PHENOMENOLOGY. – The term appears to have been used for the first time by J. H. Lambert (1764) and later by Kant to denote that particular philosophical science whose task would be to separate the true and the real from the phenomenon and from what is merely apparent. A rather ambiguous meaning that does not disappear even in Hegel’s first great systematic work, the *Phaenomenologie des Geistes* (1807), where it was given as “the exposition of consciousness in its advance from the first and immediate opposition of itself and the object up to absolute knowing.”
Phenomenology was thus to be the vestibule and the obligatory introduction to the great temple of the system, anticipating, genetically, its objects, analyses, and problems. With the establishment of the system, however, phenomenology—even if not abolished outright by Hegel in deference to the philosopher’s requirement of an absolute beginning—was greatly reduced in importance, so as to be subsumed within the system as a section of the “philosophy of spirit” (*Encyclopédie*, §§ 413 ff.). This uncertainty constituted one of the most painful points of contention in later idealism, on which it was never possible to reach agreement: in Italy, for example, while Spaventa defended with warmth and acumen the necessity of phenomenology (cf. *Scritti filosofici*, ed. G. Gentile, Naples 1900, pp. 235 ff.), his best disciples abandoned it because it clashed with the very principle of the philosopher according to which thought can only be “pure act” (Gentile).
E. Husserl, starting from the scholastic concept—received from Brentano (q.v.)—of intentionality, conceived phenomenology as a pure a priori science whose task is to perform the *epoché*, that is, the “placing in brackets” of existential awareness so as to fix in eidetic intuition the pure essences (… colour, sound, life, willing in general) as forms of the actualization of consciousness in general. In substantial agreement with his master Husserl, M. Heidegger clarifies that the task of phenomenology does not concern so much the object as such, the “that” of which one must treat, but rather the “how” it is to be treated. For him, since philosophy has as its object the truth of the existent hidden in reality, it is up to phenomenology to unveil and articulate it in its categories. Thus phenomenology returns to being the obligatory path of access to the very object of fundamental ontology, with which, in Heidegger’s existential phenomenology, it ultimately comes to be identified.
It would be advisable to avoid the term “phenomenology” to indiscriminately designate descriptive research within the sphere of psychological facts, ethics, the history of religions, and ethnology, reserving it for that moment of philosophical reflection in which the concrete content of thought presents itself in its most stable and universal forms. In this sense, there is no reason why it should not also be accepted by traditional philosophy.