Once a marginal affair, applied phenomenology is now a vast and vibrant movement. With great success, however, comes great criticism, and critics have been harsh, accusing applied phenomenology’s practitioners of everything from spewing nonsense to assailing down-to-earth researchers with gratuitous jargon. In this article, I reconstruct the most damning criticisms as a dilemma: Either applied phenomenology merely describes experience, in which case it offers nothing distinctive, or it involves the kind of analysis characteristic of classical phenomenology, in which case it’s only of interest to a small number of philosophers; either way, we should explore the experiential dimension by other means. Notwithstanding the enormous body of research in applied phenomenology, few authors have tried to explain what makes it an independent intellectual enterprise distinct from pure phenomenology, and none has defused this dilemma. Here I try my hand at both. After considering eight major approaches to applied phenomenology that fail to defuse the dilemma, I propose an approach that, I argue, does the job, one that understands applied phenomenology as a research program that brings the phenomenological method and the resources of at least one other discipline to bear on problems beyond the scope of any monodisciplinary approach.

曾经的边缘事件，应用现象学现在是一个巨大而充满活力的运动。然而，巨大的成功伴随着巨大的批评，批评者一直很严厉，指责应用现象学的实践者从胡说八道到用无缘无故的行话攻击脚踏实地的研究人员。在这篇文章中，我将最严厉的批评重构为一个困境：要么应用现象学仅仅描述经验，在这种情况下它没有提供任何独特之处，要么它涉及经典现象学的那种分析特征，在这种情况下，它只对一个人感兴趣。少数哲学家；无论哪种方式，我们都应该通过其他方式探索体验维度。尽管在应用现象学中有大量的研究，很少有作者试图解释是什么使它成为与纯粹现象学不同的独立知识事业，而且没有人解决了这个困境。在这里，我尝试了两者。在考虑了八种未能化解困境的应用现象学的主要方法之后，我提出了一种方法，我认为，可以完成这项工作，将应用现象学理解为一种研究计划，它带来了现象学方法和至少另一个人的资源处理超出任何单一学科方法范围的问题的学科。