ABOUT PHENOMENOLOGY

Phenomenologists conduct research in ways that share most of the following positive and negative features:

1. Phenomenologists tend to oppose the acceptance of unobservable matters and grand systems erected in speculative thinking;

2. Phenomenologists tend to oppose naturalism (also known as objectivism and positivism) which is the worldview growing from modern natural science and technology that has been spreading from Northern Europe since the Renaissance;

3.  Positively speaking, phenomenologists tend to justify cognition (and also some evaluation and action) with reference to what Edmund Husserl called Evidenz, which is awareness of a matter itself as disclosed in the most clear, distinct, and adequate way for something of its kind;

4. Phenomenologists tend to believe that not only objects in the natural and cultural worlds, but also ideal objects, such as numbers, and even conscious life itself can be made evident and thus known;

5. Phenomenologists tend to hold that inquiry ought to focus upon what might be called "encountering" as it is directed at objects and, correlatively, upon "objects as they are encountered" (this terminology is not widely shared, but the emphasis on a dual problematics and the reflective approach it requires is);

"Phenomenologists tend to oppose the acceptance of unobservable matters and grand systems erected in speculative thinking."

6.  Phenomenologists tend to recognise the role of description in universal, a priori, or "eidetic" terms as prior to explanation by means of causes, purposes, or grounds; and

7.  Phenomenologists tend to debate whether what Husserl calls the transcendental phenomenological epochê and reduction is useful or even possible.

--Borrowed from Lester Embree (1997), Center For Advanced Research In Phenomenology

The Editors of the Journal are aware of the broad range of ways in which phenomenology is applied by a variety of scholars, such as classical, hermeneutical, existential, and religious, AND that phenomenology is an approach and a research method which is not static but evolving. As such, it is their wish that each of these sub-disciplines be developed and extended within the context of this forum. Of particular interest to the Editors is the application of these various sub-disciplines and their theoretical sources, to applied practical topics in the research field determined by submitting authors.