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Concept
Bracketing (phenomenology)
Summary
Bracketing (Einklammerung; also called phenomenological reduction, transcendental reduction or phenomenological epoché) means looking at a situation and refraining from judgement and bias opinions to wholly understand an experience. The preliminary step in the philosophical movement of phenomenology describing an act of suspending judgment about the natural world to instead focus on analysis of experience. Suspending judgement involves stripping away every connotation and assumption made about an object. Its earliest conception can be traced back to Immanuel Kant who argued that the only reality that one can know is the one each individual experiences in their mind (or Phenomena). Edmund Husserl, building on Kant’s ideas, first proposed bracketing in 1913, to help better understand another’s phenomena.
Though it was formally developed by Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), phenomenology can be understood as an outgrowth of the influential ideas of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). Attempting to resolve some of the key intellectual debates of his era, Kant argued that Noumena (fundamentally unknowable things-in-themselves) must be distinguished from Phenomena (the world as it appears to the mind). Kant, commonly misconceived as arguing that humans cannot have direct access to reality, but only to the contents of their minds, argued rather that what is experienced in the mind is reality to us. Phenomenology grew out of this conception of phenomena and studies the meaning of isolated phenomena as directly connected to our minds. According to The Columbia Encyclopedia, "Modern philosophers have used 'phenomenon' to designate what is apprehended before judgment is applied." This may not be possible if observation is theory laden.
Edmund Husserl included the ideas of Kant in developing his concept of bracketing, also referred to as epoché. Though Husserl likely began developing the method of bracketing around 1906, his book, Ideas, introduced it when it was published in 1913.
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