Phenomenology

This course introduces students to key concepts, texts, and figures from the phenomenological tradition as it emerged and developed in Germany and France over the late-19th and 20th centuries. Students will engage with questions of intentionality, temporality, embodiment, finitude, and meaning-making. The course will pay particular attention to continuities and discontinuities between key figures. Major figures covered include Edmund Husserl, Edith Stein, Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hannah Arendt, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Simone de Beauvoir, Frantz Fanon, and Jean-Paul Sartre. (B)

The thoughts of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty are intertwined throughout their philosophical developments. Both take their departure in phenomenology’s central insight that the mind transcends itself toward the world and the attending dissolution of the false problem of how the mind can hook up onto the world. As Sartre once put it: “Each of us was trying to understand the world insofar as he could, and with the means at his disposal. And we had the same means – then called Husserl and Heidegger – as we were similarly disposed.” (“Merleau-Ponty vivant”) At the same time, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty were both dissatisfied with the accounts that Husserl and Heidegger provided of the relations between perception, language and action. German phenomenology, they argue, stumbles over the problems of other minds and history. However, their respective diagnoses are fundamentally divergent, and so are the alternative accounts that they seek to articulate. The aim of the course is to introduce students to the thoughts of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty by attending to the life-long philosophical debate between them. It is driven by the hypothesis that each of the two authors is at once the most penetrating reader and the deepest critic of the other. Although the course will recurrently present their philosophies against the background of concepts and problems bequeathed by the analytic tradition and in the light of recent debates in analytic philosophy (we will revisit the Dreyfus-McDowell debate regarding the place of conceptual capacities in perception, the McDowell-Pippin debate about agency, and contemporary debates about self-knowledge revolving around the so-called “Transparency principle”), it departs from the current analytic reception of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty in that it does not confine itself to their early works but delves into their mature works as well.

A study of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and its topics, including knowledge, self-consciousness, desire, culture, morality, religion, art, and the character of phenomenological investigation. (B) (IV)

The two basic texts of the course will be Heidegger’s 1929-30 lecture course, “Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics,” and his 1935 course (published in 1953), “Introduction to Metaphysics.” Both texts amount to a radical critique of all Western metaphysics, and an equally radical proposal for a new beginning, another sort of “first philosophy.” He wants to claim that the finitude of all a priori reflection, when properly appreciated, can inaugurate a proper interrogation of the fundamental question in philosophy: the meaning of being. To familiarize ourselves with Heidegger’s overall project, we will begin by reading selections from his 1927 Marburg lectures, “The Basic Problems of Phenomenology.”

This course will be devoted to the exploration of one of the most important philosophical movements of the Twentieth Century: Phenomenology. Our exploration will take as guideline the following question that we will have to clarify and to answer during the quarter: is there a trans-phenomenality of being? We will see that Husserl and Heidegger's answer to that question is negative whereas Sartre's answer is positive. The orientation of the quarter will be defined by the attempt to defend Sartre's position concerning this philosophical issue and to raise then a second question entailed by our answer to the first: does the discovery of the trans-phenomenality of being imply to give up the phenomenological method coming from Husserl and Heidegger or to redefine it?

The aim of this course is to introduce students to one of the most important and influential traditions in the European Philosophy of the 20th Century: Phenomenology. The main task of this course will be to present Phenomenology's main concepts and the meaning of Phenomenology's transformations from Husserl to Heidegger, Sartre, Levinas and Henry.
The fundamental credo of Phenomenology consists in the emphasis laid upon phenomena given to consciousness. This emphasis coincides with the "return to things in themselves" as formulated by Husserl. What can this kind of return actually mean? And what does this claim suggest about philosophical practices prior to phenomenology, idealism or empiricism? In what way, for Husserl, was classical philosophy not able to give access to things such as they are truly given? And what is the meaning of such idea of « givenness ». Does Phenomenology fall into the so-called «myth of the Given». No future phenomenologists after Husserl will question the fundamental idea of returning to things in themselves thanks to the phenomenological importance given to phenomena, but they will question the privilege of intentional consciousness postulated by Husserl - Heidegger will expand phenomenology to the ancient question of "Being" (thanks to the existential clarification of the Husserlian concept of Intentionality) and Levinas will question Husserl's and Heidegger's approaches of phenomenology - intentional and existential - as falling into the Western problem of Ontology and Totality against Otherness and Ethics. As we will see, even if Phenomenology coincides with the philosophical description of our "Openness to Exteriority", this openness - Intentional, Existential or Ethical - entails necessarily not the abandonment, but a radical redefinition of the concept of Subjective Immanence."

The aim of this course is to introduce students to one of the most important and influential traditions in the European Philosophy of the 20th Century: Phenomenology. The main task of this course will be to present Phenomenology’s main concepts and the meaning of Phenomenology’s transformations from Husserl to Heidegger, Sartre, Levinas and Henry. The fundamental credo of Phenomenology consists in the emphasis laid upon phenomena given to consciousness. This emphasis coincides with the “return to things in themselves” as formulated by Husserl. What can this kind of return actually mean? And what does this claim suggest about philosophical practices prior to phenomenology, idealism or empiricism? In what way, for Husserl, was classical philosophy not able to give access to things such as they are truly given ? And what is the meaning of such idea of « givenness ». Does Phenomenology fall into the so-called « myth of the Given » . No future phenomenologists after Husserl will question the fundamental idea of returning to things in themselves thanks to the phenomenological importance given to phenomena, but they will question the privilege of intentional consciousness postulated by Husserl - Heidegger will expand phenomenology to the ancient question of “Being” (thanks to the existential clarification of the Husserlian concept of Intentionality) and Levinas will question Husserl’s and Heidegger’s approaches of phenomenology - intentional and existential - as falling into the Western problem of Ontology and Totality against Otherness and Ethics. As we will see, even if Phenomenology coincides with the philosophical description of our "Openness to Exteriority", this openness - Intentional, Existential or Ethical - entails necessarily not the abandonment, but a radical redefinition of the concept of Subjective Immanence."

Human life is filled with repetition. Most obviously, we need to eat, drink, and sleep, to urinate and defecate, at regular intervals, and for our entire lives. Recent advances in technology, and changes to the organization -- especially the division -- of labor in the modern economy have only added new kinds of repetition, particularly in what we now call our "working lives.'' These changes have arguably only intensified a necessary feature of human life, indeed, of living as such. But this intensification has arguably also given rise to something new: an experience of profound boredom -- an experience, though, not of having nothing to do (as when a child complains of being bored), but of having, rather, to do (anymore, again) at all. This course is an investigation of the relation between repetition and the experience of (this peculiar kind of) boredom. Readings will be drawn from both philosophy and literature, and may include Heidegger, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Sartre, Samuel Beckett, and David Foster Wallace.

This course will be based on a direct confrontation between Sartre’s and Michel Henry’s phenomenological works. The main goal of this course will be to reintroduce the concept of immanence in a phenomenological sense beyond its critique by the philosophies of existence – of the so-called extatic dimension of human existence. The main goal of this course will be then to introduce two Sartre’s and Michel Henry’s phenomenological masterpieces (mainly Sartre’s The Transcendence of the Ego (la Transcendance de l’Ego) and Henry’s The Essence of Manifestation  (L’Essence de la manifestation)). Does the discovery of our intentional or existential openness to the world implies necessarily the renunciation to the notion of immanence or do we have to elaborate a phenomenological meaning for the concept of immanence in order to go further in the comprehension of the transcendent nature of our being? This will be the leading question of our seminar.

The aim of this course is to introduce students to one of the most important and influential traditions in the European Philosophy of the 20th Century: Phenomenology. The main task of this course will be to present Phenomenology’s main concepts and the meaning of Phenomenology’s transformations from Husserl to Heidegger, Sartre, Levinas and Henry.The fundamental credo of Phenomenology consists in the emphasis laid upon phenomena given to consciousness. This emphasis coincides with the “return to things in themselves” as formulated by Husserl. What can this kind of return actually mean? And what does this claim suggest about philosophical practices prior to phenomenology, idealism or empiricism? In what way, for Husserl, was classical philosophy not able to give access to things such as they are truly given ? And what is the meaning of such idea of « givenness » ? Does Phenomenology fall into the so-called « myth of the Given » ?No future phenomenologists after Husserl will question the fundamental idea of returning to things in themselves thanks to the phenomenological importance given to phenomena, but they will question the privilege of intentional consciousness postulated by Husserl - Heidegger will expand phenomenology to the ancient question of “Being” (thanks to the existential clarification of the Husserlian concept of Intentionality) and Levinas will question Husserl’s and Heidegger’s approaches of phenomenology - intentional and existential - as falling into the Western problem of Ontology and Totality against Otherness and Ethics. As we will see, even if Phenomenology coincides with the philosophical description of our "Openness to Exteriority", this openness - Intentional, Existential or Ethical - entails necessarily not the abandonment, but a radical redefinition of the concept of Subjective Immanence."