Phenomenology is a school of philosophy whose principal purpose is to study the phenomena, or appearances, of human experience while attempting to suspend all consideration of their objective reality or subjective association. The phenomena studied are those experienced in various acts of consciousness, mainly cognitive or perceptual acts, but also in such acts as valuation and aesthetic appreciation.Phenomenology took its present shape at the beginning of the 20th century with the writings of Edmund Husserl. Husserl intended to develop a philosophical method that was devoid of all presuppositions and that would describe phenomena by focusing exclusively on them, to the exclusion of all questions of their causal origins and their status outside the act of consciousness itself. His aim was to discover the essential structures and relationships of the phenomena as well as the acts of consciousness in which the phenomena appeared, and to do this by as faithful an exploration as possible, uncluttered by scientific or cultural presuppositions.
In his original conception of phenomenology, Husserl's idea of a presuppositionless science amounted to rejecting all antecedent commitments to theories of knowledge, both those formally developed as philosophical systems and those which pervade our ordinary thinking ("the natural attitude"). He intended by this suspension, or bracketing, of extraneous commitments to go beyond the usual choices of Idealism and Realism, to "the things themselves." In his later work, however, Husserl expanded his phenomenological method to include what he called "the phenomenological reduction." In this reduction, not only extraneous opinions, but also all beliefs about the external existence of the objects of consciousness, were bracketed. --by Thomas E. Wren
