ABSTRACT
The term “phenomenology” can be traced back to the eighteenth century, but as a movement, phenomenology has its origins in the work in descriptive psychology of Franz Brentano, as it is taken up and radically transformed by Edmund Husserl in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.1 Given the apparently unquestioned ascendancy of the empirical sciences, Husserl asserts the primacy of transcendental philosophy in the hierarchy of knowledge and aims to develop a philosophical method to serve as a scientific basis for all knowing.2 The process of that development is complex, with many revisions and shifts of emphasis in method at various stages in Husserl’s career. Some of these shifts have only become apparent with the posthumous publication of much of his work. To complicate the process even further, several of Husserl’s students eventually emerge with quite distinctive phenomenological perspectives-Heidegger is a famous example. Paul Ricoeur observes:
… phenomenology is a vast project whose expression is not restricted to one work or to any specific group of works. It is less a doctrine than a method capable of many exemplifications of which Husserl exploited only a few … In Husserl himself the method was mixed with an idealistic interpretation … As for the parts of his work where the method is actually applied … they do not constitute one homogeneous body of work with a single direction of orientation. Husserl abandoned along the way as many routes as he took. This is the case to such a degree that in a broad sense phenomenology is both the sum of Husserl’s work and the heresies issuing from it.3
