The French philosopher Gabriel Marcel (1889-1973) is not individualistic like Jean Paul Sartre (or at least the early Sartre, whose thinking was modified by Marxism); instead, he stresses the communal character of human existence--the highest virtue being fidelity. Marcel also emphasizes the mysterious (as distinguished from the empirically problematic) character of love, evil, hope, freedom, and, above all, being. His work provides a rich analysis and interpretation of the religious dimensions of human experience and thus is a philosophical basis for the study of religious experience.The Existentialist approach attempts to describe and evoke the way human beings are and thus can lay claim to be phenomenological. It is clear, however, from the divergencies among Existentialists, that they contain speculative and idiosyncratic elements, and one question raised about the general applicability of their characterizations is how far they are bounded by the product of a particular mood in Western culture.
The German philosopher Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) has had, as the main exponent of Phenomenology, a wide effect on the study of religion. His program of describing experience and "bracketing" the objects of experience, in the pursuit of essences of types of experience, was in part taken up in the phenomenology of religion. Husserl distinguished Phenomenology from psychology, however, because, in his view, the latter concerns facts in a spatio-temporal setting, whereas Phenomenology uncovers timeless essences. This aspect of Husserl's thinking has not always or wholly been accepted by phenomenologists of religion, who have been much more oriented toward facts, though Husserl's emphasis on essences often has tended to make religious phenomenology lean toward a static typology. (from Encyclopedia Britannica)
