Philosophy 188

Phenomenology was – besides analytic philosophy – one of the two great philosophical movements of the 20th century. It has been praised for addressing topics more relevant to real people’s life, but blamed for relatively lower standards of clarity and for failure to deliver on its over-ambitious goals. It has been more influential than analytic philosophy outside of academic philosophy (and is thus important in many areas of cultural studies), and within philosophy there have been repeated attempts to combine the life-relevance of phenomenology with the clarity and modesty of analysis.

In this course, we shall focus on close reading and critical explanation of selections from three classics of the movement, Edmund Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations (1929) and Crisis of European Sciences (1936) and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception (1945).

1st week

Husserl, /Cartesian Meditations/ (§§ 1-20)

2nd week

Husserl, /Cartesian Meditations/ (§§ 21-41, 63-64)

3rd week

Husserl, /Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology/ (§§ 1-16 and Supplement VI.)

4th week

Husserl, /Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology/ (§§ 33-55)

5th week

Merleau-Ponty, /Phenomenology of Perception/ (tba)

6th week

Merleau-Ponty, /Phenomenology of Perception/ (tba)