Phenomenological movement

6. Prospects

The phenomenological movement began with Husserl’s Logical Investigations. History has shown that Wilhelm Dilthey was correct to proclaim this work ‘epochal’. Besides the tendencies sketched above, a shifting geographical focus can be noted. This focus was in Germany until 1933, then shifted to France until about 1960; after that, while inspiration came from both Germany and France, the largest part of phenomenologists have come from the United States. Other enduring national traditions of phenomenology began in Japan, Russia and Spain before the First World War; arose in Australia, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Italy, Korea, The Netherlands and Flanders, Poland and Yugoslavia, as well as the United States and France between the wars; and emerged after the Second World War in Canada, China, Great Britain, India, Portugal, Scandinavia and South Africa. By the 1980s, genuinely international (and not just transatlantic) conferences and other forms of collaboration were intensifying; now that generations-deep underground tendencies have begun surfacing after the end of the Cold War, it is all the more likely that this trend will continue. It may turn out that the German, French and American periods of the phenomenological movement began to be succeeded in the early 1990s by an international period in which there are many centres.

As a century-old, world-wide, still growing and increasingly multidisciplinary movement, phenomenology is arguably the central movement in twentieth-century philosophy, and its vitality and momentum should carry it far into the twenty-first century.