Back to the Things Themselves: A Narrative Review of Phenomenology from Husserl's Ideas to Merleau-Ponty's Embodiment

Abstract

Phenomenology---the philosophy that describes experience from within---rebuilt European thought around consciousness's structures, and its century runs from Husserl's transcendental turn through Heidegger's being-in-the-world to Merleau-Ponty's embodiment. This article presents a narrative review of that tradition's canonical line: Husserl's 1913 Ideas I and 1931 Cartesian Meditations, Heidegger's 1927 Being and Time, Sartre's 1943 Being and Nothingness, Merleau-Ponty's 1945 Phenomenology of Perception, Levinas's 1961 Totality and Infinity, Derrida's 1967 Voice and Phenomenon, Moran's 2000 introduction, Zahavi's 2003 Husserl studies, Smith and Thomasson's mind collection, and Gallagher and Zahavi's phenomenological mind. The synthesis is organized around three themes: method, in which intentionality, reduction, and epoché defined the descriptive program; world, in which being-in-the-world, nothingness, and the body relocated consciousness from interior to environment; and alterity, in which the Other, language, and deconstruction transformed the ego's primacy. It is concluded that phenomenology's achievement is a rigorous first-person method---and that its contemporary influence runs through cognitive science's embodiment turn.