Phenomenology - maxvanmanen.com

1 610 PhenomenologyLitt, T. (1949). F hren oder wachsenlassen [Giving guidance or letting be]. Stuttgart, Germany: Ernst Klett Manen, M. (1991). The tact of teaching: The meaning of pedagogical thoughtfulness. London, Ontario, Canada: Althouse Manen, M. (2011). Phenomenology online: A resource for phenomenological inquiry. Retrieved from Manen, M. (2012). Ethics responsivity and pediatric parental pedagogy. Phenomenology and Practice, 6(1), 5 , K. (1985). Vergessene zusammenh nge [Forgotten connections].

2 Munich, Germany: Juventa , H. (1967). Ausgew hlte p dagogische abhandlungen [Selected papers on education.]. Paderborn, Germany: Ferdinand Sch , T. (2005). Seeing disability pedagogically: The lived experience of disability in the pedagogical encounter (Unpublished dissertation). Bergen, Norway: University of , F. E. D. (1964). Ausgew hlte p dagogische schriften [Selected writings on education]. Paderborn, Germany: Ferdinand Sch , B. (1984). The pedagogical relationship. Oxford Review of Education, 10(2), 203 is the name for the major philo-sophical orientation in continental Europe in the 20th and 21st centuries.

3 Phenomenology is not a substantive discipline, such as psychology, biol-ogy, or sociology; rather, it is the study or inquiry into how things appear, are given, or present them-selves to us in prereflective or lived experience. In this sense, Phenomenology is primarily a method. It is often called a hermeneutic phenomenological method of reflecting on experience while abstaining from theoretical, polemical, suppositional, and emo-tional intoxications. Hermeneutic means that reflect-ing on experience must aim for interpretive language and sensitive linguistic devices that make the phe-nomenological analysis, explication, and description of lived meaning possible.

4 This entry begins with a brief overview of the questions and challenges at the core of Phenomenology and the contributions of important figures in Phenomenology over the past century. It goes on to describe the five main approaches to phenomenological reflection and the rootedness of such reflection in lived experience. An exploration of Phenomenology s specific forms of engagement with education and educational theory follows, and the entry concludes with a discussion of the various ways in which the phenomenological approach has been adapted within the framework of the human sciences the past 100 years, scores of philosophers and human science scholars (to name a few, Edith Stein, Jan Pato ka, Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida.)

5 Jean-Luc Nancy, Bernard Stiegler, Jean-Luc Marion, and Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei) have been inspired to take up the phenomenological challenge of exploring where and how meaning originates, what it means to understand something, and how self and other are implicated in the ethics of pres-ence and otherness, being and alterity (otherness of the other). In the context of the long and complex philosophical tradition of Phenomenology , it should be obvious that there are various intricate descriptive and interpretative elements at work in phenomeno-logical inquiry.

6 Phenomenology is, in some sense, always descriptive and interpretive, linguistic and there are certain precursors to philo-sophical Phenomenology , such as Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Georg W. F. Hegel, it is generally agreed that the founding figure of phe-nomenology is Edmund Husserl. His aim was to find a method for arriving at indubitable knowledge that could serve to establish a firm epistemological basis for the sciences. Husserl believed that it is pos-sible to grasp and describe the essential meanings of intended objects as they appear in consciousness; the proper focus of Phenomenology is on the way objects appear or give themselves their transcen-dence.

7 The second major figure in the development of Phenomenology was Husserl s student Martin Heidegger, who argued that the attempt to formu-late indubitable knowledge was too presumptuous, since the meaning of objects as experienced is ulti-mately as elusive as the temporality of experience as lived. The I of the living present always dis-solves under the objectifying and subjugating gaze of the I of the reflective self. Heidegger radicalized Husserl s Phenomenology by pointing out that the proper focus of Phenomenology is not epistemo-logical but ontological.

8 To ask how a phenomenon appears in consciousness is already to assume an abstraction, namely, the idea of consciousness itself. Heidegger argued that Phenomenology must aim for Phenomenology 611the more fundamental concrete or existential ques-tion of how meaning comes to be. The reflective understanding of experience becomes an ontological project: exploring the Being (ontological meaning) of the being of things. Ontology is concerned with phenomena as modes of being in the mode of being-in-the-world is a way of understanding that world.

9 Phenomenology gradu-ally grew into a living tradition that soon sprouted into a variety of distinguishable orientations. A liv-ing tradition is a tradition that constantly reinvents itself. So perhaps, it is even more appropriate to regard Phenomenology as a tradition of ReflectionThere are various ways in which phenomenologi-cal reflection may be understood, depending on its presuppositions and its practice. Here follow some distinctions:1. Husserlian Phenomenology tends to be under-stood as the epistemological process of eidetic analy-sis: exploring the eidos or essence of what appears in consciousness and how it appears or gives itself.

10 Husserl contrasted two modes of givenness of an object in experience: (1) the object as experienced in external perception, such as my house as seen from where I stand, and (2) the object as experienced in internal perception, such as my house as I nostalgi-cally remember it while traveling. The house as per-ceived from external perception is always seen only from a certain vantage point. It is impossible to see the house in its totality from all possible points of view.