Phenomenology (from Greek phainómenon “that which appears” and lógos “study”) is the philosophical study of the structures of experience and consciousness. As a philosophical movement, it was founded in the early years of the 20th century by Edmund Husserl and was later expanded upon by a circle of his followers at the universities of Gottingen and Munich in Germany. It then spread to France, the United States, and elsewhere, often in contexts far removed from Husserl’s early work.

The Encyclopedia of Phenomenology (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997) features separate articles on the following seven types of phenomenology:

1. Transcendental constitutive phenomenology studies how objects are constituted in transcendental consciousness, setting aside questions of any relation to the natural world.
2. Naturalistic constitutive phenomenology studies how consciousness constitutes things in the world of nature, assuming with the natural attitude that consciousness is part of nature.
3. Existential phenomenology studies concrete human existence, including our experience of free choice and/or action in concrete situations.
4. Generative historicist phenomenology studies how meaning—as found in our experience—is generated in historical processes of collective experience over time.
5. Genetic phenomenology studies the emergence/genesis of meanings of things within one’s own stream of experience.
6. Hermeneutical phenomenology (also hermeneutic phenomenology or post-phenomenology/postphenomenology) studies interpretive structures of experience. This approach was introduced in Martin Heidegger’s early work.
7. Realistic phenomenology (also realist phenomenology elsewhere) studies the structure of consciousness and intentionality as “it occurs in a real-world that is largely external to consciousness and not somehow brought into being by consciousness.”

Source of information – Wikipedia, Online encyclopedia