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The term phenomenology has a difficult history, and over the years has come to have many meanings. It was first introduced into philosophy by Lambert, a German philosopher who was a contemporary of Kant, and who used the term simply to pertain to illusions. Kant called phenomenology the study of what appears to us in our experience and he contrasted experience, or “phenomena,” with objects and events as they are “in themselves,” a dichotomy Kant took for granted but was broken down by the German idealists. For Hegel, phenomenology represented the discovery of Absolute Spirit through a study of various stages in the historical development of the mind's experience of the phenomena of self-consciousness.
In the middle of the 19th century, however, phenomenology came to have the wider meaning of an attempt at a purely descriptive study of any given set of experiences. For example, Peirce in 1902 used the term to mean a descriptive study of whatever appears before the mind, such as perceptions of so-called reality, dreams, imaginings, and even misperceptions.
Phenomenology as employed by Husserl (1913) attempts to return to the alleged primordial data of experience, that which shows itself in the manner in which it shows itself. Phenomena so defined are always prior to our theories and concepts; they are immediate data but they are not simply “appearances,” for appearances are always appearances of something, whereas phenomena are that something which shows itself: they are primary, they are what is.
The phenomenology of the definition of phenomenology is that one cannot find philosophers in agreement on the definition or use of phenomenology