Erfahrung German term translated into English, especially since Kant, as ‘experience’. Kant does not use it as a technical term; rather, it indicates that which requires explanation through more precisely drawn technical distinctions such as those among ‘sensibility’, ‘understanding’, and ‘reason’. In the early twentieth century, Husserl sometimes distinguishes between Erfahrung and Erlebnis, the former indicating experience as capable of being thematized and methodically described or analyzed, the latter experience as ‘lived through’ and never fully available to analysis. Such a distinction occasionally reappears in later texts of phenomenology and existentialism. See also ERLEBNI. J.P.Su.