ABSTRACT
Phenomenological research is work inspired by the philosophical traditions that Spiegelberg (1994) called “the Phenomenological Movement” (p. 2). In the typical fashion of a phenomenologist, Spiegelberg, a scholar of the history of those traditions, characterized the movement as more like “an unfolding plant than … a river” (p. 2). The tradition germinated in an early work of the German philosopher Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, first published in 1913. Husserl later expanded, modified, and even ignored some of his original ideas—strategies also adopted by some of his students and by Martin Heidegger, who worked at the University of Frieburg. Husserl was born into a Jewish family, and the notorious 1933 race laws of the Nazi regime took away Husserl's academic standing and privileges. Following an illness, he died at Freiburg, Germany, in 1938. Phenomenology in Germany ended for all practical purposes with the Nazi years. In the 1930s, the movement flourished in France, where Husserl's papers were transferred shortly after his death. New hybrids developed, especially through the work of Jean-Paul Sartre (1963), Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1962), and Paul Ricoeur (1981). Thus, the metaphor of a plant is an apt descriptor of the phenomenological movement (Spiegelberg); it developed over time in various climates, flowering profusely and yielding unique philosophical fruits.
