before scientific inquiry, as that which is pre-given and presupposed by the sciences.

As a disciplinary field, it studies the structures of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view. The central structure of an experience is its intentionality, its being directed toward something, as it is an experience of or about some object. The true essence of objects resides in our deepest intentional relationship with them. An experience is directed toward an object by virtue of its content or meaning (which represents the object) together with appropriate enabling conditions. Husserl called this deep intentional relationship with objects the 'Life world'. When the subjective meaning of people is compared there is a part of the world that is taken for granted, a universal horizon common to all humanity. This is what Husserl refers to with the term Life world. In this way, subjectivity creates a kind of objectivity, called inter-subjectivity.

Phenomenology as a discipline is distinct from but related to other key disciplines in philosophy, such as ontology, epistemology, logic, and ethics. Phenomenology has been practiced in various guises for centuries, but it came into its own in the early 20th century in the works of Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau Ponty and others. So it's not only a discipline in philosophy but also in spatial science. Phenomenological issues of intentionality, consciousness, qualia, and first-person perspective have been prominent in recent philosophy of mind.

What was important in Husserl's findings was that in excisting studies, researchers didn't look at their own involvement in or with the research project. This could mean that the foundings where troubled by subjectivity. This can be found in his essay 'Philosophy and the crisis of European man' (1936).

Four phenomenological well-known philosophers are: Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau Ponty

References

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. (2008). Phenomenology. Founded at 8 september 2011 at [1]

Cloke, P., Philo, Ch. & Sadler, D. (1991). Approaching Human Geography. Chapman, London.

Johnston, R.J., Gregory, D. & Pratt, G. (2005). The Dictionary of Human Geography. Oxford

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