10-09-2025, 07:56 AM
Methodologically, Brentano, Husserl, Scheler, Heidegger, Dietrich von Hildebrand, as well as Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Emmanuel Lévinas, Michel Henry, and Jean-Luc Marion understood their phenomenological procedures along the lines of the above summary–with characteristic differences, though, which will be described in more detail below (cf. Zahavi 2018). The central understanding of the methodologically most reflective authors is that the method is not produced on the basis of a subjective decision or a certain tradition, but determined by the object of the phenomenological study, i.e., the essence itself. It may seem that the method and the content of the act of knowledge, i.e., intuition, form a circle: methodically, one reaches the object that determines the method of its own perception. This circle, nevertheless, is not logically circular; in reality, knowledge is such that it is always determined by the object of knowledge so that knowledge is teleological, i.e., it strives for its fulfillment in understanding, which is by definition an understanding of meaning (cf. Cassedy 2022, pp. 183–85).
