Phenomenology, Reality and Essences

In phenomenology, a standard way to make claims about reality is through the identification of invariant features of and in experience, traditionally called “essences”. Phenomenology as essence intuition, eidetic variation or eidetic reduction raises fundamental questions concerning, among other things, the ontological structure of reality, the status of essences, their normativity, the relationship to empirical sciences and the nature of the phenomenological a priori in general.

This conference has two aims: (1) To establish a fuller picture of the manifold ways in which essence intuition has been understood by phenomenologists historically. How was phenomenology as an eidetic science conceived in and especially outside of Husserl’s writings? (2) To inquire if the idea of essence intuition, broadly construed, might still be considered a viable way of doing phenomenology, especially in light of recent interdisciplinary developments in various fields of phenomenology.