Phenomenology
/fɪˌnɑmɪˈnɑlədʒi/noun
The philosophical study of experience as it presents itself to consciousness.
The Greek roots
Literally: “study of what appears”
The story of the word
φαινόμενον is a participle: the thing showing itself. Astronomers used the plural first, and for centuries the phenomena were the appearances in the sky that any theory had to save, whatever was actually going on out there. Lambert used Phänomenologie in 1764 for the theory of appearance as opposed to truth, Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit followed in 1807, and Husserl rebuilt it in the twentieth century as the careful description of experience with the question of an outside world set aside. The same verb gives phantom, fantasy and diaphanous.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → German → English
Same family
In a sentence
His account of grief reads more like phenomenology than psychology: what it feels like from inside, described and not explained.