Phenomenology: The study of all possible appearances in human experience, during which considerations of objective reality and of purely subjective response are left out of account. Phenomenology, 20th-century philosophical movement dedicated to describing the structures of experience as they present themselves to consciousness, without recourse to theory, deduction, or assumptions from other disciplines such as the natural sciences. The founder of phenomenology, German philosopher Edmund Husserl, defined phenomenology as the study of structures of consciousness that enable consciousness to refer to objects outside itself. This study requires reflection on the content of the mind to the exclusion of everything else. Husserl called this type of reflection phenomenological reduction. He identified the abstract content of activities such as remembering, desiring, and perceiving, which he called meanings. These meanings, he claimed, enabled an act to be directed toward an object. He held such directedness, called intentionality, to be the essence of consciousness.
German philosopher Martin Heidegger, Husserl's colleague and most brilliant critic, claimed that phenomenology should manifest what is hidden in ordinary, everyday experience. He thus attempted to describe what he called the structure of everydayness, or being-in-the-world, which he found to be an interconnected system of equipment, social roles, and purposes.
In the mid-1900s French existentialist Jean Paul Sartre attempted to adapt Heidegger's phenomenology to the philosophy of consciousness. Sartre agreed with Husserl that consciousness is always directed at objects but criticized his claim that such directedness is possible only through special mental entities called meanings.
Phenomenological versions of theology, sociology, psychology, psychiatry, and literary criticism have been developed in 20th-century thought, and phenomenology remains one of the most important schools of contemporary philosophy. ---Encarta Encyclopedia
