Phenomenography - Terminology

The word "phenomenography" has its etymological roots in Greek "phainomenon" and "graphein", i. e. "appearance" and "description". The combination of these two words makes "phenomenography" a description of appearances.

Although the word "phenomenography" was not used in classical Greek philosophy, the interest in describing that which appears can be traced back to pyrrhonism. In modern times, the interest for phenomena has taken different paths. The so called "phenomenalism" has in the classical formulations of British empirism identified reality with phenomena and phenomena with that which is actually present in experience. Berkeley's dictum "esse est percipi" is an expression of this kind of phenomenalism.

Another important direction is represented by modern phenomenology, which is one of the big traditions in contemporary philosophy and human sciences. Modern phenomenology was inaugurated by the German philosopher Edmund Husserl in his Logical Investigations in 1900-01. Since then it has developed to a phenomenological movement including scholars like Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Ricoeur, Gadamer and Schütz. During the years a differentiated understanding of consciousness and its corresponding appearances has been developed in the phenomenological tradition.

The first scholar who used the term "phenomenography" seems to be the psychologist Ulrich Sonnemann.* In his book Existence and Therapy from 1954 (New York: Grune & Stratton) he introduced the word "phenomenography" to make a distinction between the Jaspers and the Heidegger schools of psychopathological research. According to Sonnemann, Jaspers' phenomenology should better be called "phenomenography", because it is rather "a descriptive recording of immediate subjective experience as reported" (p. 344). Probably the first use of "phenomenography" thus appears within the phenomenological tradition.

* Amedeo Giorgi, 1991, personal communication.