ABSTRACT
Phenomenology is an obscure term, related to a modern philosophical movement led by Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) in which human consciousness is studied through the subjective experience of its interaction with phenomena. Phenomena, in turn, are the objects of a person’s perceptions or items of reality as they are perceived by a person’s senses or mind. Before exploring the significance of phenomenological approaches to the study of religion in greater detail, this introductory section examines why these approaches have been grouped with psychological approaches and how both relate to the sociological and anthropological approaches surveyed in the previous section.
