Color Phenomenology

Synonyms

Color experience; Color qualia

Definition

The word “phenomenology” finds its original application in philosophy, and it has two distinct meanings in that discipline. In the first, most substantive meaning it refers to a philosophical tradition originating in the work of G. W. F. Hegel and developed in the work of Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and others, with the psychologist Franz Brentano as a major influence. In this primordial sense, it refers to a nonpsychological description of the fundamental constituents of experience. It may sound peculiar to call an account of experience “nonpsychological” since experience might be thought of as necessarily psychological. The rationale for the usage is this: one may possibly describe the fundamental constituents of human experience – concepts, ideas, propositions, temporality, mental images, etc. – in a way that captures their generic character and hence their “universality” rather than their specific contents....