Phenomenological Theory

Background

Although the mind–body problem and dualism were discussed extensively by René Descartes, the 18th-century philosophers like Immanuel Kant focused exclusively on mental states, specifically perception and how our interactions with objects are organized into meaningful representations. According to Kant, the mind did not perceive objects as bits and pieces that are mechanically organized into meaningful objects. Instead perception is the basis for the mind to organize elements into a meaningful experience. From this perspective, knowledge is not simply the by-product of a combination of sensory processes but the product of experiencing an object or a phenomenon.

Franz Brentano and Carl Stumpf were late- 19th-century psychologists who attempted to infuse Kant's transcendental philosophy into a psychological method for understanding consciousness. Both argued that mental activity should be the focus of psychology and rejected Wundt's hypothesis that mental processes could be reduced to elements. Brentano is often credited with being the father of phenomenology because of his focus on mental activities (the act of seeing) rather than the contents (what is being seen). Although Brentano developed empirical methods to study mental acts, his greatest contributions to modern phenomenological theory were his use of descriptive methods and his observation that consciousness is intentional or directed toward objects. The latter would be an essential component to modern phenomenological philosophy and theory.

Although Stumpf is not cited as often with phenomenology theory as Brentano, his work in the area of phenomenology was influential to modern phenomenologists and the philosophical tenets of modern phenomenology. Stumpf, like Brentano, believed that psychology should be the study of phenomena and was one of the first social scientists to describe phenomenology in terms of rigorous research method. Stumpf believed that phenomenology is the study of the unbiased experience as it occurs. A keyword in Stumpf's definition is the term unbiased, which would be incorporated into modern phenomenology theory and philosophy.

...