Phenomenology studies common experiences and everyday life from the perspective of individuals. Edmund Husserl developed phenomenology to provide a rigorous scientific philosophy through descriptive analysis of conscious experiences. Phenomenology examines how people construct meaning in their lives through interactions with others in natural situations. It seeks to understand the world from the viewpoint of individuals rather than external observers.

1. Phenomenology
By:
DILSHAD HUSSAIN SHAH

2. .
The sociology of everyday life is a
sociological orientation concerned with:
Experiencing, Understanding ,Describing,
Analyzing, communicating.
With this people interact in concrete
situations.
The studies face to face social interactions by
observing and experiencing them in natural
situations, that is, in situations that have not
been scientifically manipulated.

3. Sociologies of Everyday Life
Phenomenology studies common sense, conscious
experience, and routine daily life.
It can be placed in the category of sociologies of
everyday life.
In the article, Sociologies of everyday life, by Jack
Douglas
Argues that sociologist have years been rebuilding the
and thus rebuilding the foundation of all theory and
method in the social sciences.
Five major bodies of theoretical ideas found
 Symbolic interactionism
 Dramaturgical analysis
 Labeling theory
 Phenomenology and ethnomethodology
 existentialism

4. The Role of Consciousness
• There are several difference between phenomenology and
sociology.
• Phenomenology relies on reflexive experience as it takes form
in consciousness.
• The research assumes intentional consciousness of the
researcher.
• Through the techniques of reduction in variation,
phenomenology is able to find the rudimentary structures
and processes of experience.
• From this perspective, the researcher takes the perspective of
the other and imposes a sense of order on the environment.

5. .
• Phenomenologist are more concerned
with the way individuals construct in
their own conscious the meanings of
things.
• They are characterized as a subjective or
creative sociology because it seeks to
understand the world from the point of
view of the acting subject and not from
the perspective of the scientific
observer.
• Meanings come from interacting
through a negotiation in their everyday
lives.

6. The Phenomenological Approach
• Edmund Husserl developed the phenomenological
approach.
• Designates two things:
– A new kind of descriptive method that made a
breakthrough in philosophy at the of the nineteenth
century.
– A science which is intended to supply the basic
instrument for a rigorously scientific philosophy and
in its consequent application to make possible a
methodological reform of all the science.
Roots of Phenomenological:
oEntrenched in the German tradition
oSome of the most important intellectual debates
taking place between the world wars.

7. .
The ideas that came under the phenomenology umbrella
Generated in an atmosphere of heightened social conflict
and anxiety about the future.
Husserl wanted to examine the phenomena of conscious
and bracket them in order to test their truth.
Influence by Descartes, Hume, and Kant
Descartes Mediations
Husserl’s first conceived of the possibility of seeking a
universally rational “science of being” by turning his
theoretical focus on an objective world to a reflective one.
Descartes argued that the social world exist only in the
context of presentations of experiences of people. He also
promoted the idea of transcendental subjectivity, a
philosophy founded through a psychology of inner
experience.

8. Edmund Husserl• Background
– He was sent away to school in Vienna at age 10
to began his German classical education at a
“real gymnasium.”
– Universities attended were Leipzig (math,
physics, and philosophy), Berlin (math), Vienna
(doctoral Work)
– Father of phenomenology
– His ideas were complex and confusing
– His work was translated from German to
English
– He was Jewish, the Jewish population was
controlled by marriage licenses; only 328 Jewish
families were allowed in 1787 and stopped in
1849.
• Married Malvine Charlotte Steinschneider and
had three children.

9. .
Held a position of Privatdozent at Halle University.
He accepted a professorship at Freiburg in Breisgau in
1916 and stayed there until retirement in 1928
Calvin O. Schrag wrote in the introduction to The
phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness
Some of the main themes and ideas that emerged
throughout this development were:
A critique of psychololgism
The phenomenological
Eidetic reduction
The phenomenological ego
Transcendental intersubjectivity
Time consciousness
The life world

10. PhenomenologyBegins with the assumption that every certainty is
questionable.
In Ideem I
Husserl describe phenomenology as a “doctrine of
essences” and a doctrine concerned with what things are
not with whether they are.
He was not looking to establish absolute presupposition on
which to build a whole system of knowledge. Therefore, he
was not interested in being a system builder.
He was always a beginner, reexamining the foundations of
his investigations, resisting all fixed formulations and final
conclusions.
Philosophy, was never ending pursuit of serious and open-
ended questions, which lead to further questions that may
require a resetting of the original questions.

11. .
• Nakhnikian described “Husserl’s
phenomenology as an outgrowth of his attack
on psychologism.
–Psychologism is a species of the view that
philosophy is reducible to a factual science,
in this case to psychology.
–Also is an attempt to reduce the
fundamental laws of logic and mathematics
to psychological generalizations about the
way people think; it is a type of scientific
generalization.
• Husserl is against ‘biologism’ and
anthropologism as he is against pschologism.

12. .
• In short, phenomenology is not a science of facts,
but a science of essential being, an eidetic science
(meaning an insubstantial empirical science; it is a
science that aims at establishing the “knowledge”
of essence.
• Distinguished between facts and essence.
–Described sciences of experience as sciences of
“fact”
–Facts are determined by acts of cognition which
underline human experiences.
–Something is real and thus a fact because it
possesses a spatiotemporal existence, having a
particular duration of its own and a “real”
content.

13. DILSHAD HUSSAIN SHAH
MUHAMMAD ASHFAQ
M.PHIL IN APPLIED LINGUISTICS (SESSION 2011-2013)