Book excerpt: Max Scheler and Nicolai Hartmann developed ethics upon a phenomenological basis. This volume demonstrates that their contributions to a material ethics of value are complementary: by supplementing the work of one with that of the other, we obtain a comprehensive and defensible axiological and moral theory. By “phenomenology,” we refer to an intuitive procedure that attempts to describe thematically the insights into essences, or the meaning-elements of judgments, that underlie and make possible our conscious awareness of a world and the evaluative judgments we make of the objects and persons we encounter in the world.