Philosophy N188

This course will be oriented around three major works in phenomenology: Martin Heidegger’s Being & Time, Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition, and Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks. Our reading of these texts will bring us to reflect on certain central themes in phenomenology: intentionality and perception, subjectivity and intersubjectivity, embodiment and intercorporeality, affect and emotion, spatiality and temporality, and art and appearance. To support our reading of these texts we will consult the thoughts of Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir.

We will also trace controversies within the phenomenological tradition, such as questions about what it is for phenomenological inquiry to bring us ‘back to the things themselves’. In this vein we will examine how canonical phenomenological insights have been both inspirational to and questioned by contemporary writers such as Sara Ahmed (Queer Phenomenology) and Lisa Guenther (on incarceration).