The era , also the era ( Greek ἐποχή - “delay, stop, hold, self-control”) is the principle of reasoning in philosophy , which means the suspension of all metaphysical statements - judgments about the existence of an object outside of the mind that perceives it.
The term is first encountered by Aristotle and is further developed by Pirron . The principle of the era is one of the key concepts of skepticism and phenomenology .
Carrying out an epoch, the subject excludes from the field of vision everything - the opinions, judgments, evaluations of the subject, accumulated by the history of scientific and unscientific thinking, and seeks from the position of a “pure observer” to make available the essence of this subject.
The Age of Phenomenology
In Husserl's phenomenology, the term epoch appears in the works “ Ideas for Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy. T. 1 ”(“ Ideas I ”) and“ Cartesian reflections ”in connection with the rejection of the “ natural attitude ” in the perception of the world, that is, the unconditional and unreflected assumption of the existence of reality.
The phenomenological era consists in the rejection (that is, “bracketing”) of all prior knowledge and assumptions about the world and is a methodological step towards substantiating the significance of reality as a correlation of the subjectivity of consciousness.
Husserl’s epoch is carried out simultaneously with a phenomenological reduction , consisting of eidetic reduction , abstracting from the randomness and individual characteristics of acts of thinking and aimed at finding the essential structures in intentional mental acts; as well as transcendental reduction , leading to the parenthesis of the empirical-bodily components of consciousness and leading to "pure consciousness".