The most original works that are of historical relevance, and generally foundational to the field of phenomenology. These are the writings by leading philosophy authors and human science and humanities scholars. Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Edith Stein, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty are probably among the best-known originators, though their work is not always easy to read and comprehend. Still, the foundational structures of these writings offer fundamental insights that are inexhaustible in their philosophical significance for those seriously interested in understanding phenomenology.

Exegetics is the critical discourse or philosophical commentary, explanation, or argumentative interpretation of a text. Exegetical publications tend to take up in a critical, and philosophical manner the arguments and positions of the founding authors mentioned above as well as address theoretical issues of more exegetical philosophers and scholars of phenomenology. This literature is enormously variegated and extensive, sometimes offering interesting comparative studies and probing thought-provoking topics, other times texts that are steeped in “language” and only of interest and readable by specialized philosophers, and there are publications that are engaged in energetic hair-splitting, cleverly raising fault-finding objections, and serving academic exegetical arguments. The exegetical structures of these enormously diverse and numerous texts unfortunately may be seen to include an almost interminable array of historical, theoretical, and liberal topics that are sometimes tedious, pretentious, intellectualist, and captious. The etymology of the term “exegesis” and “exegetics” borrows from Latin and Greek, meaning exposition, narrative, and explanation, also numerical exegesis of mathematical solutions. Exegetical phenomenology tends to be meta- phenomenology and meta-meta-phenomenology. How to recognize this form of phenomenological publications? The general style of these publications is that they offer explanations of, theories about, comments on, and introductions to other published (meta-)phenomenological works, topics, and concerns that tend to be technical and/or historical in a philosophical or specialized disciplinary phenomenological sense.

The third stream of phenomenological publications features studies that return to and start out from experience. This stream neither establishes phenomenological foundations, nor addresses theoretical topics, arguments, and contestations. Instead, the third stream of publications is composed of phenomenological texts that aim to “practise” or “do” phenomenology on concrete experiential topics of the lifeworld. Authors of the third stream try to do, as Kockelmans says, what was described as possible and necessary in the foundational, theoretical, and exegetical writings of phenomenologists. They “do” what the works of the two streams of founding originators and brilliant exegetical scholars and academic commentators suggest or imply are the possible, original, and necessary task of phenomenology: to explicate the phenomenality of phenomena as they give themselves in and as human consciousness and experience. So, this phenomenal stream includes phenomenological works that address topics that are primarily concrete and relevant to the experiential lives of clinical professional practitioners as well as the experiential concerns of everyday lives. It will be shown in this book that it is inherent in the original conception and practice of phenomenology that it minimizes or even avoids the role of theory and abstraction in the practice of phenomenological description and research.