Phenomenology (Phil 364)
The Website for students enrolled in the course is here.
This course is an introduction to the phenomenological movement in philosophy. It is aimed at philosophy majors, minors, and dabblers.
Phenomenology is the philosophical movement founded by Edmund Husserl (Moravian-German, 1859–1938) that aimed to study the nature of consciousness and meaning. Husserl conceived of phenomenology as a "rigorous" discipline that could achieve certain knowledge of the essential structure of consciousness and meaning. We will begin with several class sessions working through some of the historical precedents for Husserl's breakthrough. We will look briefly at the accounts of perception and thought in Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, and Brentano. Brentano was a teacher of Husserl's who inspired Husserl's early account of what Brentano called "intentionality," the capacity of the mind to represent objects. We will then turn to Husserl's early theory of intentionality (in his 1900/1901 Logical Investigations) and his mature "transcendental" account in his 1911 Ideas Toward a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy and other later works. Husserl develops a special philosophical technique, which he calls "the Phenomenological Reduction," to study the essence of consciousness (what he calls "noetic structures") and the essence of meaning (which he calls "noematic structures") and the essential isomorphism of the two (which he calls "noetic-noematic correlation"). The result at which Husserl aims is a purely descriptive account of intentionality. We will spend about four weeks reading Husserl.
Two generations after Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty (French, 1908–1961) developed his "existential phenomenology" (a term he took over from Martin Heidegger, whom we will not be reading – it is too difficult to extract readable bits of his phenomenological works for a course like this) as a friendly amendment to Husserl's approach. Merleau-Ponty held on to the idea of a descriptive account of intentionality and meaning, but he came to the conclusion that intentionality and meaning are essentially embodied. So, he offered a phenomenology of our bodily engagement with the world. We will examine his critique of traditional sensationalism and intellectualism in the theory of intentionality, as well as his positive phenomenology of the body and perception. We will spend about three weeks reading Merleau-Ponty.
That will leave us three weeks. I would like to devote one week each to a more contemporary topic in phenomenology. There are a wide range of options, and I will allow students to choose the topics (by voting, if necessary). Some options are feminist phenomenology, queer phenomenology, "the theological turn" in French phenomenology, alterity (the phenomenology of "the other," i.e., intersubjectivity), the phenomenology of place, and a or some critiques of phenomenology.
Prerequisites
To enroll in this course, students must have completed their core requirements in philosophy.
Requirements
For the first 9 or so weeks (while we're reading the historical material), I will set weekly small assignments (homework, I suppose) that will ask you to restate or apply one ore more of the concepts from the week's material. The idea here is help you come to a rich understanding of the material by explaining and/or applying it. There will be one 8-page paper due at the end of the semester in which you will engage argumentatively with some element of the course's material drawn from Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, or the contemporary work. You will choose the paper topic.
Required Texts
Edmund Husserl, The Essential Husserl: Basic Writing in Transcendental Phenomenology, ed. Donn Welton (Indiana UP: 1999). $32
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Donald Landes (Routledge, 2013). $21. Note: it is very important to buy the Landes translation, not the previous Smith translation.
additional material as needed