胡塞尔在一个世纪前创立了现象学。许多重要的哲学家都是现象学家，如海德格尔、梅洛-庞蒂和萨特。但现象学到底是什么?

Let’s start with the word. In the relevant sense, “phenomenon” means something observed, for which one wants to know the unobserved cause or explanation.

For example, glaciers are an interesting phenomenon. But where did they come from? The phenomenological move is to say, “Let’s study the phenomenon itself first, and leave the explanation aside, at least for the time being. But of course Husserl wasn’t interested in glaciers. He was interested inexperience.

Philosophers like Descartes taught us that we are directly aware of our own experiences, but then immediately asked for the explanation for the phenomenon of experience… what our experiences can teach us about the external world. Husserl made the phenomenological move with respect to experience. He said, wait, for starters, let’s study the experiences themselves. He said, “Let’s put aside the issue of where they come from and what they provide evidence for.” In his terminology, let’sbracket所有这些问题。然后他就这样做了，写出了成千上万页。其中我读到的比例很小。他做了很多有趣的区分和主张。但这是非常困难的事情。

It seems phenomenology ought to be of interest to cognitive science, since cognitive science studies the mind, and experience is a big part of the mind. The phenomonologist most cited in cognitive science is probably not Husserl, but a fellow named Merleau-Ponty.

As I understand it, Merleau-Ponty thought that to understand experience—livedexperience—we shouldn’t bracket everything. We shouldn’t bracket action and the body. As we experience experiences in our lives, one might say, they can’t be understood completely on their own, but need to be seen as part of intelligent action.

因此，现在的现象学与像Dretske这样的哲学家的观点相联系，他们认为经验是与行动相关的信息的收集。胡塞尔到德雷茨克似乎是一个巨大的飞跃!但哲学就是这样。