Basic Knowledge regarding Hermeneutic phenomenology

1. HERMENEUTIC
PHENOMENOLOGY
“ T O B E H U M A N M E A N S T O I N T E R P R E T ”

2. HERMENEUTIC PHENOMENOLOGY
• Hermeneutic refers to the art of understanding and
theory of interpretation while phenomenology means
the science of phenomena.
• Hermeneutic – “to interpret”
• Greek Mythology, Hermes wing- footed messenger of
god

3. HERMENEUTIC PHENOMENOLOGY
• Hermeneutic Phenomenology aims to reveal the life
world or human experience as it is lived.
• It advocates the idea that instead of simply one truth
as conceived by the scientists, there are in fact many
truths.
• Hermeneutics, therefore, means the process of
making the incomprehensible understandable.

4. HERMENEUTIC PHENOMENOLOGY
• Phenomenology becomes hermeneutical when its
method takes an interpretive instead of solely
descriptive nature.
• This approach asserts that meanings are not
straightforwardly handed down to us, and we must
use hermeneutics to understand human actions and
behaviors.

5. HERMENEUTIC PHENOMENOLOGY
• Emphasis on understanding and interpretation of
individual experiences in order to explain human
actions and behavior.

6. HISTORICAL CONTEXT
• It is a broad discipline that includes communication,
both verbal and non- verbal.
• It came out as a theory of human understanding
beginning in the late 18th and early 19th centuries
through the works of German Theologian, biblical
scholar and philosopher Friedrich Schleiermacher
and…

7. HISTORICAL CONTEXT
• … German historian, psychologist, sociologist and
hermeneutic philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey.
• But the father of phenomenology is the German
philosopher Edmund Husserl, who criticized
psychology for applying methods of the natural
sciences to human issues.

8. HISTORICAL CONTEXT
• His focus was on the world as lived by a person not
the world or reality as something separate from the
person. He developed the concept of bracketing or
setting aside the outer world as well as the individual
preconceived notions to achieve contact with senses.
• Through bracketing, one understands a phenomenon.

9. HISTORICAL CONTEXT
• A disciple of Husserl, Martin Heidegger, is credited for
having started the hermeneutical phenomenology.
• Both hermeneutical phenomenology and
phenomenology share such concern with the life
world or human experience as it lived.

10. HISTORICAL CONTEXT
• Difference: lies in the way the investigation of lived
experience ensues.
• Husserl, focused on understanding beings and
phenomena.
• Heidegger, focused on “Dasein” or “the mode of
being human”, or the authentic human being.

11. HISTORICAL CONTEXT
• Consciousness is a formation of historically lived
experience and is not separate from the world.
• Understanding is a basic form of human existence, but
understanding is not a way of knowing the world, it is
the way we are.

12. HISTORICAL CONTEXT
• It was Hans- George Gadamer, a student of
philosophy at Marburg and Freiburg, who extended
Heidegger’s work into practical application.
• He agreed with Heidegger that language and
understanding always go together as a structural
aspects of human “being- in- the- world”

13. HERMENEUTIC PHENOMENOLOGY: KEY
CONCEPTS
• Hermeneutic phenomenology concerns itself with
understanding and interpreting human experience as it
lived, thus interpretation is seen as critical to the process
of understanding.
• To be humans means to interpret.
• Every encounter involves a interpretation influenced by
an individual’s background.