Five years after the republication of L’esistere pedagogico by Piero Bertolini (2021), thirty years after the founding of Encyclopaideia, and twenty years after the death of its founder, the debate on phenomenological research in education and pedagogy stands at once at a mature and delicate juncture. These anniversaries are not merely commemorative. Rather, they invite a renewed critical reflection on the epistemological status of phenomenological education and, more specifically, on the role of empirical research within it.
A significant portion of Bertolini’s work emerged from sustained engagement with concrete educational practice, real situations, and lived experience. Even where the empirical grounding of his thought is not systematically thematized, decisive passages acknowledge its foundational value. Within an authentically phenomenological perspective, he assigns empirical inquiry a structural role, defining it as “an indispensable instrument if education […] is to have concrete possibilities of realizing itself according to sound and, above all, correct perspectives of scientificity” (Bertolini, 2021, p. 228). Empiricity, in this framework, does not amount to data accumulation, but to methodical work on lived experience. It is precisely here that phenomenological education tests its claim to rigor.
Yet, at the very moment when phenomenological qualitative research has gained significant traction in educational studies, a quasi-ritualized representation of its distinctive methodological gesture has consolidated: the epoché (Schnegg, 2018). Frequently presented in qualitative methodology handbooks as the sine qua non of phenomenological inquiry—“bracketing” theories, beliefs, and presuppositions to access experience “as it is given”—the epoché has assumed the status of a methodological myth.
1 The epoché as methodological myth
As Dan Zahavi has argued, the centrality attributed to the epoché in empirical research is historically and theoretically problematic (Zahavi, 2019; Zahavi & Martiny, 2019). In the work of Edmund Husserl, the epoché belongs to the transcendental project: it enables the shift from the natural attitude to the thematic analysis of constituting subjectivity (Husserl, 1970). It was not conceived as a technical protocol for analyzing interviews or narratives. To transform it into a methodological procedure risks committing a category mistake: a philosophical move is misconstrued as a psychological technique.
More radically, Zahavi contends that it is “safe to ignore the epoché” in applied phenomenology (Zahavi, 2019)—if by epoché one means the aspiration to a total suspension of presuppositions. No empirical inquiry operates in a vacuum. Every analysis is guided by theoretical questions, conceptual frameworks, and disciplinary language. The claim to absolute neutrality is not only psychologically implausible; it contradicts any historically and socially situated account of subjectivity (Schnegg, 2018).
The issue, then, is not whether reflexivity should be abandoned, but whether it should be disentangled from a naïvely purificatory image.
2 Husserl, Bertolini, and the operational marginality of the epoché
A return to Husserl reveals a significant point: the epoché is thematized when clarifying the meaning of the transcendental project (Husserl, 1982), yet it is never converted into an operational manual for empirical investigation. Nowhere in his corpus does one find a detailed procedure translating the phenomenological reduction into a qualitative analytic technique.
The epoché does not amount to epistemic amnesia. It designates a modification of attitude, a shift in the mode of thematizing the world, not its erasure. To “put in brackets” does not mean eliminating the lifeworld but suspending its claim to self-evidence.
In L’esistere pedagogico, Bertolini receives this tension in formative terms: the epoché becomes a critical exercise, an (auto-)educational device (Bertolini, 2021), a practice of liberation from the technical reduction of the human being—an orientation already underscored by Enzo Paci (1963). It assumes the sense of vigilance against methodolatry, against the uncritical application of procedures that present themselves as neutral (Janesick, 1994).
In this light, fidelity to phenomenology does not consist in proclaiming the suspension of presuppositions, but in subjecting research techniques to critique. A scientific practice is phenomenological in the strong sense when the researcher interrogates their own conceptual tools rather than applying them as invariant schemas.
3 The epoché as an attitude of the researcher tout court
If this reconstruction is taken seriously, a thesis with decisive implications for education/pedagogy emerges: the epoché is not the distinctive feature of phenomenology, but the mark of any rigorous inquiry (Zahavi, 2019). Every mature scientific discipline entails a form of critical distancing from immediate evidence. In this sense, the epoché is not phenomenology’s monopoly; it is a paradigmatic figure of scientific reflexivity.
What distinguishes phenomenological research is not an assertion of neutrality, but its orientation toward the structural description of experience: the analysis of intentionality, intersubjectivity, and embodiment (Zahavi, 1994; 2003). For education, this implies that phenomenological specificity lies not in the promise of total suspension, but in the quality and depth of the interrogation of educational experience.
4 Beyond naïve suspension: an epistemological reformulation
Accepting Zahavi’s critique does not entail abandoning the epoché; it calls for its reformulation.
First, presuppositions must be explicated rather than eliminated. Reflexivity consists in rendering operative categories visible, monitoring their use, and assessing their adequacy in relation to the phenomenon under study.
Second, a dialogical dimension must be acknowledged. In educational research, meaning emerges through interaction between researchers and participants. The phenomenological attitude is not a solipsistic act, but an intersubjective process of clarification.
Third, a structural dimension comes into view. What is suspended is not the world, but the assumption that it is already definitively understood. The epoché thus becomes openness to revision, readiness for surprise, and exposure to the resistance of the phenomenon.
Understood in this way, the epoché is not a methodological switch to be activated at the outset of a study, but a regulative principle orienting the entire research process.
5 Implications for phenomenological education
Within educational research, the rhetoric of “bracketing” has at times produced an implausible image of the researcher as capable of divesting themselves of history, theoretical positioning, and institutional belonging. An epistemologically mature phenomenology of education must instead recognize the situatedness of all descriptions.
The task is not to deny one’s location, but to assume it critically.
To maintain—provocatively, with Zahavi—that it is “safe to ignore the epoché” does not legitimize naïve empiricism (Zahavi, 2019). Rather, it frees applied phenomenology from an unrealistic performative burden and redirects attention to what genuinely qualifies it: the rigorous analysis of the structures of lived experience.
For a journal such as Encyclopaideia, born in the wake of Bertolini’s project, this reformulation represents not a rupture but a coherent deepening of its original vocation: to safeguard the rigor of phenomenology without transforming it into methodological ritual. Rethinking the epoché today is therefore not an exegetical exercise, but an act of epistemological responsibility toward the pedagogical community.
Acknowledgements
Encyclopaideia thanks the reviewers who collaborated with the journal in 2025, ensuring with their professionalism a rigorous and efficient peer review process:
Claudia Alborghetti, Pierangelo Barone, Federico Batini, Gabriele Boselli, Carla Maria Rosaria Cuomo, Tommaso Farina, Ilaria Folci, Maria Benedetta Gambacorti Passerini, Mariangela Giusti, Cristina Gumirato, Emiliano Macinai, Elena Madrussan, Silvia Maggiolini, Milena Manini, Chiara Montà, Marisa Musaio, Elisabetta Musi, Greta Persico, Mimmo Angelo Pesare, Giorgio Prada, Maria Ratotti, Tone Saevi, Michela Schenetti, Marco Ubbiali, Stefania Ulivieri Stiozzi.
References
Bertolini, P. (2021). L’esistere pedagogico: Ragioni e limiti di una pedagogia come scienza fenomenologicamente fondata (Nuova ed.). Milano: FrancoAngeli. (Originally published in 1988).
Husserl, E. (1970). The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (D. Carr, Trans.). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. (Originally published in 1936).
Husserl, E. (1982). Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to A Phenomenological Philosophy. First Book: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology (F. Kersten, Trans.). The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. (Originally published in 1913).
Janesick, V. J. (1994). The dance of qualitative research design: Metaphor, methodolatry, and meaning. In Handbook of Qualitative Research. (pp. 209–219). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
Paci, E. (1963). Funzione delle scienze e significato dell’uomo. Milano: Il Saggiatore.
Schnegg, M. (2018). Struggling with the concept of culture: Phenomenological and praxeological perspectives. Zeitschrift für Erziehungswissenschaft, 21(Suppl. 1), 27–44.
Zahavi, D. (1994). Husserl’s phenomenology of the body. Études Phénoménologiques, 10(19), 63–84. https://doi.org/10.5840/etudphen199410199
Zahavi, D. (2003). Husserl’s Phenomenology. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Zahavi, D. (2019). Applied phenomenology: Why it is safe to ignore the epoché. Continental Philosophy Review, 54(2), 259–273. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-019-09463-y
Zahavi, D., & Martiny, K. (2019). Phenomenology in nursing studies: New perspectives. International Journal of Nursing Studies, 93, 155–162. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijnurstu.2019.01.014