ABSTRACT

Phenomenology might be described as a philosophically-oriented examination of the nature of objectivity. Phenomenology begins, as Edmund Husserl would claim, with a "return to things themselves." Talking about the idea of a pen abstracts researchers from the world of lived-experience to which phenomenology wanted to return. In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty took up the examination of the world as it appears to researchers from within their worldly projects. In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty proposed that people’s perception of the world is mediated by their "bodies"–not the physical body of medical science, but the body they know in and as their lived-experience of the world. More than any particular argument or point that it makes, Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception as a whole teaches researchers to see the world as they see it in the middle of their experience of it.