Over the past four chapters, we have considered the four main fi gures in the phenomenological tradition. Although, as we have seen, the phenomenological tradition is hardly monolithic, replete as it is with intramural debates and in some cases wholesale changes in orientation (consider the divide between Husserl’s and Heidegger’s respective conceptions of phenomenology), there is nonetheless among these fi gures a shared sense of there being a distinctive philosophical discipline worthy of the name “phenomenology”, and so a shared sense that phenomenology is both possible and, indeed, philosophically indispensable. Despite many diff erences both at the programmatic level and at the level of detail, all four fi gures – Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty – agree that phenomenology is not only worth doing, but that it aspires to be the method for philosophy.