文档介绍：INTRODUCTION
This monograph is intended to provide an insight into the experience
of what it is like to do phenomenological research.
The contributors to this monograph have e to and prac-
tised phenomenology in distinctive and manifold ways. Yet the
monograph is a collaborative effort, being the product of a series of
meetings over coffee and hot chocolate in which we discovered from
each other what phenomenology might be about. As such, it is hoped
that the reader will find affinities in the work presented here, affinities
that link these stories to the question of phenomenology and also to
the reader themselves.
Moreover, it is hoped that the question of what it is like to do
phenomenology, like the deeper question of what phenomenology is,
will be one that is not finalised for the reader, as if these are the only
stories to be told. The intention is rather that the question of phe-
nomenology is opened up as a set of ideas for further questioning and
investigation. The authors intend to stimulate questions rather than
to answer them, while also providing the reader with a taste for the
diversity of interpretations and applications of phenomenological
research.
Contemporary philosophers such as Jacques Derrida (1999,
p. 71) describe phenomenology as providing a profound lesson for all
inquiry, in the sense that it recognises the irreducible difference of the
other. If we want to understand that which goes beyond what we know
already, then we need to be receptive to that difference. But how is this
possible? How is it that understanding can transcend individual,
social, cultural and historical bounds? Or, can it? These are the kind of
philosophical problems that underpin phenomenological research.
As for what phenomenology is, definitions abound, and in line
with our aims in this monograph we do not wish to give ascendancy
to any particular candidate. However, there are, of course, some
accounts of what phenomenology is that we f