Phenomenology (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry)

This is David Woodruff Smith's Phenomenology entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, published by the Metaphysics Research Lab at Stanford University in 2003, a continuously revised, peer reviewed reference entry covering the philosophical movement founded by Edmund Husserl and developed by Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and others. Smith was a recognized specialist in phenomenology and philosophy of mind. Its strength is that peer editorial process, together with the encyclopedia's practice of ongoing revision as scholarship develops. Its limit is that an encyclopedia entry compresses a large and internally varied philosophical movement into a single survey, so a claim resting on a specific phenomenologist's distinctive position should be checked against that philosopher's own primary texts or a study focused specifically on them, rather than this general entry alone.