Scholars
The scholars listing provides descriptions of philosophers and other individuals who have made special contributions to the field of Phenomenology.
Arendt, Hannah
In The Human Condition, Arendt develops a phenomenological account of action that is provocative and of practical import. She makes a distinction between a hierarchy of human activity (vita active) labor, work, and action. Labor is the most basic human activity that...
Bachelard, Gaston
In his evocative text The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard employs the notion of the “poetic image” to refer to that special epiphanic oneiric quality of language that brings about in the reader a vocative response. The power of a phenomenological text resides in...
Barthes, Roland
What makes phenomenology rewarding is that it is pleasurable to read about existential insights: to passively and actively read and write insightful sources. In his book The Pleasure of the Text, Roland Barthes (1975) reminds us that the act of reading and writing...
Bergson, Henri Louis
The hands of a clock go around and round. They move unendingly along the circumference of the clock-face in a continuous repetition or they move eternally along an infinite line. But that is not how we experience time. While clock-time tends to be seen as a steady,...
Binswanger, Ludwig
Binswanger was a founder of the existential school of psychiatry as he ventured to apply philosophical ideas of Heidegger to the psychological understanding and treatment of psychiatric patients. According to the interpretation of Binswanger’s clinical work by Nassir...
Blanchot, Maurice
Blanchot wrote a variety of genres such as novels, essays, and texts that feature a unique fragmentary philosophical style. He wrote extensively and profoundly on the philosophical thoughts of Hegel and Heidegger, yet he rarely explicitly quoted from their work. The...
Bollnow, Otto Friedrich
One of Bollnow’s best-known hermeneutic phenomenological texts is “The Pedagogical Atmosphere” (1988). While the term “pedagogical relation” is a well- known and well-discussed concept, especially in the German theoretical educational literature, interestingly the...
Buytendijk, F.J.J.
The medical doctor Buytendijk was unique in that his philosophical starting point was the healthy human being rather than the ill person. In his wide range of health science publications, Buytendijk preoccupied himself only rarely with methodological issues. A seeming...
Cixous, Hélène
Cixous repeatedly expresses her wariness of reductive language that would simplify her practice of écriture feminine. Still, she makes clear that she wishes to offer new ways of writing and speaking, and that she writes to women: “I write this as a woman, towards...
De Beauvoir, Simone
De Beauvoir’s novels, essays and philosophical works reflect a sustained and critical concern with the art of living and how to self-consciously live a life of personal choices that fully face the challenges and consequences of individual freedom, responsibility, and...
Derrida, Jacques
Derrida is now considered one of the most original thinkers, if not the most influential thinker of his time. His development of the idea of deconstruction, his critical reading of classical philosophic texts, and his provocative take on a wide range of issues and...
Descartes, Rene
The thought that the self (soul or mind) is completely distinct from the body has been widely regarded as Descartes’ fundamental mistake: separating the mind from the body. He is the philosopher who is blamed for the legacy of mind–body dualism—an idea that is now...
Dilthey, Wilhelm
What is “lived experience” (Erlebnis)? This is an important question because phenomenological human science begins in lived experience and eventually turns back to it. Dilthey (1985) has suggested that in its most basic form lived experience involves our immediate,...
Diogenes
Legend has it that the youthful Alexander the Great one day went to visit the philosopher Diogenes about whom he had heard such strange stories. He came upon the philosopher while the latter was relaxing in the beautiful sunshine. Alexander: I am Alexander the Great....
Foucault, Michel Paul
Foucault finds a foothold for prioritizing the question of self-care in Plato’s Alcibiades. In this dialogue Socrates becomes the spiritual teacher of Alcibiades in the latter’s quest for self-knowledge. And Foucault asks: “In that relationship, why should Alcibiades...
Gadamer, Hans-Georg
There is the irony that the title of Gadamer’s Truth and Method seems to promise a method to truth. But he says: “My revival of the expression ‘hermeneutics,’ with its long tradition, has apparently led to some misunderstandings. I did not intend to produce an art or...
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
When Hegel refers to “absolute knowledge,” he does not mean knowing everything absolutely or knowing absolutely everything; rather, it is knowledge of something for what this thing really is: its absolute identity. Famous is Hegel’s use of the biblical Adam for...
Heidegger, Martin
For Heidegger the method of ontology is phenomenology. So, for Heidegger phenomenology requires of its practitioners a heedful attunement to the modes of being of the ways that things are in the world. “Phenomenology” means—to let that which shows itself be seen from...
Husserl, Edmund
Husserl defines phenomenology as a descriptive philosophy of the essences of pure experiences. He aims to capture experience in its primordial origin or essence, without interpreting, explaining, or theorizing. The essences with which phenomenology concerns itself are...
James, William
William James (1842-1910) was born in New York City on January 11, 1842. His father, Henry James was a Swedenborgian theologian. William James received very good education when he was young and travelled a lot. After graduating from school, he worked at Harvard...
Jaspers, Karl
As psychiatrist, Karl Jaspers believed that patients who suffer from primary delusions would effectively be “un-understandable” and therefore untreatable in a therapeutic manner for the psychiatrist, since there are no rational coherent processes that shaped their...
Kant, Immanuel
Famously, Kant made a distinction between the things-in-themselves (noumena) that lie beyond the reach and realm of human thinking and the things (phenomena) that we encounter (intuit) in everyday experiences as they appear in consciousness. Phenomena are the many...
Kierkegaard, Soren
Kierkegaard was a Danish philosopher and religious thinker who wrote literary and philosophical essays that reacted against Hegelian philosophy and the state church in Denmark, setting the stage for modern existentialism. Kierkegaard was born in Copenhagen, the...
Langeveld, Jan Martinus
Langeveld spoke of the “home, street, and kitchen approach” in practicing phenomenology to emphasize this quotidian interest in ordinary life topics, even as these topics often were born in the lifeworld contexts of clinical professional practices. The interest in the...
Levinas, Emmanuel
Levinas has insistently proposed that caring responsibility can only be understood in its most basic modality if we can somehow transcend the intentional relation toward the world that accompanies all modes of being and thinking. Levinas has aimed to show that it is...
Marcel, Gabriel
Gabriel Marcel (1889-1973) was born in Paris, France. He is a world renown French existentialist dramatist, philosopher and drama critic. He was a visiting scholar at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland 1951-1952, and at Harvard University in the United States...
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice
Merleau-Ponty is known as a cautious and tentative Socratic philosopher. His writings are rich, expressive, evocative, and profound. Often his texts possess the textual sensibility of a constant probing wondering and questioning. The Preface to his influential study...
Nietzsche, Friedrich
Perhaps Nietzsche’s most famous essay is “On Truth and Lie in a Nonmoral Sense.” In this essay he mocks the human effort to arrive at truth by erecting huge and complex conceptual frameworks and structures of scientific knowledge that in a fundamental sense rests on...
Ricoeur, Paul
Paul Ricoeur is generally known as a phenomenologist who began his studies with Husserl but who was also deeply steeped in all areas of philosophy, literary theory, theology, hermeneutics, critical theory, and the human sciences such as history, linguistics, politics,...
Sartre, Jean-Paul
The methodology of hermeneutic phenomenology is more a carefully cultivated thoughtfulness than a technique. Phenomenology might be called a method without techniques. The “procedures” of this methodology have been recognized as a project of various kinds of...
Scheler, Max
Scheler’s work is proof that phenomenology does not need to be practiced as a rigorous method in the sense of Husserl. Yet, he carefully and brilliantly explores phenomenological distinctions by means of the “method” of the phenomenological attitude and reflections...
Schleiermacher, Friedrich E.D.
Schleiermacher is born on November 21, 1768, in Breslau, Lower Silesia. His father is a Prussian army chaplain. Friedrich Schleiermacher attends Moravian boarding schools and later becomes a student at the University of Halle from 1787-1790, until he passes...
Schutz, Alfred
The phenomenological sociology and social science of Alfred Schutz is significant for its contribution to a phenomenology of social action, the lifeworld, the notion of multiple realities, the idea of taken-for-grantedness of everyday life practices, and so forth. His...
Spiegelberg, Herbert
When the phenomenological historian Herbert Spiegelberg sets out “to give a minimum operational grasp of what it means to do phenomenology” (p. 14), he starts from the commonly accepted Husserlian phrase “To the Things” (Zu den Sachen) which indicates that doing...
Strasser, Stephan
An interesting case of validity critique is contained in the scornful criticism by Stephen Strasser who once referred to Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous account of the objectifying look as “phenomenological impressionism” (1974, pp. 295–302). In his account of “the look”...
van den Berg, J.H.
Van den Berg argues that it was a significant event in human history, around the year 1300, when the ordinary closed body was first cut open and by Mundinus and soon by others. From this historical moment onward, it is possible to see the hand with two kinds of...
Wittgenstein, Ludwig Josef Johann
Wittgenstein, Ludwig Josef Johann (1889-1951), Austrian-British philosopher, who was one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century, particularly noted for his contribution to the movement known as analytic and linguistic philosophy. Wittgenstein was raised...