Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger

Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) a Dutch philosopher, who is most often known as the 'founding father' of phenomenology. Husserl's phenomenology is a self-reflexive philosophical approach and commonly known as descriptive phenomenology. Descriptive phenomenology utilized intentionality' which means intentionally directing one's focus to identify the essences of phenomena of interest and explore the nature of human consciousness.

As Husserl assumed that understanding and describing a subjective phenomenon requires set away bracketing out' from pre-understanding and preconceived notions that would otherwise impact how phenomena is understood and focuses mainly on the objective essence of 'lived experience' as it appears through consciousness (Smith et al.

2009). Thus, the phenomenological researchers have to go back to the phenomenon itself while setting aside (bracketing) their fore understandings in order to access the essence of a phenomenon directly. Therefore, the aim of Husserl phenomenology was to give a description to the essence of the phenomenon rather than to provide an interpretation of its meaning (Silverman, 1984).

A former student of Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) argued that human consciousness is a construction of a human's own context and as human beings in this the world, we are thrown into this context.

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For Heidegger, it was not possible to bracket out subjectivity, since meanings are constructed through communications between people, and within their relationships. Thus, Heidegger changed phenomenology to portray reality through essences and thus he engaged the concept of Dasein'. He also considered the phenomenologist or the researcher as a participant who is making meaning through his/her interpretation and self-understanding which are dispensed through language and experiences of beings-in-the-world (Heidegger 1962, Smith et al., 2009).

In addition, Heidegger believed that it was impossible for individuals to set aside pre-understandings and preconceived notions and they rather were seen to be integral to the research process (Heidegger 1962; Smith et al., 2009). Therefore, human understanding of a phenomenon of interest is a product of the relationship between reality and consciousness. Heidegger's phenomenological concept of intersubjectivity represents how human experience is constructed through interpersonal interactions. Smith et al. (2009) identified the term of intersubjectivity as 'the shared, overlapped and relational nature of our engagement in the world'.

From a Heideggerian perspective, human understanding stems from experiencing the world intersubjectively, and making inevitable interpretation of humans' meaning construction. Moreover, Smith et al. (2009) elucidates that 'our being-in-the-world' is always temporal and related to something. This moved phenomenology away from Husserl's theory about the existence of essential reality, to an understanding of reality as grounded in intersubjective construction of meaning.