An idea · Twentieth Century (to mid-century) · first attested 1913
Epoché (Bracketing)
Suspend the assumption that what you experience is or is not real.
Husserl's central methodological move. To study experience cleanly, the phenomenologist brackets the question of whether things really exist — neither asserting nor denying, just setting it aside — and attends to how things appear. The point is not skepticism but precision: you cannot describe an appearance accurately if you are simultaneously theorizing about its source.