This year’s annual meeting of ICNAP (Interdisciplinary Coalition of North-American Phenomenologists) will meet in May at Ramapo College in New Jersey. Dr. Frederick Wertz is President of ICNAP, and we’re happy to post his invitation followed by submission details below. Dear Colleague, The Interdisciplinary Coalition of North American Phenomenologists (ICNAP) conference, “Understanding Embodiment,” will be

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In May 2013 Ramapo College in New Jersey will host the Interdisciplinary Coalition of North American Phenomenologists’ annual meeting. This year’s theme is “Understanding Embodiment,” and is open to a wide variety of topics. The submission deadline is February 1, 2013–for more details, read the call here: ICNAP V call for papers        

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 Introduction The descriptive phenomenological method of psychological research is rooted in the intentional property of consciousness. Husserl (1983) modified Brentano’s concept of intentionality, expressing it as consciousness acting upon an object or state-of-affairs that is not itself. In other words, embodied human subjectivity relates actively and passively to things that are immanent and external to it

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Since Husserl, phenomenological philosophers have dialogued with the empirical sciences in an attempt to contribute to a more complete human science—a science that speaks to the fullness of being human.  The job of our philosophers, in this context, is to invite an opening up of an epistemological conversation that renews the sciences’ exploration of human

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Merleau-Ponty (1968) wrote that questioning does not “fill in the blanks” in our knowledge. Instead, “the questions are within our life, within our history. They are born there, they die there, if they have found a response, more often than not they are transformed there” (p. 105). For phenomenologists, questions of any depth are never

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Here is the presentation I gave in Montreal at the 31st International Human Science Research Conference. My aim was to encourage dialogue between interpretive and descriptive researchers, and clinicians whose work is informed by these perspectives. My premise about the complementarity of description and interpretation is based on Jitendra Nath Mohanty’s work on Husserl’s phenomenology.

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Perhaps the most exciting thing I have found in becoming a phenomenological psychologist is how fundamentally important it is to value the subjective psychological perspective when seeking to understand people (Giorgi & Giorgi, 2003). Television “reality shows” have become popular because they provide a “fly on the wall” perspective of dramatic events in a world

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I teach and mentor graduate psychology students in Descriptive Phenomenological Psychology. Learning how to practice phenomenological research, students gain a lived-sense of the feature of consciousness that Edmund Husserl, drawing on the work of his teacher Franz Brentano, termed “intentionality”. Within Husserl’s phenomenology intentionality signifies (in part) that everything we can experience and know is

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“Husserlian phenomenology, in its search for meanings, is guided by respect for the given.”  -

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