The Phenomenological Method in the Ethics and Legal Philosophy of the XX Century

Abstract

This paper analyzes the essence of the phenomenological method as it is used in certain theories in ethics and legal philosophy. The purpose of the paper is to provide a full study of phenomenology to determine its place in modern philosophical thought. The paper used methods of the history of philosophy, especially method of rational reconstruction, and based on interpretation of the classical phenomenological texts (E. Husserl, E. Levinas, A. Reinach). The main result of the paper is the justification that the unity of logic, ontology and ethics became the ground of application of the phenomenological method in the field of legal and ethical knowledge. Therefore the ideas of E. Levinas‟s ethical phenomenology were the basis for understanding ethics as the “first philosophy” in a phenomenological context. The main conclusion of this paper is that the ethical dimension of responsibility for the actions of the subject and their consequences expands the horizons of phenomenological reduction and allows us to reveal the essence of legal reality in a new way. The paper was carried out within the framework of the HSE research project “Ethics and Law: correlation and mechanisms of mutual influence”.