I recorded this short talk in response to psychology students who asked “What does “interpretation” mean in phenomenological research?” Merleau-Ponty makes a critical distinction in the first pages of the Phenomenology of Perception between explicitation (making the implicit explicit) and expliquer (explaining). A bit more of the passage in Merleau-Ponty that I’m reading from is: “…all
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Notes from a seminar I’m giving this weekend introducing phenomenology to psychological researchers. Those familiar with the tradition will see how the epochê, reduction, bracketing, striving for presuppositionlessness, and inquiring into the Other’s natural attitude meanings are represented here–as well the situatedness of research findings–reflecting a particular, psychological interest.
Students new to phenomenological psychology often ask me what’s the difference between Clark Moustakas’ and Amedeo Giorgi’s research methods, since both approaches are called “phenomenological.” In fact there are major differences: in this post I’ll examine Moustakas’ Phenomenological Research Methods (1994) from the perspective of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological philosophy. Naturally I’ll also be speaking as
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I recently posted a short discussion of what “the natural attitude” means in Husserl’s phenomenology. As I mentioned, the natural attitude is the perspective of everyday life. For Husserl the process he calls the phenomenological reduction is the means by which the phenomenologist frees himself from the reifications of the natural attitude, gaining a standpoint
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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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