ABSTRACT
“Phenomenological reduction” is a shorthand term for a two-step operation that includes a moment of suspension of belief, the epoche, and a moment of leading back (reducere) the unities of meaning found in the field of transcendentally purified experience. The first occurrence of the term 'phenomenological reduction' in Husserl's published work is in chapter four of the second section of Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy. Despite the glaring differences, one could argue that post-Husserlian phenomenologists did retain the fundamental impulse driving the phenomenological reduction in Edmund Husserl, i.e., the quest for an original ground of meaning that remains invisible to both common sense and empirical science. Jean-Luc Marion connects the notion of reduction to the notion of givenness and argues that, far from entrapping thought in the self-contained immanence of consciousness, the reduction is the philosophical device that enables us to see phenomena as given, thus making givenness as such available to philosophical scrutiny.
