Phenomenology

In the course of their everyday activities, people do not doubt the validity of the world that surrounds them. But from the philosophical point of view, this validity, which is quasi “automatically” given to us, presents a problem. How does our consciousness gain the reality of the world that we take for granted in our “natural attitude”? Phenomenology, as developed by Edmund Husserl, is a philosophical school of thought that intends to clarify this problem by describing how the constitution of reality in the acts of our consciousness occurs. Thus, phenomenology aims at basic processes bestowing meaning on the human world, and its results are significant for those crucial questions of social theory asking how actors construct and interpret their reality and how they define ...