1 Overview

100 years ago Edith Stein had just ended her term as assistant to Edmund Husserl, and Martin Heidegger was beginning his. Both were in the early stages of their own notable careers in phenomenology. They were drawn to the prospect of a new way of studying the world, oriented around the manifestations of entities, and their meanings to us, rather than to their objective properties. For example, the experience of living in a building, hearing a passage of music, or worshiping a sacred vessel, as opposed to a construction report, an acoustic analysis of tonal properties, or an archaeological description. Since then thousands of researchers have been drawn to the field and its many texts and themes, sweating through its extensive and jargon-filled primary literature, in the process creating a huge secondary literature and organizing into hundreds of groups and professional organizations, many of them associated with specific schools of interpretation.

Phenomenology continues to have broad appeal, both as a research program within philosophy and as a methodology, where researchers seek ways to supplement purely objective descriptions with more experiential, personal, or otherwise phenomenological descriptions. However, anyone entering the field, and even those with some familiarity, are faced with a problem: how to get one’s bearings in an ever-expanding landscape of technical concepts, historical texts, and competing schools of thought? The primary literature is daunting, and the secondary literature is massive. Introductions and anthologies exist, many of them excellent, but they are typically focused on particular phenomenologists or topics, or offer an encyclopedic catalog of the discipline. What is missing is a broad characterization of the field as a whole—one that canvasses its many schools, camps, and styles—as a way to get situated in the area. What follows is such a guide, a kind of handbook or map of current research, to orient established scholars in areas outside of their primary expertise and also to orient newcomers, who can read these essays alongside introductory texts. This volume is thus a supplement to existing resources, a guide to further study, providing a selective overview of many of the paths the field has taken in the last 100 years, a summary of where things stand today, and indications of where they are going.

The volume is organized around a horizon metaphor. A literal horizon, the place where earth meets sky, serves to orient us in space, and is suggestive of both an outermost limit and of the many ways one can push forward into an area. The horizon allows us to find our way among objects and in the wider world. This metaphor was used by all the major phenomenologists. In Husserl “horizon” is a technical term with several meanings. He distinguishes an internal from an external horizon. The internal horizon of an object is the “systematic manifold of all possible perceptual exhibitings belonging to it harmoniously” (Husserl, 1970, 162). In other words, the set of possible ways an object can appear to a perceiver. An object’s external horizon is the field of “co-given” objects to which it is related, which “points finally to the whole ‘world as perceptual world’….the universe of things for possible perceptions” (ibid.). Heidegger opens Being and Time by describing the provisional aim of the treatise as disclosing time as “the possible horizon for any understanding whatsoever of Being,” a kind of underlying background on the basis of which any understanding of being makes sense, a background which must be “laid bare” as part of ontological research (Heidegger, 1962, 40).

We don’t intend to make use of any specific technical sense of the term “horizon” here; this is not a treatise about the concept of horizon. Rather, we draw on the imagery of a horizon, and on the broad outlines of the philosophical concept, to organize the volume. Our aim is to consider some important points of reference for the field as a whole, as a way of orienting readers in the field, attuning them to its possibilities, and opening up ideas and avenues of future research. As a whole, the essays provide a broad sampling of contemporary approaches to phenomenology, both in terms of the state of current research within the field (“internal horizons”) and in terms of applications of phenomenology to other areas of research (“external horizons”).

Of course, any such guide is bound to be selective, reflecting the social networks and interests of the editors. This is not meant as an encyclopedia, but as a guided tour of the field, focusing on trends, approaches, and methodologies that have been left out of other collections. The volume originates in a conference convened at UC Merced, in California’s central valley, and attended by many scholars in California’s public higher education system (the University of California and the California State College systems). Still, we were fortunate to gather scholars with very different backgrounds and training, to write essays on the broad outlines of the field and its many applications.

The first part of the book, on the “internal horizons” of the field, surveys the state of phenomenology today and raises questions that the field faces going forward. This part of the book provides an overview of some of the main schools of thought in phenomenology, the questions that animate them, and examples of projects and directions of research being pursued. Several schools of Husserlian and Heideggerian thought are covered, including more analytic “West Coast” phenomenology, the pragmatic form of existential phenomenology associated with Hubert Dreyfus and his students, and broad surveys of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty scholarship which includes coverage of several European research traditions. Many (but not all) of the topics covered in this part of the book are internal to phenomenology itself, such as exegetical and philosophical questions about being and consciousness, and clashes between rival schools of interpretation.

The second part of the volume showcases the “external horizons” of phenomenology, treating it as a living discipline that can both contribute to and draw inspiration from other areas. We do not cover several areas of application that are already well established, e.g. phenomenology and cognitive science, or phenomenology and the social sciences.Footnote 1 Instead, we focus on: (1) embodiment and questions of identity, (2) the arts, and (3) archaeology and anthropology. Each of these connections shows how phenomenology can open up new paths of thinking in an area.

The way that identity is embodied has long been a focus of phenomenological work. The theme is already apparent in Husserl and Heidegger, namely in their discussions of how structures of consciousness take shape through processes of historical genesis. Sartre and Merleau-Ponty both explore these issues in detail, treating the “transcendence” of consciousness as inextricable from its concrete, embodied, historical situation—its “facticity.” This set the stage for groundbreaking investigations into the way identity is gendered and racialized by Simone de Beauvoir and Frantz Fanon. Beauvoir’s The Second Sex and Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks set the agenda for entire research programs, establishing connections between embodiment, socio-historical processes, and identity as enduring horizons for both phenomenological research and philosophy more generally.

Art has been a prominent topic within phenomenology from its inception. The experience of works of art provided key insights for some of the most influential texts in phenomenology (Heidegger on van Gogh; Merleau-Ponty on Cézanne, etc.). Art theorists and critics have, in turn, recognized how phenomenology offers a useful theoretical framework for understanding works of art, thus highlighting that a shared interest in investigating the structure and meaning of experience characterizes both fields. Art practitioners and theorists have also made use of phenomenological concepts for their own creative and theoretical ends, often developing these ideas in ways that go beyond the simple application of a philosophical framework. Phenomenological reflection is not just a way for philosophers to understand art, but can also be a tool for artists and art theorists to investigate the subject matter of creative work. Understanding how artworks themselves can embody phenomenological investigation helps us see what philosophers can learn from those working in the arts.

Finally, archaeology and anthropology have a history of interaction with phenomenology, extending back to Husserl’s early interactions with Levy Bruhl (Moran & Steinacher, 2008) and his dismissal of Heidegger’s Being and Time as merely “philosophical anthropology” (Husserl, 1997), which reflects a mixed relationship between the areas. On the one hand, it is natural to supplement objective data about human societies with experiential accounts of life in those societies. Phenomenology has natural affinities with ethnographic field research, where an anthropologist spends an extended period of time with a group (for example, the Yanomami, a street gang, or the crew of a ship) and then describes those experiences in a detailed report. In a similar way, archaeologists are naturally led to consider what the experiences of those living in the ancient settlements they study might have been. However, phenomenological and ethnographic methods are subject to the criticism that they reflect the sensibilities of present-day phenomenologists or scientists in implicit and sometimes damaging ways. This was a source of controversy in Changon’s early ethnographic studies of the Yanomani (Albert, 1989), and also the basis of Husserl’s own pejorative use of the phrase “philosophical anthropology” to characterize what he thought of as armchair speculations about contingent features of human experience. The contributions in this volume revisit these questions and suggest ways of overcoming or addressing them.

2 Internal Horizons

The section on internal horizons provides an overview of contemporary phenomenology, largely organized around major figures and scholarly directions in the field. The contributions focus on Husserlian, Heideggerian, and Merleau-Pontyan phenomenology, and give a sense of the main controversies, methodologies, and stylistic tendencies in these areas. The discussion is not comprehensive (none of the chapters is focused on Sartre or Beauvoir, for example). The goal, again, is to develop an illuminating rather than a comprehensive selection.

Pablo Contreras Kallens and Jeff Yoshimi open the section with a literal map of the phenomenology literature based on citational patterns. This is, to our knowledge, the first application of bibliometric methods to phenomenology, which promises to supplement our intuitive understanding of the structure of the phenomenology literature with objective citation data. The map contains nearly 12,000 nodes and 70,000 links, where nodes correspond to authors and links correspond to citations between authors. A clustering algorithm was used to identify groups of authors who cite each other more than they cite authors in other groups. The results confirm the central status of Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty in contemporary phenomenology. Other large clusters are organized around “embodied” approaches to cognitive science, contemporary philosophy of mind, and Kantian-Hegelian influences on phenomenology. The analysis is then recursively applied to the Husserl, Heidegger, and “French phenomenology” clusters, shedding light on internal divisions within these areas. The map also highlights a few areas that this volume largely passes over, e.g. contemporary discussions of theology and phenomenology in French phenomenology, as well as discussions of phenomenology in relation to Eastern philosophy and psychotherapy.

The next three chapters focus specifically on Husserlian phenomenology, beginning with John Drummond’s overview, which takes the form of a walk through “Phenomenology park.” This paper can be read as a first-person counterpart to the Husserlian section of the bibliometric map; a fun, opinionated overview of scholarly tendencies in the field. It is associated with an annotated bibliography.

David Woodruff Smith describes “West Coast” or “California School” phenomenology (Yoshimi et al., 2019), which is focused on links between Husserlian phenomenology and analytic philosophy. Smith’s style exemplifies a core practice of classical phenomenology: extended analysis of concrete perceptual experiences. Husserl spent several pages describing an apple tree in his garden (Husserl, 1982; section 88). Raymond Aron, pointing to a cocktail glass, told Sartre “You see, my dear fellow, if you were a phenomenologist, you could talk about this cocktail and make philosophy out of it” (Beauvoir, 1920, 112). Smith contemplates a Podocarpus tree in his backyard and a snowy egret in Merced. These simple acts are expressed using phenomenological descriptions like: “Phenomenally in this very experience I now here see attentively and intuitively that tall white egret stepping slowly through waving grass.” Smith identifies the logical form of this statement with the logical form of the experience it describes. This formal structure is associated with a horizon of implied meanings, which refer to possible worlds in which the egret might have been different. Smith also describes a “constitutive realism,” according to which our consciousness of the egret is built up over time but refers to an actual physical egret in the world.

Burt Hopkins considers a set of fundamental questions in Husserlian phenomenology, and in doing so exemplifies a different style of analysis. He considers experience of unity and manifolds in time, e.g. the ability to hear a manifold of five notes unfolding in time as five notes. This kind of ability occupied Husserl throughout his career, from his early work on the constitution of numbers in Philosophy of Arithmetic, to his late work on historicity, which Derrida famously critiqued, insofar as Husserl seems to assert that timeless essences develop in time (Derrida, 1989). Hopkins, who has worked extensively on this topic (Hopkins, 2005, 2013), returns to the issue here, focusing on Husserl’s account of time consciousness. Hopkins argues that there are several tensions in Husserl’s analysis, and indicates future research directions based on an account of time-consciousness which addresses these tensions.

The next two chapters are focused on Heideggerian and Merleau-Pontyan phenomenology, respectively. Hakhamanesh Zanganeh develops a taxonomic overview of Heidegger scholarship and argues that only one position in this taxonomy actually corresponds to “Heideggerian phenomenology.” Syncretic approaches put Heidegger’s work in contact with other areas of contemporary philosophy (the Dreyfus school, discussed by Londen, can be located here); whereas scholarly readings focus on textual exegesis. Within the scholarly readings, Zanganeh further distinguishes between a dual phased reading that organizes Heidegger’s thought around a central Kehre or turn, a teleological reading that sees the later texts as the goal towards which the earlier works develop, and genealogical readings that emphasize continuities in the development of Heidegger’s thought. Within the genealogical reading Zanganeh emphasizes one that he argues is properly phenomenological; a reading which is “mostly genealogical but tries to preserve the specificity of individual works and topics.” Zanganeh ends the paper by pursuing some work within this reading, arguing that Heidegger’s account of temporality can be read as a Kantian/Husserlian project.

Robin Muller’s contribution turns to Merleau-Ponty, providing a comprehensive survey of Merleau-Ponty’s work organized around the central Hegelian conception of ambiguity. Muller shows how Merleau-Ponty applies this concept to topics internal and external to phenomenology, including questions about phenomenological method and the structure of perception, as well as questions at the intersection of phenomenology and psychology, art, anthropology, and other disciplines. Muller traces the development of Merleau-Ponty’s thought from his early work drawing on psychology (which has been of particular interest to philosophers of mind and cognitive science), to his later work focused on aesthetics and ontology. She defends a “unified reading” of Merleau-Ponty, whereby he engages with ontological problems throughout his career, and argues that this unified reading opens up new points of contact between Merleau-Ponty and several strands of contemporary research.

Patrick Londen provides an overview of a more or less unified school of existential phenomenology deriving from Hubert Dreyfus’ work, what he calls “Anglo-American Existential Phenomenology.” Often thought of as a particular interpretation of Heidegger (or “Dreydegger,” as it is sometimes called)—indeed, it may be the dominant approach to Heidegger interpretation in philosophy departments in the English-speaking world—this school of thought also draws from Merleau-Ponty and other figures, as well as more recent philosophy from the U.S. and U.K. It can be contrasted with European approaches to Heidegger interpretation which are focused more on textual exegesis (cf. Zanganeh’s “scholarly readings”) than on thematic developments or syncretic connections to other philosophical work. Londen focuses on four key issues in Anglo-American existential phenomenology: (1) the primacy of practice or “knowing how” over theoretical contemplation; (2) an understanding of practical know-how as coping, which fluidly responds to the nuances of a situation; (3) the role of ontology in background practices, whereby even in doing something like shopping for groceries we implicitly enact a background understanding of what humans and the goods they shop for are; (4) the way a meaningful life comes from taking a stand on one’s background practices. The final section includes a discussion of how individuals can manifest their “culture in a distinctive way and thereby… reinvest in that culture by clarifying its style,” and how marginalized communities can transform pervasive background practices by introducing marginal practices into the mainstream.

We end the section with Steven Crowell’s discussion of what Husserl (2013) calls Grenzprobleme or “limit problems” in phenomenology: birth, death, animal consciousness, the unconscious, and the afterlife. These are seemingly un-phenomenological topics because they involve a study of what is not given to consciousness. This in turn raises the question of how phenomenology is related to metaphysics, which is arguably the most fundamental Grenzproblem opened up by phenomenology, and a central theme for all the classical phenomenologists: the relationship between phenomenology, which discloses conditions on the possibility of being, and metaphysical studies of being itself. Crowell summarizes a range of positions on the issue (which has been active in recent scholarship), including Husserl’s own late metaphysical view that being emerges from a network of interacting minds in an “inter-monadic community.” Crowell concludes on a skeptical note about phenomenological and metaphysics: “transcendental phenomenology is and ought to be metaphysically neutral; it should leave worldview proposals to the scientists and theologians.”

3 External Horizons: Embodiment and Identity

Céline Leboeuf’s chapter, “Phenomenology at the Intersection of Gender and Race,” functions as the volume’s pivot from internal to external horizons of phenomenology. The concrete ways in which one’s sense of identity becomes constituted through material and socio-historical conditions has always been a core concern of the “classical” phenomenological tradition. Beauvoir’s and Fanon’s systematic studies of gender and race, respectively, delineated major research trajectories for the second half of the twentieth century, and are some of the most active and interdisciplinary areas of phenomenology today. Leboeuf’s contribution situates these trajectories within the broader contemporary landscape of feminist philosophy and philosophy of race by developing her own “intersectional” phenomenological analyses of the lived experience of women of color. Classical phenomenologies of gendered and racialized embodiment (such as Beauvoir’s or Fanon’s) tended toward overly general descriptions of being a woman or being Black, while neglecting the particularities that come when identity categories like Black and woman intersect. Women of color do not necessarily experience the male gaze in the same way that white women do, nor do they necessarily experience the white gaze the way Black men do. In addition to her careful intersectional analysis of the gaze, Leboeuf also considers the particularities of women of color’s lived experience of body image, and the possibilities for “embodied resistance” in an oppressive society.

An important feature of Leboeuf’s chapter is that it articulates a shift from purely descriptive to critical phenomenology. Critical phenomenology emphasizes the role of contingent historical and social structures in normalizing oppressive power relations. Francisco Gallegos’s chapter explores this horizon of phenomenology through the distinctive lens of Mexican and Latinx philosophy from the mid-twentieth century through the present. A central topic in this tradition is the concept of zozobra: “an anxious condition characterized by the inability to be at home in the world.” Gallegos goes beyond psychological accounts of zozobra to a more fundamental phenomenological analysis of how this condition arises at the level of our basic structures of sense-making, or what Heidegger would understand as the structures in virtue of which one “has a world” at all. In bringing together contemporary Latinx philosophers like Gloria Anzaldúa and Mariana Ortega with classical Mexican phenomenologists such as Jorge Portilla and Emillio Uranga, Gallegos guides us through a complex dialectic of what it means to be at home in the world. The concept of home can function as both ground of identity and mechanism of exclusion; as both illusory ideal and site of negotiation.

Rebecca Harrison’s chapter on Merleau-Ponty and standpoint epistemology rounds out this section by taking up foundational questions concerning the very concept of a standpoint associated with a social identity category. Standpoint epistemology is a variety of feminist epistemology which claims that knowledge is always conditioned by socio-historically constituted perspectives, or “standpoints” relative to which members of different groups literally see the world differently. Harrison draws on Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception to provide an analysis of this kind of situated perception, and in the process addresses a core challenge for standpoint epistemology: how is it that different standpoints “have different but nonetheless real experiences of a single external reality” such that some standpoints can make better or “less false” claims about that reality than others? Merleau-Ponty’s accounts of perspectival realism, the horizonal structure of the perceptual object, and the normativity of perception (cf. Muller’s discussion in this volume) serve as a model for understanding feminist standpoint epistemology’s central insight: that some people are better situated to see certain realities than others. Harrison notes that in everyday perception, certain spatial orientations can offer better perceptual access than others: I can see someone better (for most purposes) at ten feet than at one hundred. Harrison argues that, for Merleau-Ponty, perspective isn’t limited to spatial orientation. Social, cultural, and historical orientation can offer similar privileged perspectives: the Parthenon does not look the same way to us today as it did to the ancient Greeks, and they were better situated to appreciate its original significance. In the same way, Harrison points out, women in heterosexual domestic relationships tend to have a more accurate view of the unequal distribution of domestic labor than men, because occupying a social category like “woman” may offer a privileged position for seeing “certain gendered phenomena in the world, or how pervasive certain gendered phenomena are”.

4 External Horizons: The Arts

Phenomenology has a rich history of engaging with art and artists. Phenomenologists have often looked to artworks to enrich their philosophical accounts of perception, consciousness, and ontology, and philosophers interested in art and aesthetics have often drawn from canonical works in phenomenology. Artists and those working in the arts more generally are often interested in phenomenology and use these ideas in their own theoretical discourse. These applications of phenomenological theory don’t always make their way back into philosophy. This section explores some of these discussions of phenomenology in the arts, and the relevance of artistic practice for phenomenology.

Samantha Matherne investigates the relationship between the work of artists and phenomenologists in her chapter, “Are Artists Phenomenologists?” She compares Merleau-Ponty’s frequently discussed views on art and artists with the lesser-known views of Edith Landmann-Kalischer. While both authors construe lived experience as the shared subject matter of artistic practice and phenomenology, the two disagree on whether artists themselves count as phenomenologists. Matherne argues that this disagreement lies in their differing views on the nature and goals of phenomenology. For Landmann-Kalischer, the phenomenologist “is a kind of psychologist who aims to analyze, classify, and lawfully-determine lived experience,” whereas the artist seeks to produce works that “mirror lived experience in a faithful way.” On this view, the phenomenologist and the artist approach the same subject matter in fundamentally different ways. For Merleau-Ponty, however, the phenomenologist and the artist share a goal as well as a subject matter: both aim to “present” lived experience so as to “evoke” that experience in the viewer, reader, or audience. Matherne thus identifies a common goal among artists and phenomenologists in the Merleau-Pontyan approach: their shared “endeavor to express, exhibit and evoke our still-mute experience.”

Manuel Martín-Rodríguez explores the role of phenomenology in theories of the reader’s experience of literature, focusing on the experience of encountering references to outside texts within a literary work: how does a reader negotiate an allusion to an unfamiliar text? Martín-Rodríguez reviews the development of reader response criticism, from Roman Ingarden’s pioneering phenomenological work on the intentionality of the reader’s experience of a text, to Wolfgang Iser’s analysis of the active role the reader plays in helping to constitute the meaning of a text. But Martín-Rodríguez’s views on reader experience are grounded not only in these theoretical debates but also in his own experience working through literary texts with students. He draws from his students’ reading of José Antonio-Villareal’s Pocho, an early work of Mexican American literature that contains a scene in which characters respond to a reading of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, a work unfamiliar to the students. Without any direct citations of Dostoevsky’s novel, the reader of Pocho must negotiate this literary reference based solely on the characters’ reactions to hearing the story read aloud. By gauging his students’ frustrations with and insights into these intertextual gaps, as well as the evolution of that initial understanding upon reading Dostoevsky’s novel, Martín-Rodríguez constructs an “intertextually-based” account of reader experience that emphasizes the way any reading experience depends on and informs experiences of reading other texts. This empirically informed investigation into reader experience of intertextuality points the way to a decentralized and “more organic understanding of the history of literature than the one currently available to [students] from educational and other cultural institutions.”

In “Phenomenology and Architecture,” Jennifer Shields investigates how phenomenology and perceptual psychology are informing creative work in the fields of design and architecture. Shields notes the central role that two-dimensional graphic representations play in design, including exploratory sketches at the beginning of the design process, computer renderings that communicate finished designs to clients, and instructional graphics to aid in construction. Shields argues that we need a better understanding of how viewers experience two-dimensional images as representations of three-dimensional space. She draws from her own empirical work into the perceptual experience of graphic representations of three-dimensional space, including tracking eye movements in response to different kinds of images, and suggests that architects have a responsibility to better understand this phenomenological data. “If we could anticipate how spaces will affect the occupant’s phenomenological experience by how they respond to images of it,” Shields argues, “we could design a better built environment.”

5 External Horizons: Archaeology and Anthropology

Phenomenology is obviously relevant to anthropology, which interprets the lived experiences of human social groups, and also to archaeology, which studies past peoples via their physical remains. We begin with two papers on archaeological research. While it may seem impossible to get any insight into the phenomenology of long-dead peoples and civilizations, there is in fact a (controversial) tradition in archaeology of drawing on phenomenology. Both contributions to the volume return to phenomenological archaeology, but in a way that addresses concerns with earlier approaches. Both draw on objective methods (considerations about cognitive architecture, lab experiments, virtual reality research, and geo-spatial information models) to make informed conjectures about the experiences of past peoples, and also try to recreate certain aspects of those experiences.

Holley Moyes begins her chapter with a history of phenomenological archaeology, starting with Christopher Tilley’s well-known landscape studies, which involved him walking through ancient sites like Stonehenge, and on that basis describing what he thought the experience of those living in at the time might have been like. The approach was meant to shed light on meaningful structures of the environment obscured by what Tilley (drawing on Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty) took to be an over-emphasis on objective data. However, Tilley was widely criticized for the potentially biased perspective of his “solitary strolls.” Moyes describes the subsequent history of this controversy, then unpacks her own approach, which draws on multiple lines of evidence in developing an account of past phenomenology, including neural and psychological evidence about shared cognitive architecture, and laboratory experiments which test responses to physical features of the environment such as light and darkness. She then describes how she has used this methodology to study the ritual significance of darkness in caves.

Graham Goodwin and Nicola Lercari also describe ways of using objective data to develop plausible accounts of past phenomenology, in part by recreating past phenomenology. This is done using virtual reality, augmented reality, and multi-sensory displays, built around detailed reconstructions of physical sites. In this way Tilley’s solitary and interpretive strolls around Stonehenge could be replaced with immersive and empirically grounded phenomenological simulations. Several case studies are described, including a site reconstruction of Catalhöyuk in modern-day Turkey. Graham and Lercari caution against an oculocentric emphasis associated with this kind of approach (VR tends to be focused on visual data), or on systems that only provide visual or auditory information. They describe ways to integrate visual and auditory data in multi-modal simulations, and argue that this provides for a more immersive, affective, and embodied form of recreated experience.

Finally, Christopher Stephan and Jason Throop turn to anthropology, which has its own long and at times fraught relationship with phenomenology. They develop the concept of an “eventive ground,” which can be understood in contrast to simplistic alternative conceptions of an event, including Husserl’s own concept of an event as a moment of life, “bracketed” in an epoché, and then reflected on in order to identify general essences. Stephan and Throop argue that events should not be understood in this way, nor should they be understood as anecdotes or curiosities which can be used to enrich existing phenomenological accounts. Instead, they conceive of events as generative structures that can direct our thinking “through” particulars to whole worlds. An event can be a “touch, a turn in conversation, recapitulations of ritual, a silence” whereby “a world (as well as a style of being in it) begins to become discernible.” Their discussion is critical of traditional phenomenology but also aspirational. Anthropology is at its best when it “holds close to” the event, and in this way phenomenological anthropology has the potential to be “an in-between which aims to think phenomenologically from an eventive ground that always exceeds and transforms the grasp of the familiar.”

6 Conclusion

The world is more than an aggregation of physical objects; it is a meaningful world, a lived world, a source of action and reflection. Across many areas of science and inquiry, the need for a discipline which studies these meanings has been felt. Gender, race, identity, artworks, novels, graphical representations, past civilizations, social groups, and present-day human societies all involve lived and meaningful experiences. Artworks produce experience in the viewer or reader, but also represent the experiences of those involved, and can in some cases give insight into concealed features of everyday experience. Identity is experienced differently by those “in a standpoint” than by those outside of it, who construct it in multiple ways. Archaeology involves a reconstruction of past phenomenology from scant evidence, and even recreations of that phenomenology. Phenomenology itself can be pursued in many ways, from studying the logical form of the mundane experience of a tree, to describing the unreflective experience of getting on in the world, to delving into the most fundamental mysteries of temporality, the emergence of unities from the flux of ongoing experience.

Throughout these many domains of investigations deep and difficult questions arise. What are the proper categories of phenomenology? What is its method? Is it subject to inescapable bias? Are its many ambiguities something to be overcome or is this ambiguity the proper essence of phenomenology? Does phenomenology shed light on being, or is it metaphysically neutral? Is it best pursued using the austere categories of analytic philosophy or are those categories themselves problematic? Does it provide a way to overcome the limitations of the scientific method, or should it draw on scientific methods to supplement its inquiries?

We hope to give a sense of these many questions that arise at the horizons of phenomenology, in hopes of continued research, further pushing its boundaries and potential as it enters its second century.