The 20th century philosophical tradition founded by Edmund Husserl and developed by Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and others, focused on the careful analysis of lived experience. Phenomenology asks how things appear to us in everyday consciousness rather than how they exist in some independent reality. Hannah Arendt brought phenomenological methods into political theory, analyzing politics from the inside, from the perspective of someone actually trying to act in the world, rather than from the outside.
Tradition
Phenomenology
The 20th century philosophical tradition focused on the careful analysis of lived experience.
Thinkers
Thinker
Martin Heidegger
1889–1976
Martin Heidegger was one of the most influential and most troubling philosophers of the 20th century, whose Being and Time reshaped philosophy and who was also a committed Nazi who never meaningfully repudiated his role
ThinkerHannah Arendt
1906–1975
Hannah Arendt was a German-American political theorist who refused every ideological camp, rebuilding political thought from the lived experience of totalitarianism
Related through shared thinkers