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As good a place to begin as any is the meaning of the term 'phenomenology' itself. It is indeed a reasoned inquiry which discovers the inherent essences of appearances. But what is an appearance? The answer to this question leads to one of the major themes of phenomenology: an appearance is anything of which one is conscious. Anything at all which appears to consciousness is a legitimate area of philosophical investigation. Moreover, an appearance is a manifestation of the essence of that of which it is the appearance. Surprising as it may sound, other philosophic points of view have refused to make this move. One can characterize phenomenological philosophy as centering on the following basic themes: a return to the traditional tasks of philosophy, the search for a philosophy without presuppositions, the intentionality of consciousness, and the rejection of the subject-object dichotomy.
Phenomenology, beginning with Edmund Husserl, urges that the world of immediate or 'lived' experience takes precedence over the objectified and abstract world of the 'natural attitude' of natural science. Science as such, thus, is secondary to the world of concrete, lived experience. Phenomenology, therefore, engages in a process known as 'bracketing' in which the 'natural attitude' is placed aside such that the researcher may begin with 'the things themselves,' as Husserl said - or, in other words, in the phenomena as they show themselves in experience. In Heidegger's terminology, phenomenology involves letting things 'show themselves from themselves in the very way in which they show themselves from themselves'. By definition, phenomenology never begins with a theory, but, instead, always begins anew with the phenomena under consideration. Husserl brings to this understanding something unique, his phenomenological method, which is characterized by Husserl's 'epoche.' As mentioned previously, 'epoche' is a 'bracketing' or, to me it is 'photo' of the 'natural attitude' so that one can attend to a phenomenon as it shows itself. Once the 'natural attitude' is 'bracketed', one can then attend to what, according to Husserl, are the two poles of experience, noema and noesis. Noesis is the act of perceiving, while noema is that which is perceived. Through this method, for Husserl, one can perform an 'eidetic reduction'. Noema can be reduced to their essential form...