Abstract
Once a marginal affair, applied phenomenology is now a vast and vibrant movement. With great success, however, comes great criticism, and critics have been harsh, accusing applied phenomenology’s practitioners of everything from spewing nonsense to assailing down-to-earth researchers with gratuitous jargon. In this article, I reconstruct the most damning criticisms as a dilemma: Either applied phenomenology merely describes experience, in which case it offers nothing distinctive, or it involves the kind of analysis characteristic of classical phenomenology, in which case it’s only of interest to a small number of philosophers; either way, we should explore the experiential dimension by other means. Notwithstanding the enormous body of research in applied phenomenology, few authors have tried to explain what makes it an independent intellectual enterprise distinct from pure phenomenology, and none has defused this dilemma. Here I try my hand at both. After considering eight major approaches to applied phenomenology that fail to defuse the dilemma, I propose an approach that, I argue, does the job, one that understands applied phenomenology as a research program that brings the phenomenological method and the resources of at least one other discipline to bear on problems beyond the scope of any monodisciplinary approach.
Highlights
While enjoying a recent rise in popularity, applied phenomenology ( AP) has suffered a spate of searing attacks
I reconstruct the most damning criticisms as a dilemma: Either applied phenomenology merely describes experience, in which case it offers nothing distinctive, or it involves the kind of analysis characteristic of classical phenomenology, in which case it’s only of interest to a small number of philosophers; either way, we should explore the experiential dimension by other means
After considering eight major approaches to applied phenomenology that fail to defuse the dilemma, I propose an approach that, I argue, does the job, one that understands applied phenomenology as a research program that brings the phenomenological method and the resources of at least one other discipline to bear on problems beyond the scope of any monodisciplinary approach
Summary
While enjoying a recent rise in popularity, applied phenomenology ( AP) has suffered a spate of searing attacks. As I see it, we owe AP’s critics thanks for challenging the phenomenological community to specify what AP is and what makes it distinctive. Authors working in AP owe their readers a substantive justification for using the term phenomenology and an explanation of what makes their practice distinctive. To defuse the dilemma, I offer an account of AP as a research program that brings the phenomenological method and the resources of at least one other discipline to bear on problems beyond the scope of any monodisciplinary approach. What I offer here is not a new way of doing AP but rather a new way of understanding what the best work in AP already does
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