Phenomenology: Encyclopedia II - Phenomenology - Transcendental phenomenology after the Ideen 1913

Phenomenology - Transcendental phenomenology after the Ideen 1913

Some years after the publication of the Logical Investigations, Husserl made some key elaborations which led him to the distinction between the act of consciousness (noesis) and the phenomena at which it is directed (the noemata).

• "noetic" refers to the act of consciousness (believing, willing, hating and loving ...)
• "noematic" refers to the object or content (noema) which appears in the noetic acts (respectively the believed, wanted, hated and loved ...).

What we observe is not the object as it is in itself, but how and inasmuch it is given in the intentional acts. Knowledge of essences would only be possible by "bracketing" all assumptions about the existence of an external world and the inessential (subjective) aspects of how the object is concretely given to us. This procedure Husserl called epoché.

Husserl in a later period concentrated more on the ideal, essential structures of consciousness. As he wanted to exclude any hypothesis on the existence of external objects, he introduced the method of phenomenological reduction to eliminate them. What was left over was the pure transcendental ego, as opposed to the concrete empirical ego. Now (transcendental) phenomenology is the study of the essential structures that are left in pure consciousness: this amounts in practice to the study of the noemata and the relations among them. German philosopher Theodor Adorno criticised Husserl's concept of phenomenological epistemology in his metacritique "Against Epistemology", which is anti-foundationalist in its stance.

Transcendental phenomenologists include: Oskar Becker, Aron Gurwitsch and Alfred Schutz.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Transcendental phenomenology after the Ideen 1913", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki