PHL 229 - Phenomenology

Course unit(s): 1
Meets GAR (students beginning prior to Fall 2024): Meets general academic requirement HU.
Meets Explore Core requirement (students beginning Fall 2024 and later): MV
In the twentieth century phenomenology emerged as a new and powerful philosophical program. At its core lay the impulse to reveal the reality that gets obscured by one-dimensional activity and “everyday” thinking. The thinkers who carry out this project reveal both similarities in method and provocative variation in results. For example, some phenomenologists ground reality in the first-person experience of time, whereas others privilege the spatial experience of persons in being with others. We will examine historical and contemporary variations of phenomenology and read figures such as Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Alia Al-Saji, Lewis Gordon, and Elizabeth Grosz.