Phenomenology

AY2020/2021 Semester 1

Phenomenology is one of the most important and enduring philosophical traditions of the last two hundred years. In this course, we will study its historical development and systematic contributions to key philosophical issues, including the intentional structure of human consciousness; the relation between linguistic meaning and thought; the origins and justification of knowledge; the nature of evidence; the significance of everyday experience (including death and anxiety) for truth, knowledge, and action; the possibility of a phenomenological ethics; the philosophical importance of intersubjectivity, and others. The course studies the various answers that phenomenologists have given to these and other questions, starting from the work of Edmund Husserl,the founder of phenomenology. We will then consider responses to Husserl's work from his students, including Edith Stein and Martin Heidegger, before turning to the development of phenomenology in France in the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jean-Luc Marion.