The tradition of phenomenology has proved remarkably resilient, enduring throughout the entirety of the twentieth century and beyond. In fact, it continues to be one of the primary research fronts of contemporary continental philosophy (both on the European continent and beyond), as well as a tradition that many of the great continental philosophers have aligned themselves with – Husserl, Edith Stein, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, Ricoeur, Gadamer, Arendt, Derrida, Henry, Marion and so on – while also reinventing in more or less radical ways. In recent times, the term phenomenology also crops up repeatedly in analytic philosophy of mind where it roughly designates the qualitative character of experience, or what are sometimes called qualia. Of course, in Husserl and the tradition stemming from him, phenomenology has come to mean something rather more specific than merely a term that is interchangeable with “what it is like”. By the same token, if we describe phenomenology as a descriptive method for studying and reflecting on experience and its variegated structures, it is not radically divorced from some important analytic concerns either, and it is perhaps for this reason that philosophers such as Ryle and Austin (and the early pragmatist, C. S. Peirce) have sometimes wondered whether their own projects might best be called phenomenological.

It seems to be phenomenology's more grandiose methodological aspirations that analytic philosophers have been troubled by, rather than any kind of wholesale rejection of the worth of all phenomenological description (although there have been wholesale rejections too).