P for Phenomenology
McKeever / 18 Febbraio 2022

            The limited purpose of this brief blog is to explain a major ambiguity in common understandings of the term “phenomenology”. It is not uncommon to read such phrases as “A phenomenology of globalization” or “The phenomenon of racism” or again “A phenomenological approach to inflation”. In such phrases, phenomenology is taken to be almost a synonym of description and indeed the texts that follow are usually just that, a mere description of the specific reality under study. There is nothing in the grammar and semantics of the English language that prohibits such an understanding of “phenomenology” and its variants. Given, however, that “phenomenology” is the name of a still relatively new and very revolutionary branch of philosophy, the least that can be said is that to understand phenomenology as the mere description of realities, in the manner of an artist or a would-be “neutral observer”, risks creating confusion.             This ambiguity, and consequent confusion, is at least partly to be explained by the fact that phenomenology, as a branch of philosophy, does indeed involve description. The form of description practised in phenomenology is the description not of the given reality in itself but of the human experience of this…