An idea · Twentieth Century (to mid-century) · first attested 1900
Phenomenology
The rigorous description of experience from the first-person point of view.
Husserl's method: instead of speculating about whether the external world exists or what consciousness is "really" made of, simply describe what experience is like – its structures, its objects, its acts, its moods. Phenomenology is the dominant continental method of the 20th century and the wellspring of existentialism and hermeneutics; even contemporary cognitive science drinks from it.