 Welcome to an explainer on phenomenology. At its most basic, phenomenology is the study of lived experience. As its name suggests, phenomenology is concerned with the study of phenomena that arise from the experience of being in the world. The development of modern phenomenology, established by Edmund Husserl in the early 20th century, is a break from the Cartesian system that pitched stark distinctions between the outer, real reality and the individual experience of reality. Following the Cartesian principle, outer reality is a separate and distinct entity that can only be understood in rational terms through cognitive processes of deduction. Sense perception was thought to distort this process and certainly emotions were considered a lower form of experience emanating from the recesses of the body. In contrast, phenomenology seeks to understand the outside world as it is interpreted by and through human consciousness. Ontologically speaking, that means speaking in terms of how philosophers understand the nature of being and existence, Husserl purported that reality could be grasped by and through structures of consciousness by applying what he called intentionality to the object of study or intentionally directing one's focus to describe realities. For Husserl to achieve deeper understanding of an object of study, a researcher could quarantine their personal judgments, a process called bracketing, so that preconceived notions do not interfere with the phenomenological inquiry. It is at this point that Martin Heidegger's approach breaks with Husserl's process. In fact, Heidegger was very critical of Husserl's phenomenology, where Husserl sought to capture objects of study as graspable entities that could be objectively studied. Heidegger employed the notion of design, the situated meaning of a human in the world. For Heidegger, consciousness is a product or construction of the historical context from which it arises, and in turn, one can never approach an object of study in a pre-suppositionless form. That is, objects of study cannot be neatly separated from their contexts, nor should they be. Reality and consciousness are co-creations, and because of this, human understanding always arises from the relationship between the two, acting upon each other. Thank you for watching.