The philosophy that returns to experience itself: a disciplined description of how things appear to consciousness, before theory explains them away.
Phenomenology began with Edmund Husserl's call to go back to the things themselves, setting aside assumptions to describe the structures of experience: perception, time, the body, the other person. Martin Heidegger turned the method toward the question of being, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty toward the lived body. It is a method more than a creed, but it stands as a worldview wherever its claim holds, that consciousness and its world are given together and neither explains the other away.
Sources
Primary
- Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology (1913).
Secondary
- Dermot Moran, Introduction to Phenomenology (2000).
How this compares to Christianity
How does this branch relate to the historic Christian faith?
This assessment has not yet been reviewed. Every verdict below stands at Not yet reviewed until the named theological reviewers supply it.
- Does it consider itself Christian?
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- Did it arise from the Christian tradition?
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- Does it affirm the ecumenical creeds?
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- Is it recognized as Christian by the historic bodies?
- the Catholic Church: Not yet reviewed
- the Eastern Orthodox Church: Not yet reviewed
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- conciliar Protestant bodies: Not yet reviewed
- the WCC / National Council of Churches: Not yet reviewed
- This site's assessment
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- Reviewer
- Not yet reviewed. The theological reviewers are named on the criteria page when they are appointed.
The comparative record for this entity, its points of convergence and divergence across the ten loci, has not yet been populated. It stands in the assessment queue on the criteria page.
What this assessment cannot settle
This assessment determines what this entity teaches and how that teaching relates to the historic Christian creeds. It does not determine whether any person is saved, whether God accepts their worship, whether they are sincere, or whether the criteria applied here are correct.
This assessment is made from the standpoint described in our editorial statement and our criteria page. It reports classifications; it does not rank sincerity, spiritual standing, or the eternal state of any person.