Phenomenology

Phenomenology studies experience as it is lived from the first-person point of view. Its central theme is intentionality: the way every experience is directed towards something. Founded as a movement by Edmund Husserl in the early twentieth century, it was transformed by Heidegger’s turn to the question of being, and developed by Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Beauvoir and many others into one of the main currents of European philosophy.