For The Oxford Handbook of Perception, edited by Mohan Matthen, Oxford University Press.
From the Introduction:
Phenomenology (as a philosophical movement or tradition) originated in the late nineteenth century, partly in an effort to find philosophy’s place in a culture increasingly dominated by experimental science and technology—and in dialogue (sometimes in tension) with an emerging academic psychology. Beginning with Franz Brentano, phenomenology seeks an elucidation of just what the phenomena are psychology purports to explain, via inquiry anchored in an understanding of mind available from the first-person point of view. From this perspective experience or consciousness is seen as fundamentally “intentional”:
it refers to or is directed at objects. Just how to describe this “intentionality” and its forms becomes a basic theme. Beginning with Edmund Husserl, the intentionality of perception is investigated by asking: how can experience, itself in near constant flux, nonetheless be of stable objects, so that meaning and knowledge might be possible for us? The key to answering this question, he proposes, is to see perceptual consciousness as dynamic and prospective—a process wherein the needed constancies are achieved via the successful anticipation of further experience through movement and direction of attention. This conception of Husserl’s—with its emphasis on the experience of one’s own body—helped inspire Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s important mid-twentieth century contribution to phenomenology. The following is a summary of approaches to perception (in Brentano, Husserl, and Merleau-Ponty) that are central to the phenomenological tradition, closing with a brief reference to recent work that stems from or neighbors it.