With the mission in mind to articulate an approach that is scientifically competent to meet the appeals from health care, education, social work, and other disciplines, the theme of this article is to rethink the essential ideas of phenomenological and hermeneutical research approaches, by exploring their philosophical underpinnings and especially the essential ontological idea of inseparability. We examine the fissure between approaches that favor description or interpretation and explore the arguments for a third approach that has the power to close the false epistemological methodological gap.

Phenomena may preferably be appreciated as essences, and describing phenomena and their essences is a common methodological goal in phenomenological research, e.g. in the area of health and well-being. Consequently it is important to explore the meaning of essences, thereby answering the questions, What are phenomenological essences? How do they come to be? What are their characteristics? In this article I suggest some possible answers to these questions through an analysis of Husserl's philosophy and especially his understanding of intentionality. Further, I want to show that the analysis of essences in empirical research never can be separated from the context of the phenomenon. Here I draw on the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty and especially his philosophy of ''the flesh''.

In this paper we offer an appreciation and critique of patient-led care as expressed in current policy and practice. We argue that current patient-led approaches hinder a focus on a deeper understanding of what patient-led care could be. Our critique focuses on how the consumerist/citizenship emphasis in current patient-led care obscures attention from a more fundamental challenge to conceptualise an alternative philosophically informed framework from where care can be led. We thus present an alternative interpretation of patient-led care that we call 'lifeworld-led care', and argue that such lifeworld-led care is more than the general understanding of patient-led care. Although the philosophical roots of our alternative conceptualisation are not new, we believe that it is timely to re-consider some of the implications of these perspectives within current discourses of patient-centred policies and practice. The conceptualisation of lifeworld-led care that we develop includes an articulation of three dimensions: a philosophy of the person, a view of well-being and not just illness, and a philosophy of care that is consistent with this. We conclude that the existential view of well-being that we offer is pivotal to lifeworld-led care in that it provides a direction for care and practice that is intrinsically and positively health focused in its broadest and most substantial sense.

In this paper, we describe the value and philosophy of lifeworld-led care. Our purpose is to give a philosophically coherent foundation for lifeworld-led care and its core value as a humanising force that moderates technological progress. We begin by indicating the timeliness of these concerns within the current context of citizen-oriented, participative approaches to healthcare. We believe that this context is in need of a deepening philosophy if it is not to succumb to the discourses of mere consumerism. We thus revisit the potential of Husserl's notion of the lifeworld and how lifeworld-led care could provide important ideas and values that are central to the humanisation of healthcare practice. This framework provides a synthesis of the main arguments of the paper and is finally expressed in a model of lifeworld-led care that includes its core value, core perspectives, relevant indicative methodologies and main benefits. The model is offered as a potentially broad-based approach for integrating many existing practices and trends. In the spirit of Husserl's interest in both commonality and variation, we highlight the central, less contestable foundations of lifeworld-led care, without constraining the possible varieties of confluent practices.

This article is a companion to an earlier article entitled "Challenging a Reductionistic Paradigm as a Foundation for Nursing," which appeared in the December 1995 issue of the Journal of Holistic Nursing. The authors discuss how five concepts-encounter, openness, immediacy, uniqueness, and meaning-which constitute their philosophy for nursing practice, also comprise a foundation for human sciences research. In the first article, encounter was presented as the core concept for practice. In the present work, openness is the central idea in a lifeworld research paradigm, with encounter, immediacy, uniqueness, and meaning as supporting concepts. Openness is explicated with the notions of open-mindedness, open-heartedness, phenomenological questioning, and preunderstanding. A lifeworld paradigm for research is based on phenomenological philosophy and the understanding that the conduct of research is guided by the researcher's openness to the phenomena of the everyday world.