Phenomenology

First published Sun Nov 16, 2003; substantive revision Mon Dec 16, 2013

Phenomenology is the study of structures of consciousness asexperienced from the first-person point of view. The central structureof an experience is its intentionality, its being directed towardsomething, as it is an experience of or about some object. Anexperience is directed toward an object by virtue of its content ormeaning (which represents the object) together with appropriateenabling conditions.

Phenomenology as a discipline is distinct from but related to otherkey disciplines in philosophy, such as ontology, epistemology, logic,and ethics. Phenomenology has been practiced in various guises forcenturies, but it came into its own in the early 20th century in theworks of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and others.Phenomenological issues of intentionality, consciousness, qualia, andfirst-person perspective have been prominent in recent philosophy ofmind.

1. What is Phenomenology?

Phenomenology is commonly understood in either of two ways: as adisciplinary field in philosophy, or as a movement in the history ofphilosophy.

The discipline of phenomenology may be defined initially as thestudy of structures of experience, or consciousness. Literally,phenomenology is the study of “phenomena”: appearances of things, orthings as they appear in our experience, or the ways we experiencethings, thus the meanings things have in our experience. Phenomenologystudies conscious experience as experienced from the subjective orfirst person point of view. This field of philosophy is then to bedistinguished from, and related to, the other main fields ofphilosophy: ontology (the study of being or what is), epistemology (thestudy of knowledge), logic (the study of valid reasoning), ethics (thestudy of right and wrong action), etc.

The historical movement of phenomenology is the philosophicaltradition launched in the first half of the 20^th century byEdmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-PaulSartre,et al. In that movement, the discipline ofphenomenology was prized as the proper foundation of all philosophy—as opposed, say, to ethics or metaphysics or epistemology. Themethods and characterization of the discipline were widely debated byHusserl and his successors, and these debates continue to the presentday. (The definition of phenomenology offered above will thus bedebatable, for example, by Heideggerians, but it remains the startingpoint in characterizing the discipline.)

In recent philosophy of mind, the term “phenomenology” is oftenrestricted to the characterization of sensory qualities of seeing,hearing, etc.: what it is like to have sensations of various kinds.However, our experience is normally much richer in content than meresensation. Accordingly, in the phenomenological tradition,phenomenology is given a much wider range, addressing the meaningthings have in our experience, notably, the significance of objects,events, tools, the flow of time, the self, and others, as these thingsarise and are experienced in our “life-world”.

Phenomenology as a discipline has been central to the tradition ofcontinental European philosophy throughout the 20^th century,while philosophy of mind has evolved in the Austro-Anglo-Americantradition of analytic philosophy that developed throughout the20^th century. Yet the fundamental character of our mentalactivity is pursued in overlapping ways within these two traditions.Accordingly, the perspective on phenomenology drawn in this articlewill accommodate both traditions. The main concern here will be tocharacterize the discipline of phenomenology, in a contemporarypurview, while also highlighting the historical tradition that broughtthe discipline into its own.

Basically, phenomenology studies the structure of various types ofexperience ranging from perception, thought, memory, imagination,emotion, desire, and volition to bodily awareness, embodied action, andsocial activity, including linguistic activity. The structure of theseforms of experience typically involves what Husserl called“intentionality”, that is, the directedness of experience toward thingsin the world, the property of consciousness that it is a consciousnessof or about something. According to classical Husserlian phenomenology,our experience is directed toward—represents or “intends”—things onlythrough particular concepts, thoughts,ideas, images, etc. These make up the meaning or content of a givenexperience, and are distinct from the things they present or mean.

The basic intentional structure of consciousness, we find inreflection or analysis, involves further forms of experience. Thus,phenomenology develops a complex account of temporal awareness (withinthe stream of consciousness), spatial awareness (notably inperception), attention (distinguishing focal and marginal or“horizonal” awareness), awareness of one’s own experience(self-consciousness, in one sense), self-awareness(awareness-of-oneself), the self in different roles (as thinking,acting, etc.), embodied action (including kinesthetic awareness ofone’s movement), purpose or intention in action (more or lessexplicit), awareness of other persons (in empathy, intersubjectivity,collectivity), linguistic activity (involving meaning, communication,understanding others), social interaction (including collectiveaction), and everyday activity in our surrounding life-world (in aparticular culture).

Furthermore, in a different dimension, we find various grounds orenabling conditions—conditions of the possibility—ofintentionality, including embodiment, bodily skills, cultural context,language and other social practices, social background, and contextualaspects of intentional activities. Thus, phenomenology leads fromconscious experience into conditions that help to give experience itsintentionality. Traditional phenomenology has focused on subjective,practical, and social conditions of experience. Recent philosophy ofmind, however, has focused especially on the neural substrate ofexperience, on how conscious experience and mental representation orintentionality are grounded in brain activity. It remains a difficultquestion how much of these grounds of experience fall within theprovince of phenomenology as a discipline. Cultural conditions thusseem closer to our experience and to our familiar self-understandingthan do the electrochemical workings of our brain, much less ourdependence on quantum-mechanical states of physical systems to which wemay belong. The cautious thing to say is that phenomenology leads insome ways into at least some background conditions of ourexperience.

2. The Discipline of Phenomenology

The discipline of phenomenology is defined by its domain of study,its methods, and its main results.

Phenomenology studies structures of conscious experience asexperienced from the first-person point of view, along with relevantconditions of experience. The central structure of an experience is itsintentionality, the way it is directed through its content or meaningtoward a certain object in the world.

We all experience various types of experience including perception,imagination, thought, emotion, desire, volition, and action. Thus, thedomain of phenomenology is the range of experiences including thesetypes (among others). Experience includes not only relatively passiveexperience as in vision or hearing, but also active experience as inwalking or hammering a nail or kicking a ball. (The range will bespecific to each species of being that enjoys consciousness; our focusis on our own, human, experience. Not all conscious beings will, orwill be able to, practice phenomenology, as we do.)

Conscious experiences have a unique feature: weexperiencethem, we live through them or perform them. Other things in the worldwe may observe and engage. But we do not experience them, in the senseof living through or performing them. This experiential or first-personfeature—that of being experienced—is an essential partof the nature or structure of conscious experience: as we say, “I see /think / desire / do …” This feature is both a phenomenologicaland an ontological feature of each experience: it is part of what it isfor the experience to be experienced (phenomenological) and part ofwhat it is for the experience to be (ontological).

How shall we study conscious experience? We reflect on various typesof experiences just as we experience them. That is to say, we proceedfrom the first-person point of view. However, we do not normallycharacterize an experience at the time we are performing it. In manycases we do not have that capability: a state of intense anger or fear,for example, consumes all of one’s psychic focus at the time. Rather,we acquire a background of having lived through a given type ofexperience, and we look to our familiarity with that type ofexperience: hearing a song, seeing a sunset, thinking about love,intending to jump a hurdle. The practice of phenomenology assumes suchfamiliarity with the type of experiences to be characterized.Importantly, also, it is types of experience that phenomenologypursues, rather than a particular fleeting experience—unlessits type is what interests us.

Classical phenomenologists practiced some three distinguishablemethods. (1) We describe a type of experience just as we find it in ourown (past) experience. Thus, Husserl and Merleau-Ponty spoke of puredescription of lived experience. (2) We interpret a type of experienceby relating it to relevant features of context. In this vein, Heideggerand his followers spoke of hermeneutics, the art of interpretation incontext, especially social and linguistic context. (3) We analyze theform of a type of experience. In the end, all the classicalphenomenologists practiced analysis of experience, factoring outnotable features for further elaboration.

These traditional methods have been ramified in recent decades,expanding the methods available to phenomenology. Thus: (4) In alogico-semantic model of phenomenology, we specify the truth conditionsfor a type of thinking (say, where I think that dogs chase cats) or thesatisfaction conditions for a type of intention (say, where I intend orwill to jump that hurdle). (5) In the experimental paradigm ofcognitive neuroscience, we design empirical experiments that tend toconfirm or refute aspects of experience (say, where a brain scan showselectrochemical activity in a specific region of the brain thought tosubserve a type of vision or emotion or motor control). This style of“neurophenomenology” assumes that conscious experience is grounded inneural activity in embodied action in appropriate surroundings—mixing pure phenomenology with biological and physical science in a waythat was not wholly congenial to traditional phenomenologists.

What makes an experience conscious is a certain awareness one has ofthe experience while living through or performing it. This form ofinner awareness has been a topic of considerable debate, centuriesafter the issue arose with Locke’s notion of self-consciousness on theheels of Descartes’ sense of consciousness (conscience,co-knowledge). Does this awareness-of-experience consist in a kind ofinner observation of the experience, as if one were doing two things atonce? (Brentano argued no.) Is it a higher-order perception of one’smind’s operation, or is it a higher-order thought about one’s mentalactivity? (Recent theorists have proposed both.) Or is it a differentform of inherent structure? (Sartre took this line, drawing on Brentanoand Husserl.) These issues are beyond the scope of this article, butnotice that these results of phenomenological analysis shape thecharacterization of the domain of study and the methodology appropriateto the domain. For awareness-of-experience is a defining trait ofconscious experience, the trait that gives experience a first-person,lived character. It is that lived character of experience that allows afirst-person perspective on the object of study, namely, experience,and that perspective is characteristic of the methodology ofphenomenology.

Conscious experience is the starting point of phenomenology, butexperience shades off into less overtly conscious phenomena. As Husserland others stressed, we are only vaguely aware of things in the marginor periphery of attention, and we are only implicitly aware of thewider horizon of things in the world around us. Moreover, as Heideggerstressed, in practical activities like walking along, or hammering anail, or speaking our native tongue, we are not explicitly conscious ofour habitual patterns of action. Furthermore, as psychoanalysts havestressed, much of our intentional mental activity is not conscious atall, but may become conscious in the process of therapy orinterrogation, as we come to realize how we feel or think aboutsomething. We should allow, then, that the domain of phenomenology—our own experience—spreads out from consciousexperience into semi-conscious and even unconscious mental activity,along with relevant background conditions implicitly invoked in ourexperience. (These issues are subject to debate; the point here is toopen the door to the question of where to draw the boundary of thedomain of phenomenology.)

To begin an elementary exercise in phenomenology, consider sometypical experiences one might have in everyday life, characterized inthe first person:

I see that fishing boat off the coast as dusk descends over thePacific.
I hear that helicopter whirring overhead as it approaches thehospital.
I am thinking that phenomenology differs from psychology.
I wish that warm rain from Mexico were falling like last week.
I imagine a fearsome creature like that in my nightmare.
I intend to finish my writing by noon.
I walk carefully around the broken glass on the sidewalk.
I stroke a backhand cross-court with that certain underspin.
I am searching for the words to make my point in conversation.

Here are rudimentary characterizations of some familiar types ofexperience. Each sentence is a simple form of phenomenologicaldescription, articulating in everyday English the structure of the typeof experience so described. The subject term “I” indicates thefirst-person structure of the experience: the intentionality proceedsfrom the subject. The verb indicates the type of intentional activitydescribed: perception, thought, imagination, etc. Of central importanceis the way that objects of awareness are presented or intended in ourexperiences, especially, the way we see or conceive or think aboutobjects. The direct-object expression (“that fishing boat off thecoast”) articulates the mode of presentation of the object in theexperience: the content or meaning of the experience, the core of whatHusserl called noema. In effect, the object-phrase expresses the noemaof the act described, that is, to the extent that language hasappropriate expressive power. The overall form of the given sentencearticulates the basic form of intentionality in the experience:subject-act-content-object.

Rich phenomenological description or interpretation, as in Husserl,Merleau-Pontyet al., will far outrun such simplephenomenological descriptions as above. But such simple descriptionsbring out the basic form of intentionality. As we interpret thephenomenological description further, we may assess the relevance ofthe context of experience. And we may turn to wider conditions of thepossibility of that type of experience. In this way, in the practice ofphenomenology, we classify, describe, interpret, and analyze structuresof experiences in ways that answer to our own experience.

In such interpretive-descriptive analyses of experience, weimmediately observe that we are analyzing familiar forms ofconsciousness, conscious experience of or about this or that.Intentionality is thus the salient structure of our experience, andmuch of phenomenology proceeds as the study of different aspects ofintentionality. Thus, we explore structures of the stream ofconsciousness, the enduring self, the embodied self, and bodily action.Furthermore, as we reflect on how these phenomena work, we turn to theanalysis of relevant conditions that enable our experiences to occur asthey do, and to represent or intend as they do. Phenomenology thenleads into analyses of conditions of the possibility of intentionality,conditions involving motor skills and habits, background socialpractices, and often language, with its special place in humanaffairs.

3. From Phenomena to Phenomenology

The Oxford English Dictionary presents the followingdefinition: “Phenomenology. a. The science of phenomena as distinctfrom being (ontology). b. That division of any science which describesand classifies its phenomena. From the Greekphainomenon,appearance.” In philosophy, the term is used in the first sense, amiddebates of theory and methodology. In physics and philosophy ofscience, the term is used in the second sense, albeit onlyoccasionally.

In its root meaning, then, phenomenology is the study ofphenomena: literally, appearances as opposed to reality. Thisancient distinction launched philosophy as we emerged from Plato’scave. Yet the discipline of phenomenology did not blossom until the20th century and remains poorly understood in many circles ofcontemporary philosophy. What is that discipline? How did philosophymove from a root concept of phenomena to the discipline ofphenomenology?

Originally, in the 18th century, “phenomenology” meant thetheory of appearances fundamental to empirical knowledge, especiallysensory appearances. The Latin term “Phenomenologia” wasintroduced by Christoph Friedrich Oetinger in 1736. Subsequently, theGerman term “Phänomenologia” was used by JohannHeinrich Lambert, a follower of Christian Wolff. Immanuel Kant usedthe term occasionally in various writings, as did Johann GottliebFichte. In 1807, G. W. F. Hegel wrote a booktitledPhänomenologie des Geistes (usually translatedasPhenomenology of Spirit). By 1889 Franz Brentano used theterm to characterize what he called “descriptivepsychology”. From there Edmund Husserl took up the term for hisnew science of consciousness, and the rest is history.

Suppose we say phenomenology studies phenomena: what appears to us—and its appearing. How shall we understand phenomena? The termhas a rich history in recent centuries, in which we can see traces ofthe emerging discipline of phenomenology.

In a strict empiricist vein, what appears before the mind aresensory data or qualia: either patterns of one’s own sensations (seeingred here now, feeling this ticklish feeling, hearing that resonant basstone) or sensible patterns of worldly things, say, the looks and smellsof flowers (what John Locke called secondary qualities of things). In astrict rationalist vein, by contrast, what appears before the mind areideas, rationally formed “clear and distinct ideas” (in RenéDescartes’ ideal). In Immanuel Kant’s theory of knowledge, fusingrationalist and empiricist aims, what appears to the mind are phenomenadefined as things-as-they-appear or things-as-they-are-represented (ina synthesis of sensory and conceptual forms of objects-as-known). InAuguste Comte’s theory of science, phenomena (phenomenes) arethe facts (faits, what occurs) that a given science wouldexplain.

In 18^th and 19^th century epistemology, then,phenomena are the starting points in building knowledge, especiallyscience. Accordingly, in a familiar and still current sense, phenomenaare whatever we observe (perceive) and seek to explain.

As the discipline of psychology emerged late in the 19^thcentury, however, phenomena took on a somewhat different guise. InFranz Brentano’sPsychology from an Empirical Standpoint(1874), phenomena are what occur in the mind: mental phenomena are actsof consciousness (or their contents), and physical phenomena areobjects of external perception starting with colors and shapes. ForBrentano, physical phenomena exist “intentionally” in acts ofconsciousness. This view revives a Medieval notion Brentano called“intentional in-existence”, but the ontology remains undeveloped (whatis it to exist in the mind, and do physical objects exist only in themind?). More generally, we might say, phenomena are whatever we areconscious of: objects and events around us, other people, ourselves,even (in reflection) our own conscious experiences, as we experiencethese. In a certain technical sense, phenomena are thingsasthey are given to our consciousness, whether in perception orimagination or thought or volition. This conception of phenomena wouldsoon inform the new discipline of phenomenology.

Brentano distinguisheddescriptive psychology fromgenetic psychology. Where genetic psychology seeks the causesof various types of mental phenomena, descriptive psychology definesand classifies the various types of mental phenomena, includingperception, judgment, emotion, etc. According to Brentano, every mentalphenomenon, or act of consciousness, is directed toward some object,and only mental phenomena are so directed. This thesis of intentionaldirectedness was the hallmark of Brentano’s descriptive psychology. In1889 Brentano used the term “phenomenology” for descriptive psychology,and the way was paved for Husserl’s new science of phenomenology.

Phenomenology as we know it was launched by Edmund Husserl in hisLogical Investigations (1900–01). Two importantly differentlines of theory came together in that monumental work: psychologicaltheory, on the heels of Franz Brentano (and also William James, whosePrinciples of Psychology appeared in 1891 and greatlyimpressed Husserl); and logical or semantic theory, on the heels ofBernard Bolzano and Husserl’s contemporaries who founded modern logic,including Gottlob Frege. (Interestingly, both lines of research traceback to Aristotle, and both reached importantly new results inHusserl’s day.)

Husserl’sLogical Investigations was inspired by Bolzano’sideal of logic, while taking up Brentano’s conception of descriptivepsychology. In hisTheory of Science (1835) Bolzanodistinguished between subjective and objective ideas or representations(Vorstellungen). In effect Bolzano criticized Kant and beforehim the classical empiricists and rationalists for failing to make thissort of distinction, thereby rendering phenomena merely subjective.Logic studies objective ideas, including propositions, which in turnmake up objective theories as in the sciences. Psychology would, bycontrast, study subjective ideas, the concrete contents (occurrences)of mental activities in particular minds at a given time. Husserl wasafter both, within a single discipline. So phenomena must bereconceived as objective intentional contents (sometimes calledintentional objects) of subjective acts of consciousness. Phenomenologywould then study this complex of consciousness and correlatedphenomena. InIdeas I (Book One, 1913) Husserl introduced twoGreek words to capture his version of the Bolzanoan distinction:noesis andnoema, from the Greek verbnoéō (νοέω), meaning toperceive, think, intend, whence the nounnous or mind. Theintentional process of consciousness is callednoesis, whileits ideal content is callednoema. The noema of an act of consciousness Husserlcharacterized both as an ideal meaning and as “the objectasintended”. Thus the phenomenon, or object-as-it-appears, becomes thenoema, or object-as-it-is-intended. The interpretations of Husserl’stheory of noema have been several and amount to different developmentsof Husserl’s basic theory of intentionality. (Is the noema an aspect ofthe object intended, or rather a medium of intention?)

For Husserl, then, phenomenology integrates a kind of psychologywith a kind of logic. It develops a descriptive or analytic psychologyin that it describes and analyzes types of subjective mental activityor experience, in short, acts of consciousness. Yet it develops a kindof logic—a theory of meaning (today we say logical semantics)—in that it describes and analyzes objective contents ofconsciousness: ideas, concepts, images, propositions, in short, idealmeanings of various types that serve as intentional contents, ornoematic meanings, of various types of experience. These contents areshareable by different acts of consciousness, and in that sense theyare objective, ideal meanings. Following Bolzano (and to some extentthe platonistic logician Hermann Lotze), Husserl opposed any reductionof logic or mathematics or science to mere psychology, to how peoplehappen to think, and in the same spirit he distinguished phenomenologyfrom mere psychology. For Husserl, phenomenology would studyconsciousness without reducing the objective and shareable meaningsthat inhabit experience to merely subjective happenstances. Idealmeaning would be the engine of intentionality in acts ofconsciousness.

A clear conception of phenomenology awaited Husserl’s development ofa clear model of intentionality. Indeed, phenomenology and the modernconcept of intentionality emerged hand-in-hand in Husserl’sLogicalInvestigations (1900–01). With theoretical foundations laid in theInvestigations, Husserl would then promote the radical newscience of phenomenology inIdeas I (1913). And alternativevisions of phenomenology would soon follow.

4. The History and Varieties of Phenomenology

Phenomenology came into its own with Husserl, much as epistemologycame into its own with Descartes, and ontology or metaphysics came intoits own with Aristotle on the heels of Plato. Yet phenomenology hasbeen practiced, with or without the name, for many centuries. WhenHindu and Buddhist philosophers reflected on states of consciousnessachieved in a variety of meditative states, they were practicingphenomenology. When Descartes, Hume, and Kant characterized states ofperception, thought, and imagination, they were practicingphenomenology. When Brentano classified varieties of mental phenomena(defined by the directedness of consciousness), he was practicingphenomenology. When William James appraised kinds of mental activity inthe stream of consciousness (including their embodiment and theirdependence on habit), he too was practicing phenomenology. And whenrecent analytic philosophers of mind have addressed issues ofconsciousness and intentionality, they have often been practicingphenomenology. Still, the discipline of phenomenology, its rootstracing back through the centuries, came to full flower in Husserl.

Husserl’s work was followed by a flurry of phenomenological writingin the first half of the 20^th century. The diversity oftraditional phenomenology is apparent in theEncyclopedia ofPhenomenology (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997, Dordrecht andBoston), which features separate articles on some seven types ofphenomenology. (1) Transcendental constitutive phenomenology studieshow objects are constituted in pure or transcendental consciousness,setting aside questions of any relation to the natural world around us.(2) Naturalistic constitutive phenomenology studies how consciousnessconstitutes or takes things in the world of nature, assuming with thenatural attitude that consciousness is part of nature. (3) Existentialphenomenology studies concrete human existence, including ourexperience of free choice or action in concrete situations. (4)Generative historicist phenomenology studies how meaning, as found inour experience, is generated in historical processes of collectiveexperience over time. (5) Genetic phenomenology studies the genesis ofmeanings of things within one’s own stream of experience. (6)Hermeneutical phenomenology studies interpretive structures ofexperience, how we understand and engage things around us in our humanworld, including ourselves and others. (7) Realistic phenomenologystudies the structure of consciousness and intentionality, assuming itoccurs in a real world that is largely external to consciousness andnot somehow brought into being by consciousness.

The most famous of the classical phenomenologists were Husserl,Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty. In these four thinkers we finddifferent conceptions of phenomenology, different methods, anddifferent results. A brief sketch of their differences will captureboth a crucial period in the history of phenomenology and a sense ofthe diversity of the field of phenomenology.

In hisLogical Investigations (1900–01) Husserl outlined acomplex system of philosophy, moving from logic to philosophy oflanguage, to ontology (theory of universals and parts of wholes), to aphenomenological theory of intentionality, and finally to aphenomenological theory of knowledge. Then inIdeas I (1913)he focused squarely on phenomenology itself. Husserl definedphenomenology as “the science of the essence of consciousness”,centered on the defining trait of intentionality, approached explicitly“in the first person”. (See Husserl,Ideas I,¤¤33ff.) In this spirit, we may say phenomenology is thestudy of consciousness—that is, conscious experience of varioustypes—as experienced from the first-person point of view. Inthis discipline we study different forms of experience justaswe experience them, from the perspective of the subject living throughor performing them. Thus, we characterize experiences of seeing,hearing, imagining, thinking, feeling (i.e., emotion), wishing,desiring, willing, and also acting, that is, embodied volitionalactivities of walking, talking, cooking, carpentering, etc. However,not just any characterization of an experience will do.Phenomenological analysis of a given type of experience will featurethe ways in which we ourselves would experience that form of consciousactivity. And the leading property of our familiar types of experienceis their intentionality, their being a consciousness of or aboutsomething, something experienced or presented or engaged in a certainway. How I see or conceptualize or understand the object I am dealingwith defines the meaning of that object in my current experience. Thus,phenomenology features a study of meaning, in a wide sense thatincludes more than what is expressed in language.

InIdeas I Husserl presented phenomenology with atranscendental turn. In part this means that Husserl took on theKantian idiom of “transcendental idealism”, looking forconditions of the possibility of knowledge, or of consciousnessgenerally, and arguably turning away from any reality beyondphenomena. But Husserl’s transcendental turn also involved hisdiscovery of the method ofepoché (from the Greek skeptics’ notion of abstainingfrom belief). We are to practice phenomenology, Husserl proposed, by“bracketing” the question of the existence of the naturalworld around us. We thereby turn our attention, in reflection, to thestructure of our own conscious experience. Our first key result is theobservation that each act of consciousness is a consciousness ofsomething, that is, intentional, or directed towardsomething. Consider my visual experience wherein I see a tree acrossthe square. In phenomenological reflection, we need not concernourselves with whether the tree exists: my experience is of a treewhether or not such a tree exists. However, we do need to concernourselves withhow the object is meant or intended. I see aEucalyptus tree, not a Yucca tree; I see that object as a Eucalyptus,with a certain shape, with bark stripping off, etc. Thus, bracketingthe tree itself, we turn our attention to my experience of the tree,and specifically to the content or meaning in my experience. Thistree-as-perceived Husserl calls the noema or noematic sense of theexperience.

Philosophers succeeding Husserl debated the proper characterizationof phenomenology, arguing over its results and its methods. AdolfReinach, an early student of Husserl’s (who died in World War I),argued that phenomenology should remain allied with a realist ontology,as in Husserl’sLogical Investigations. Roman Ingarden, aPolish phenomenologist of the next generation, continued the resistanceto Husserl’s turn to transcendental idealism. For such philosophers,phenomenology should not bracket questions of being or ontology, as themethod ofepoché would suggest. And they were notalone. Martin Heidegger studied Husserl’s early writings, worked asAssistant to Husserl in 1916, and in 1928 succeeded Husserl in theprestigious chair at the University of Freiburg. Heidegger had his ownideas about phenomenology.

InBeing and Time (1927) Heidegger unfurled his renditionof phenomenology. For Heidegger, we and our activities are always “inthe world”, our being is being-in-the-world, so we do not study ouractivities by bracketing the world, rather we interpret our activitiesand the meaning things have for us by looking to our contextualrelations to things in the world. Indeed, for Heidegger, phenomenologyresolves into what he called “fundamental ontology”. We mustdistinguish beings from their being, and we begin our investigation ofthe meaning of being in our own case, examining our own existence inthe activity of “Dasein” (that being whose being is in each case myown). Heidegger resisted Husserl’s neo-Cartesian emphasis onconsciousness and subjectivity, including how perception presentsthings around us. By contrast, Heidegger held that our more basic waysof relating to things are in practical activities like hammering, wherethe phenomenology reveals our situation in a context of equipment andin being-with-others.

InBeing and Time Heidegger approached phenomenology, in aquasi-poetic idiom, through the root meanings of “logos”and “phenomena”, so that phenomenology is defined as theart or practice of “letting things show themselves”. InHeidegger’s inimitable linguistic play on the Greek roots, “‘phenomenology’ means …—to let that whichshows itself be seen from itself in the very way in which it showsitself from itself.” (See Heidegger,Being and Time,1927, ¦ 7C.) Here Heidegger explicitly parodies Husserl’s call,“To the things themselves!”, or “To the phenomenathemselves!” Heidegger went on to emphasize practical forms ofcomportment or better relating (Verhalten) as in hammering anail, as opposed to representational forms of intentionality as inseeing or thinking about a hammer. Much ofBeing and Timedevelops an existential interpretation of our modes of beingincluding, famously, our being-toward-death.

In a very different style, in clear analytical prose, in the text of alecture course calledThe Basic Problems of Phenomenology(1927), Heidegger traced the question of the meaning of being fromAristotle through many other thinkers into the issues ofphenomenology. Our understanding of beings and their being comesultimately through phenomenology. Here the connection with classicalissues of ontology is more apparent, and consonant with Husserl’svision in theLogical Investigations (an early source ofinspiration for Heidegger). One of Heidegger’s most innovative ideaswas his conception of the “ground” of being, looking tomodes of being more fundamental than the things around us (from treesto hammers). Heidegger questioned the contemporary concern withtechnology, and his writing might suggest that our scientific theoriesare historical artifacts that we use in technological practice, ratherthan systems of ideal truth (as Husserl had held). Our deepunderstanding of being, in our own case, comes rather fromphenomenology, Heidegger held.

In the 1930s phenomenology migrated from Austrian and then Germanphilosophy into French philosophy. The way had been paved in MarcelProust’sIn Search of Lost Time, in which the narratorrecounts in close detail his vivid recollections of past experiences,including his famous associations with the smell of freshly bakedmadeleines. This sensibility to experience traces to Descartes’ work,and French phenomenology has been an effort to preserve the centralthrust of Descartes’ insights while rejecting mind-body dualism. Theexperience of one’s own body, or one’s lived or living body, has beenan important motif in many French philosophers of the 20^thcentury.

In the novelNausea (1936) Jean-Paul Sartre described abizarre course of experience in which the protagonist, writing in thefirst person, describes how ordinary objects lose their meaning untilhe encounters pure being at the foot of a chestnut tree, and in thatmoment recovers his sense of his own freedom. InBeing andNothingness (1943, written partly while a prisoner of war),Sartre developed his conception of phenomenologicalontology. Consciousness is a consciousness of objects, as Husserl hadstressed. In Sartre’s model of intentionality, the central player inconsciousness is a phenomenon, and the occurrence of a phenomenon justis a consciousness-of-an-object. The chestnut tree I see is, forSartre, such a phenomenon in my consciousness. Indeed, all things inthe world, as we normally experience them, are phenomena, beneath orbehind which lies their “being-in-itself”. Consciousness,by contrast, has “being-for-itself”, since eachconsciousness is not only a consciousness-of-its-object but also apre-reflective consciousness-of-itself (conscience desoi). Yet for Sartre, unlike Husserl, the “I” or selfis nothing but a sequence of acts of consciousness, notably includingradically free choices (like a Humean bundle of perceptions).

For Sartre, the practice of phenomenology proceeds by a deliberatereflection on the structure of consciousness. Sartre’s method is ineffect a literary style of interpretive description of different typesof experience in relevant situations—a practice that does notreally fit the methodological proposals of either Husserl or Heidegger,but makes use of Sartre’s great literary skill. (Sartre wrote manyplays and novels and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.)

Sartre’s phenomenology inBeing and Nothingness became thephilosophical foundation for his popular philosophy of existentialism,sketched in his famous lecture “Existentialism is aHumanism” (1945). InBeing and Nothingness Sartreemphasized the experience of freedom of choice, especially the projectof choosing one’s self, the defining pattern of one’s pastactions. Through vivid description of the “look” of theOther, Sartre laid groundwork for the contemporary politicalsignificance of the concept of the Other (as in other groups orethnicities). Indeed, inThe Second Sex (1949) Simone deBeauvoir, Sartre’s life-long companion, launched contemporary feminismwith her nuanced account of the perceived role of women as Other.

In 1940s Paris, Maurice Merleau-Ponty joined with Sartre andBeauvoir in developing phenomenology. InPhenomenology ofPerception (1945) Merleau-Ponty developed a rich variety ofphenomenology emphasizing the role of the body in human experience.Unlike Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre, Merleau-Ponty looked toexperimental psychology, analyzing the reported experience of amputeeswho felt sensations in a phantom limb. Merleau-Ponty rejected bothassociationist psychology, focused on correlations between sensationand stimulus, and intellectualist psychology, focused on rationalconstruction of the world in the mind. (Think of the behaviorist andcomputationalist models of mind in more recent decades of empiricalpsychology.) Instead, Merleau-Ponty focused on the “body image”, ourexperience of our own body and its significance in our activities.Extending Husserl’s account of the lived body (as opposed to thephysical body), Merleau-Ponty resisted the traditional Cartesianseparation of mind and body. For the body image is neither in themental realm nor in the mechanical-physical realm. Rather, my body is,as it were, me in my engaged action with things I perceive includingother people.

The scope ofPhenomenology of Perception is characteristicof the breadth of classical phenomenology, not least becauseMerleau-Ponty drew (with generosity) on Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartrewhile fashioning his own innovative vision of phenomenology. Hisphenomenology addressed the role of attention in the phenomenal field,the experience of the body, the spatiality of the body, the motility ofthe body, the body in sexual being and in speech, other selves,temporality, and the character of freedom so important in Frenchexistentialism. Near the end of a chapter on the cogito (Descartes’ “Ithink, therefore I am”), Merleau-Ponty succinctly captures hisembodied, existential form of phenomenology, writing:

Insofar as, when I reflect on the essence of subjectivity, I find itbound up with that of the body and that of the world, this is becausemy existence as subjectivity [= consciousness] is merely one with myexistence as a body and with the existence of the world, and becausethe subject that I am, when taken concretely, is inseparable from thisbody and this world. [408]

In short, consciousness is embodied (in the world), and equally bodyis infused with consciousness (with cognition of the world).

In the years since Husserl, Heidegger,et al. wrote,phenomenologists have dug into all these classical issues, includingintentionality, temporal awareness, intersubjectivity, practicalintentionality, and the social and linguistic contexts of humanactivity. Interpretation of historical texts by Husserlet al.has played a prominent role in this work, both because the texts arerich and difficult and because the historical dimension is itself partof the practice of continental European philosophy. Since the 1960s,philosophers trained in the methods of analytic philosophy have alsodug into the foundations of phenomenology, with an eye to20^th century work in philosophy of logic, language, andmind.

Phenomenology was already linked with logical and semantic theory inHusserl’sLogical Investigations. Analytic phenomenologypicks up on that connection. In particular, Dagfinn Føllesdaland J. N. Mohanty have explored historical and conceptual relationsbetween Husserl’s phenomenology and Frege’s logical semantics (inFrege’s “On Sense and Reference”, 1892). For Frege, anexpression refers to an object by way of a sense: thus, twoexpressions (say, “the morning star” and “theevening star”) may refer to the same object (Venus) but expressdifferent senses with different manners of presentation. For Husserl,similarly, an experience (or act of consciousness) intends or refersto an object by way of a noema or noematic sense: thus, twoexperiences may refer to the same object but have different noematicsenses involving different ways of presenting the object (for example,in seeing the same object from different sides). Indeed, for Husserl,the theory of intentionality is a generalization of the theory oflinguistic reference: as linguistic reference is mediated by sense, sointentional reference is mediated by noematic sense.

More recently, analytic philosophers of mind have rediscoveredphenomenological issues of mental representation, intentionality,consciousness, sensory experience, intentional content, andcontext-of-thought. Some of these analytic philosophers of mind harkback to William James and Franz Brentano at the origins of modernpsychology, and some look to empirical research in today’s cognitiveneuroscience. Some researchers have begun to combine phenomenologicalissues with issues of neuroscience and behavioral studies andmathematical modeling. Such studies will extend the methods oftraditional phenomenology as theZeitgeist moves on. Weaddress philosophy of mind below.

5. Phenomenology and Ontology, Epistemology, Logic, Ethics

The discipline of phenomenology forms one basic field in philosophyamong others. How is phenomenology distinguished from, and related to,other fields in philosophy?

Traditionally, philosophy includes at least four core fields ordisciplines: ontology, epistemology, ethics, logic. Supposephenomenology joins that list. Consider then these elementarydefinitions of field:

Ontology is the study of beings or their being—whatis.
Epistemology is the study of knowledge—how we know.
Logic is the study of valid reasoning—how to reason.
Ethics is the study of right and wrong—how we shouldact.
Phenomenology is the study of our experience—how weexperience.

The domains of study in these five fields are clearly different, andthey seem to call for different methods of study.

Philosophers have sometimes argued that one of these fields is“first philosophy”, the most fundamental discipline, on which allphilosophy or all knowledge or wisdom rests. Historically (it may beargued), Socrates and Plato put ethics first, then Aristotle putmetaphysics or ontology first, then Descartes put epistemology first,then Russell put logic first, and then Husserl (in his latertranscendental phase) put phenomenology first.

Consider epistemology. As we saw, phenomenology helps to define thephenomena on which knowledge claims rest, according to modernepistemology. On the other hand, phenomenology itself claims to achieveknowledge about the nature of consciousness, a distinctive kind offirst-person knowledge, through a form of intuition.

Consider logic. As we saw, logical theory of meaning led Husserlinto the theory of intentionality, the heart of phenomenology. On oneaccount, phenomenology explicates the intentional or semantic force ofideal meanings, and propositional meanings are central to logicaltheory. But logical structure is expressed in language, either ordinarylanguage or symbolic languages like those of predicate logic ormathematics or computer systems. It remains an important issue ofdebate where and whether language shapes specific forms of experience(thought, perception, emotion) and their content or meaning. So thereis an important (if disputed) relation between phenomenology andlogico-linguistic theory, especially philosophical logic and philosophyof language (as opposed to mathematical logicper se).

Consider ontology. Phenomenology studies (among other things) thenature of consciousness, which is a central issue in metaphysics orontology, and one that leads into the traditional mind-body problem.Husserlian methodology would bracket the question of the existence ofthe surrounding world, thereby separating phenomenology from theontology of the world. Yet Husserl’s phenomenology presupposes theoryabout species and individuals (universals and particulars), relationsof part and whole, and ideal meanings—all parts ofontology.

Now consider ethics. Phenomenology might play a role in ethics byoffering analyses of the structure of will, valuing, happiness, andcare for others (in empathy and sympathy). Historically, though,ethics has been on the horizon of phenomenology. Husserl largelyavoided ethics in his major works, though he featured the role ofpractical concerns in the structure of the life-world orofGeist (spirit, or culture, as inZeitgeist), andhe once delivered a course of lectures giving ethics (like logic) abasic place in philosophy, indicating the importance of thephenomenology of sympathy in grounding ethics. InBeing andTime Heidegger claimed not to pursue ethics while discussingphenomena ranging from care, conscience, and guilt to“fallenness” and “authenticity” (all phenomenawith theological echoes). InBeing and Nothingness Sartreanalyzed with subtlety the logical problem of “bad faith”,yet he developed an ontology of value as produced by willing in goodfaith (which sounds like a revised Kantian foundation formorality). Beauvoir sketched an existentialist ethics, and Sartre leftunpublished notebooks on ethics. However, an explicitlyphenomenological approach to ethics emerged in the works of EmannuelLevinas, a Lithuanian phenomenologist who heard Husserl and Heideggerin Freiburg before moving to Paris. InTotality and Infinity(1961), modifying themes drawn from Husserl and Heidegger, Levinasfocused on the significance of the “face” of the other,explicitly developing grounds for ethics in this range ofphenomenology, writing an impressionistic style of prose withallusions to religious experience.

Allied with ethics are political and social philosophy. Sartre andMerleau-Ponty were politically engaged in 1940s Paris, and theirexistential philosophies (phenomenologically based) suggest apolitical theory based in individual freedom. Sartre later sought anexplicit blend of existentialism with Marxism. Still, political theoryhas remained on the borders of phenomenology. Social theory, however,has been closer to phenomenology as such. Husserl analyzed thephenomenological structure of the life-world andGeistgenerally, including our role in social activity. Heidegger stressedsocial practice, which he found more primordial than individualconsciousness. Alfred Schutz developed a phenomenology of the socialworld. Sartre continued the phenomenological appraisal of the meaningof the other, the fundamental social formation. Moving outward fromphenomenological issues, Michel Foucault studied the genesis andmeaning of social institutions, from prisons to insane asylums. AndJacques Derrida has long practiced a kind of phenomenology oflanguage, seeking social meaning in the “deconstruction”of wide-ranging texts. Aspects of French“poststructuralist” theory are sometimes interpreted asbroadly phenomenological, but such issues are beyond the presentpurview.

Classical phenomenology, then, ties into certain areas ofepistemology, logic, and ontology, and leads into parts of ethical,social, and political theory.

6. Phenomenology and Philosophy of Mind

It ought to be obvious that phenomenology has a lot to say in thearea called philosophy of mind. Yet the traditions of phenomenology andanalytic philosophy of mind have not been closely joined, despiteoverlapping areas of interest. So it is appropriate to close thissurvey of phenomenology by addressing philosophy of mind, one of themost vigorously debated areas in recent philosophy.

The tradition of analytic philosophy began, early in the 20thcentury, with analyses of language, notably in the works of GottlobFrege, Bertrand Russell, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Then in The Conceptof Mind (1949) Gilbert Ryle developed a series of analyses of languageabout different mental states, including sensation, belief, and will.Though Ryle is commonly deemed a philosopher of ordinary language, Rylehimself said The Concept of Mind could be called phenomenology. Ineffect, Ryle analyzed our phenomenological understanding of mentalstates as reflected in ordinary language about the mind. From thislinguistic phenomenology Ryle argued that Cartesian mind-body dualisminvolves a category mistake (the logic or grammar of mental verbs—“believe”, “see”, etc.—does notmean that we ascribe belief, sensation, etc., to “the ghost inthe machine”). With Ryle’s rejection of mind-body dualism, themind-body problem was re-awakened: what is the ontology of mindvis-à-vis body, and how are mind and body related?

René Descartes, in his epoch-making Meditations on FirstPhilosophy (1641), had argued that minds and bodies are two distinctkinds of being or substance with two distinct kinds of attributes ormodes: bodies are characterized by spatiotemporal physical properties,while minds are characterized by properties of thinking (includingseeing, feeling, etc.). Centuries later, phenomenology would find, withBrentano and Husserl, that mental acts are characterized byconsciousness and intentionality, while natural science would find thatphysical systems are characterized by mass and force, ultimately bygravitational, electromagnetic, and quantum fields. Where do we findconsciousness and intentionality in thequantum-electromagnetic-gravitational field that, by hypothesis, orderseverything in the natural world in which we humans and our minds exist?That is the mind-body problem today. In short, phenomenology by anyother name lies at the heart of the contemporary mind-body problem.

After Ryle, philosophers sought a more explicit and generallynaturalistic ontology of mind. In the 1950s materialism was arguedanew, urging that mental states are identical with states of thecentral nervous system. The classical identity theory holds that eachtoken mental state (in a particular person’s mind at a particular time)is identical with a token brain state (in that person’s brain at thattime). A stronger materialism holds, instead, that each type of mentalstate is identical with a type of brain state. But materialism does notfit comfortably with phenomenology. For it is not obvious how consciousmental states as we experience them—sensations, thoughts,emotions—can simply be the complex neural states that somehowsubserve or implement them. If mental states and neural states aresimply identical, in token or in type, where in our scientific theoryof mind does the phenomenology occur—is it not simply replacedby neuroscience? And yet experience is part of what is to be explainedby neuroscience.

In the late 1960s and 1970s the computer model of mind set in, andfunctionalism became the dominant model of mind. On this model, mind isnot what the brain consists in (electrochemical transactions in neuronsin vast complexes). Instead, mind is what brains do: their function ofmediating between information coming into the organism and behaviorproceeding from the organism. Thus, a mental state is a functionalstate of the brain or of the human (or animal) organism. Morespecifically, on a favorite variation of functionalism, the mind is acomputing system: mind is to brain as software is to hardware; thoughtsare just programs running on the brain’s “wetware”. Sincethe 1970s the cognitive sciences—from experimental studies ofcognition to neuroscience—have tended toward a mix ofmaterialism and functionalism. Gradually, however, philosophers foundthat phenomenological aspects of the mind pose problems for thefunctionalist paradigm too.

In the early 1970s Thomas Nagel argued in “What Is It Like toBe a Bat?” (1974) that consciousness itself—especiallythe subjective character of what it is like to have a certain type ofexperience—escapes physical theory. Many philosophers pressedthe case that sensory qualia—what it is like to feel pain, tosee red, etc.—are not addressed or explained by a physicalaccount of either brain structure or brain function. Consciousness hasproperties of its own. And yet, we know, it is closely tied to thebrain. And, at some level of description, neural activities implementcomputation.

In the 1980s John Searle argued in Intentionality (1983) (andfurther in The Rediscovery of the Mind (1991)) that intentionality andconsciousness are essential properties of mental states. For Searle,our brains produce mental states with properties of consciousness andintentionality, and this is all part of our biology, yet consciousnessand intentionality require a “first-person” ontology.Searle also argued that computers simulate but do not have mentalstates characterized by intentionality. As Searle argued, a computersystem has a syntax (processing symbols of certain shapes) but has nosemantics (the symbols lack meaning: we interpret the symbols). In thisway Searle rejected both materialism and functionalism, while insistingthat mind is a biological property of organisms like us: our brains“secrete” consciousness.

The analysis of consciousness and intentionality is central tophenomenology as appraised above, and Searle’s theory of intentionalityreads like a modernized version of Husserl’s. (Contemporary logicaltheory takes the form of stating truth conditions for propositions, andSearle characterizes a mental state’s intentionality by specifying its“satisfaction conditions”). However, there is an importantdifference in background theory. For Searle explicitly assumes thebasic worldview of natural science, holding that consciousness is partof nature. But Husserl explicitly brackets that assumption, and laterphenomenologists—including Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty—seem to seek a certain sanctuary for phenomenology beyond thenatural sciences. And yet phenomenology itself should be largelyneutral about further theories of how experience arises, notably frombrain activity.

Since the late 1980s, and especially the late 1990s, a variety ofwriters working in philosophy of mind have focused on the fundamentalcharacter of consciousness, ultimately a phenomenological issue. Doesconsciousness always and essentially involve self-consciousness, orconsciousness-of-consciousness, as Brentano, Husserl, and Sartre held(in varying detail)? If so, then every act of consciousness eitherincludes or is adjoined by a consciousness-of-that-consciousness. Doesthat self-consciousness take the form of an internal self-monitoring?If so, is that monitoring of a higher order, where each act ofconsciousness is joined by a further mental act monitoring the baseact? Or is such monitoring of the same order as the base act, a properpart of the act without which the act would not be conscious? A varietyof models of this self-consciousness have been developed, someexplicitly drawing on or adapting views in Brentano, Husserl, andSartre. Two recent collections address these issues: David WoodruffSmith and Amie L. Thomasson (editors), Phenomenology and Philosophy ofMind (2005), and Uriah Kriegel and Kenneth Williford (editors),Self-Representational Approaches to Consciousness (2006).

The philosophy of mind may be factored into the followingdisciplines or ranges of theory relevant to mind:

Phenomenologystudies conscious experience as experienced, analyzing the structure—the types, intentional forms and meanings, dynamics, and(certain) enabling conditions—of perception, thought,imagination, emotion, and volition and action.
Neuroscience studiesthe neural activities that serve as biological substrate to the varioustypes of mental activity, including conscious experience. Neurosciencewill be framed by evolutionary biology (explaining how neural phenomenaevolved) and ultimately by basic physics (explaining how biologicalphenomena are grounded in physical phenomena). Here lie the intricaciesof the natural sciences. Part of what the sciences are accountable foris the structure of experience, analyzed by phenomenology.
Cultural analysisstudies the social practices that help to shape or serve as culturalsubstrate of the various types of mental activity, including consciousexperience, typically manifest in embodied action. Here we study theimport of language and other social practices, including backgroundattitudes or assumptions, sometimes involving particular politicalsystems.
Ontology of mindstudies the ontological type of mental activity in general, rangingfrom perception (which involves causal input from environment toexperience) to volitional action (which involves causal output fromvolition to bodily movement).

This division of labor in the theory of mind can be seen as anextension of Brentano’s original distinction between descriptive andgenetic psychology. Phenomenology offers descriptive analyses of mentalphenomena, while neuroscience (and wider biology and ultimatelyphysics) offers models of explanation of what causes or gives rise tomental phenomena. Cultural theory offers analyses of social activitiesand their impact on experience, including ways language shapes ourthought, emotion, and motivation. And ontology frames all these resultswithin a basic scheme of the structure of the world, including our ownminds.

The ontological distinction among the form, appearance, and substrateof an activity of consciousness is detailed in D. W. Smith, Mind World(2004), in the essay “Three Facets of Consciousness”.

Meanwhile, from an epistemological standpoint, all these ranges oftheory about mind begin with how we observe and reason about and seekto explain phenomena we encounter in the world. And that is wherephenomenology begins. Moreover, how we understand each piece oftheory, including theory about mind, is central to the theory ofintentionality, as it were, the semantics of thought and experience ingeneral. And that is the heart of phenomenology.

7. Phenomenology in Contemporary Consciousness Theory

Phenomenological issues, by any other name, have played a prominentrole in very recent philosophy of mind. Amplifying the theme of theprevious section, we note two such issues: the form of inner awarenessthat ostensibly makes a mental activity conscious, and the phenomenalcharacter of conscious cognitive mental activity in thought, andperception, and action.

Ever since Nagel’s 1974 article, “What Is It Like to be a Bat?”, thenotion of what-it-is-like to experience a mental state or activity hasposed a challenge to reductive materialism and functionalism in theoryof mind. This subjective phenomenal character of consciousness is heldto be constitutive or definitive of consciousness. What is the form ofthat phenomenal character we find in consciousness?

A prominent line of analysis holds that the phenomenal character ofa mental activity consists in a certain form of awareness of thatactivity, an awareness that by definition renders it conscious. Sincethe 1980s a variety of models of that awareness have been developed. Asnoted above, there are models that define this awareness as ahigher-order monitoring, either an inner perception of the activity (aform of inner sense per Kant) or inner consciousness (per Brentano), oran inner thought about the activity. A further model analyzes suchawareness as an integral part of the experience, a form ofself-representation within the experience. (Again, see Kriegel andWilliford (eds.) (2006).)

A somewhat different model comes arguably closer to the form ofself-consciousness sought by Brentano, Husserl, and Sartre. On the“modal” model, inner awareness of an experience takes the form of anintegral reflexive awareness of “this very experience”. That form ofawareness is held to be a constitutive element of the experience thatrenders it conscious. As Sartre put the claim, self-consciousness isconstitutive of consciousness, but that self-consciousness is“pre-reflective”. This reflexive awareness is not, then, part of aseparable higher-order monitoring, but rather built into consciousnessper se. On the modal model, this awareness is part of the way theexperience unfolds: subjectively, phenomenally, consciously. This modelis elaborated in D. W. Smith (2004), Mind World, in the essay “Returnto Consciousness” (and elsewhere).

Whatever may be the precise form of phenomenal character, we wouldask how that character distributes over mental life. What is phenomenalin different types of mental activity? Here arise issues of cognitivephenomenology. Is phenomenality restricted to the “feel” of sensoryexperience? Or is phenomenality present also in cognitive experiences ofthinking such-and-such, or of perception bearing conceptual as well assensory content, or also in volitional or conative bodily action? Theseissues are explored in Bayne and Montague (eds.) (2011), CognitivePhenomenology.

A restrictive view holds that only sensory experience has a properphenomenal character, a what-it-is-like. Seeing a color, hearing atone, smelling an odor, feeling a pain—these types ofconscious experience have a phenomenal character, but no others do, onthis view. A stringent empiricism might limit phenomenal experienceto pure sensations, though Hume himself presumably recognizedphenomenal “ideas” beyond pure sense“impressions”. A somewhat more expansive view would holdthat perceptual experience has a distinctive phenomenal character evenwhere sensation is informed by concepts. Seeing that yellow canary,hearing that clear Middle C on a Steinway piano, smelling the sharpodor of anise, feeling a pain of the jab of the doctor’s needle inreceiving an injection—these types of conscious experiencehave a character of what-it-is-like, a character informed byconceptual content that is also “felt”, on this view. AKantian account of conceptual-sensory experience, or“intuition”, would endorse a phenomenal character in thesetypes of experience. Indeed, “phenomena”, in the Kantianidiom, are precisely things as they appear in consciousness, so ofcourse their appearance has a phenomenal character.

Now, a much more expansive view would hold that every consciousexperience has a distinctive phenomenal character. Thinking that 17 isa prime number, thinking that the red in the sunset is caused by thesun’s light waves being bent by the atmosphere, thinking that Kant wasmore right than Hume about the grounds of knowledge, thinking thateconomic principles are also political—even such highlycognitive activities have a character of what-it-is-like to so think,according to this expansive view.

Classical phenomenologists like Husserl and Merleau-Ponty surelyassumed an expansive view of phenomenal consciousness. As noted above,the “phenomena” that are the focus of phenomenology wereassumed to present a rich character of lived experience. EvenHeidegger, while de-emphasizing consciousness (the Cartesian sin!),dwelt on “phenomena” as what appears or shows up to us (to“Dasein”) in our everyday activities such as hammering anail. Like Merleau-Ponty, Gurwitsch (1964) explicitly studies the“phenomenal field”, embracing all that is presented in ourexperience. Arguably, for these thinkers, every type of consciousexperience has its distinctive phenomenal character, its“phenomenology”—and the task of phenomenology (thediscipline) is to analyze that character. Note that in recent debatesthe phenomenal character of an experience is often called its“phenomenology”—whereas, in the established idiom,the term “phenomenology” names the discipline that studiessuch “phenomenology”.

Since intentionality is a crucial property of consciousness,according to Brentano, Husserl, et al., the character of intentionalityitself would count as phenomenal, as part of what-it-is-like toexperience a given type of intentional experience. But it is not onlyintentional perception and thought that have their distinctivephenomenal characters. Embodied action also would have a distinctivephenomenal character, involving “lived” characters of kinestheticsensation as well as conceptual volitional content, say, in the feel ofkicking a soccer ball. The “lived body” is precisely the body asexperienced in everyday embodied volitional action such as running orkicking a ball or even speaking. Husserl wrote at length about the“lived body” (Leib), in Ideas II, and Merleau-Ponty followed suit withrich analyses of embodied perception and action, in Phenomenology ofPerception. In Bayne and Montague (eds.) (2011) see the article onconative phenomenology by Terence Horgan, and in Smith and Thomasson(eds.) (2005) see articles by Charles Siewert and Sean Kelly.

But now a problems remains. Intentionality essentially involvesmeaning, so the question arises how meaning appears in phenomenalcharacter. Importantly, the content of a conscious experience typicallycarries a horizon of background meaning, meaning that is largelyimplicit rather than explicit in experience. But then a wide range ofcontent carried by an experience would not have a consciously feltphenomenal character. So it may well be argued. Here is a line ofphenomenological theory for another day.

Bibliography

Classical Texts

Brentano, F., 1995,Psychology from an EmpiricalStandpoint, Trans. Antos C. Rancurello, D. B. Terrell, and LindaL. McAlister, London and New York: Routledge. From the German originalof 1874.
Brentano’s development of descriptivepsychology, the forerunner of Husserlian phenomenology, includingBrentano’s conception of mental phenomena as intentionally directed andhis analysis of inner consciousness distinguished from innerobservation.
Heidegger, M., 1962,Being and Time, Trans. by JohnMacquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper & Row. From theGerman original of 1927.
Heidegger’s magnum opus, laying out his style of phenomenologyand existential ontology, including his distinction between beings andtheir being, as well as his emphasis on practicalactivity.
Heidegger, M., 1982,The Basic Problems of Phenomenology.Trans. by Albert Hofstadter. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.From the German original of 1975. The text of a lecture course in 1927.
Heidegger’s clearest presentation of hisconception of phenomenology as fundamental ontology, addressing thehistory of the question of the meaning of being from Aristotleonward.
Husserl, E., 2001,Logical Investigations. Vols. One andTwo, Trans. J. N. Findlay. Ed. with translation corrections and with anew Introduction by Dermot Moran. With a new Preface by MichaelDummett. London and New York: Routledge. A new and revised edition ofthe original English translation by J. N. Findlay. London: Routledge& Kegan Paul, 1970. From the Second Edition of the German. Firstedition, 1900–01; second edition, 1913, 1920.
Husserl’s magnum opus, laying out his system ofphilosophy including philosophy of logic, philosophy of language,ontology, phenomenology, and epistemology. Here are the foundations ofHusserl’s phenomenology and his theory of intentionality.
Husserl, E., 2001,The Shorter Logical Investigations.London and New York: Routledge.
An abridged edition of the preceding.
Husserl, E., 1963,Ideas: A General Introduction to PurePhenomenology. Trans. W. R. Boyce Gibson. New York: Collier Books.From the German original of 1913, originally titledIdeaspertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a PhenomenologicalPhilosophy, First Book. Newly translated with the full title byFred Kersten. Dordrecht and Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1983.Known asIdeas I.
Husserl’s mature account of transcendentalphenomenology, including his notion of intentional content asnoema.
Husserl, E., 1989,Ideas pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology andto a Phenomenological Philosophy, Second Book. Trans. RichardRojcewicz and André Schuwer. Dordrecht and Boston: Kluwer AcademicPublishers. From the German original unpublished manuscript of 1912,revised 1915, 1928. Known asIdeas II.
Detailed phenomenological analyses assumed inIdeas I, including analyses of bodily awareness (kinesthesisand motility) and social awareness (empathy).
Merleau-Ponty, M., 2012,Phenomenology of Perception,Trans. Donald A. Landes. London and New York: Routledge. Priortranslation, 1996,Phenomenology of Perception, Trans. ColinSmith. London and New York: Routledge. From the French original of1945.
Merleau-Ponty’s conception of phenomenology,rich in impressionistic description of perception and other forms ofexperience, emphasizing the role of the experienced body in many formsof consciousness.
Sartre, J.-P., 1956,Being and Nothingness. Trans. HazelBarnes. New York: Washington Square Press. From the French original of1943.
Sartre’s magnum opus, developing in detail hisconception of phenomenology and his existential view of human freedom,including his analysis of consciousness-of-consciousness, the look ofthe Other, and much more.
Sartre, J.-P., 1964,Nausea. Trans. Lloyd Alexander. NewYork: New Directions Publishing. From the French original of 1938).
A novel in the first person, featuringdescriptions of how things are experienced, thereby illustratingSartre’s conception of phenomenology (and existentialism) with notechnical idioms and no explicit theoretical discussion.

Contemporary Studies

Bayne, T., and Montague, M., (eds.), 2011,CognitivePhenomenology. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
Essaysdebating the extend of phenomenal consciousness.
Block, N., Flanagan, O., and Güzeldere, G. (eds.), 1997,The Nature of Consciusness. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MITPress.
Extensive studies of aspects of consciousness,in analytic philosophy of mind, often addressing phenomenologicalissues, but with limited reference to phenomenology assuch.
Chalmers, D. (ed.), 2002,Philosophy of Mind: Classical andContemporary Readings. Oxford and New York: Oxford UniversityPress.
Core readings in philosophy of mind, largelyanalytic philosophy of mind, sometimes addressing phenomenologicalissues, with some reference to classical phenomenology, includingselections from Descartes, Ryle, Brentano, Nagel, and Searle (asdiscussed in the present article).
Dreyfus, H., with Hall, H. (eds.), 1982,Husserl,Intentionality and Cognitive Science. Cambridge, Massachusetts:MIT Press.
Studies of issues in Husserlian phenomenologyand theory of intentionality, with connections to early models ofcognitive science, including Jerry Fodor’s discussion of methodologicalsolipsism (compare Husserl’s method of bracketing or epoché),and including Dagfinn Føllesdal’s article, “Husserl’sNotion of Noema” (1969).
Fricke, C., and Føllesdal, D. (eds.), 2012,Intersubjectivity and Objectivity in Adam Smith and Edmund Husserl: ACollection of Essays. Frankfurt and Paris: Ontos Verlag.
Phenomenological studies of intersubjectivity,empathy, and sympathy in the works of Smith and Husserl.
Kriegel, U., and Williford, K. (eds.),2006,Self-Representational Approaches toConsciusness. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.
Essays addressing the structure ofself-consciousness, or consciousness-of-consciousness, some drawing onphenomenology explicitly.
Mohanty, J. N., 1989,Transcendental Phenomenology: An AnalyticAccount. Oxford and Cambridge, Massachusetts: Basil Blackwell.
A study of structures of consciousness andmeaning in a contemporary rendition of transcendental phenomenology,connecting with issues in analytic philosophy and itshistory.
Mohanty, J. N., 2008,The Philosophy of Edmund Husserl: AHistorical Development, New Haven and London: Yale UniversityPress.
A detailed study of the development ofHusserl’s philosophy and his conception of transcendentalphenomenology.
Mohanty, J. N., 2011,Edmund Husserl’s FreiburgYears: 1916–1938. New Haven and London: Yale UniversityPress.
A close study of Husserl’s late philosophy andhis conception of phenomenology involving the life-world.
Moran, D., 2000,Introduction to Phenomenology. London andNew York: Routledge.
An extensive introductory discussion of theprincipal works of the classical phenomenologists and several otherbroadly phenomenological thinkers.
Moran, D., 2005,Edmund Husserl: Founder ofPhenomenology. Cambridge and Malden, Massachusetts: Polity Press.
A study of Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology.
Parsons, Charles, 2012,From Kant to Husserl: Selected Essays,Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Studies of historical figures on philosophy ofmathematics, including Kant, Frege, Brentano, and Husserl.
Petitot, J., Varela, F. J., Pachoud, B., and Roy, J.-M., (eds.),1999,Naturalizing Phenomenology: Issues in ContemporaryPhenmenology and Cognitive Science. Stanford, California: StanfordUniversity Press (in collaboration with Cambridge University Press,Cambridge and New York).
Studies of issues of phenomenology in connectionwith cognitive science and neuroscience, pursuing the integration ofthe disciplines, thus combining classical phenomenology withcontemporary natural science.
Searle, J., 1983,Intentionality. Cambridge and New York:Cambridge University Press.
Searle’s analysis of intentionality, oftensimilar in detail to Husserl’s theory of intentionality, but pursued inthe tradition and style of analytic philosophy of mind and language,without overtly phenomenological methodology.
Smith, B., and Smith, D.W. (eds.), 1995,The CambridgeCompanion to Husserl. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge UniversityPress.
Detailed studies of Husserl’s work including hisphenomenology, with an introduction to his overallphilosophy.
Smith, D. W., 2013,Husserl, 2nd revised edition. Londonand New York: Routledge. (1st edition, 2007).
A detailed study of Husserl’s philosophicalsystem including logic, ontology, phenomenology, epistemology, andethics, assuming no prior background.
Smith, D. W., and McIntyre, R., 1982,Husserl andIntentionality: a Study of Mind, Meaning, and Language. Dordrechtand Boston: D. Reidel Publishing Company (now Springer).
A book-length development of analyticphenomenology, with an interpretation of Husserl’s phenomenology, histheory of intentionality, and his historical roots, and connectionswith issues in logical theory and analytic philosophy of language andmind, assuming no prior background.
Smith, D. W., and Thomasson, Amie L. (eds.),2005,Phenomenology and Philosophy of Mind. Oxford and NewYork: Oxford University Press.
Essays integrating phenomenology and analyticphilosophy of mind.
Sokolowski, R., 2000,Introduction to Phenomenology.Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
A contemporary introduction to the practice oftranscendental phenomenology, without historical interpretation,emphasizing a transcendental attitude in phenomenology.
Tieszen, R., 2005,Phenomenology, Logic, and the Philosophy ofMathematics. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
Essays relating Husserlian phenomenology withissues in logic and mathematics.
Tieszen, R., 2005,Phenomenology, Logic, and the Philosophy ofMathematics. Cambridge and New York: Camabridge UniversityPress.
Essays relating Husserlian phenomenologywith issues in logic and mathematics.
Tieszen, R., 2011,After Gödel: Platonism and Rationalism inMathematics and Logic. Oxford and New York: Oxford UniversityPress.
A study of Gödel’s work in relation to, inter alia,Husserlian phenomenology in the foundations of logic andmathematics.
Zahavi, D. (ed.), 2012,The Oxford Handbook on ContemporaryPhenomenology. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
A collection of contemporary essays onphenomenological themes (not primarily on historical figures).

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