Phenomenology

Tradition · 18 readings

Phenomenology examines how things appear in experience. Husserl and Merleau-Ponty place their emphasis differently, on directedness, changing perspectives and the body’s access to the world.

Heidegger asks how beings are intelligible within being-in-the-world. The three share an attention to experience, but their methods and conclusions are not interchangeable.

All readings

18 readings · Title A–Z

Heidegger: being, a shared world and its limits · Lesson 5 of 12
Anxiety and a life that can end
Heidegger distinguishes anxiety from fear and treats death as a possibility that bears on how a life is lived. The lesson compares the readings of Blattner and Hoffman, questions the priority given to anxiety and asks for no personal disclosure.
Guided course · Module 11 · Lesson 64
Describe experience before explaining it away
Husserl and Merleau-Ponty describe experience through three ideas: intentionality, bracketing and embodiment. How does a whole object appear through changing bodily perspectives?
Heidegger: being, a shared world and its limits · Lesson 4 of 12
How a situation matters to us
For Heidegger, attunement is a way of finding oneself in a situation, and care unites being ahead of oneself, being already in a world and being involved with beings. The lesson separates what a mood discloses from what it proves, and care from kindness.
Husserl and Merleau-Ponty: experience, embodiment and a shared world · Lesson 3 of 9
How can a passing moment belong to a whole?
Husserl distinguishes retention of what has just passed from protention of what is coming, and both from recollection, which is another event. The lesson assesses what his description can establish about the unity of temporal experience.
Husserl and Merleau-Ponty: experience, embodiment and a shared world · Lesson 4 of 9
How can another person be given to me?
Husserl explains how another person is given through the lived body, pairing and appresentation. The lesson follows his account without treating another person’s experience as something one possesses or copies.
Husserl and Merleau-Ponty: experience, embodiment and a shared world · Lesson 6 of 9
Learning a way of moving
Learning a skill, or adapting to a changed tool, can alter what a body is able to do. Following Merleau-Ponty on the body schema and habit, the lesson asks whether his account gives fluency too much authority.
Heidegger: being, a shared world and its limits · Lesson 7 of 12
Living from a past toward a future
Heidegger finds the unity of care in temporality and moves from inherited possibilities to a people’s destiny. What does that move leave ethically unjustified?
Husserl and Merleau-Ponty: experience, embodiment and a shared world · Lesson 1 of 9
One thing, more than one appearance
Husserl distinguishes an object from its changing appearances, and an act of experience from its intentional correlate. Intentionality, the lesson shows, needs neither an inner picture nor an infallible report, and leaves room for error and correction.
Heidegger: being, a shared world and its limits · Lesson 3 of 12
Other people and the way one does things
Even work done alone can be shaped by being-with and by the everyday authority Heidegger calls the they. The lesson separates shared norms from conformity and asks how help can support or displace another person’s agency.
Husserl and Merleau-Ponty: experience, embodiment and a shared world · Lesson 8 of 9
Sharing a world without sharing one perspective
Merleau-Ponty describes meeting others in a shared bodily and cultural world, and the lesson compares his account with Husserl’s. Sharing an object or an exchange, it shows, is not the same as sharing access, agreement or justified belief.
Husserl and Merleau-Ponty: experience, embodiment and a shared world · Lesson 5 of 9
The body through which a world appears
Merleau-Ponty criticizes the picture of a mechanical body supplemented by an inner observer, and describes the lived body as access to a world. The lesson keeps the value of physical description and asks what reflection from within a situation can establish.
Heidegger: being, a shared world and its limits · Lesson 2 of 12
The world in a familiar tool
A tool belongs with materials, a task and a way of living, and a broken or missing tool can reveal those connections. The lesson asks whether practical involvement comes before detached observation.
Heidegger: being, a shared world and its limits · Lesson 9 of 12
Truth before a true statement?
For Heidegger, a statement can be correct only where something has already been disclosed. Setting a defense by Wrathall beside an objection from Lafont, the lesson asks how a framework of understanding can itself answer to criticism.
Heidegger: being, a shared world and its limits · Lesson 1 of 12
What are we asking when we ask about being?
Heidegger distinguishes beings from their being and begins with Dasein and its being-in-the-world. The lesson reconstructs his reasons and weighs an objection to the priority he claims.
Husserl and Merleau-Ponty: experience, embodiment and a shared world · Lesson 9 of 9
What can a description establish?
The final lesson of the study separates description, constitutive argument, causal explanation and ethical judgment, and weighs Husserl and Merleau-Ponty against their critics. Its checkpoint asks what an exhibition committee should do next.
Husserl and Merleau-Ponty: experience, embodiment and a shared world · Lesson 2 of 9
What changes when we bracket the world?
Husserl brackets the ordinary acceptance of the world and varies examples in imagination to find what cannot change. What could warrant the move from an apparent invariant to a necessity?
Heidegger: being, a shared world and its limits · Lesson 6 of 12
What would it mean to own a life?
For Heidegger, taking over a life involves existential guilt, the call of conscience and resoluteness. The lesson separates owning a commitment from justifying it, and keeps room for dependence, assistance and correction.
Husserl and Merleau-Ponty: experience, embodiment and a shared world · Lesson 7 of 9
When expression helps a thought take shape
Merleau-Ponty argues that expression can accomplish a thought rather than record a meaning already complete. The lesson distinguishes acquired language from emerging meaning, and both from truth.

Study this in sequence

Heidegger: being, a shared world and its limits
Begin with familiar encounters and follow Heidegger’s questions about being, a finite life, truth, art, dwelling and technology. Examine what the arguments explain, what they leave open and how they fare under political and ethical criticism.
Husserl and Merleau-Ponty: experience, embodiment and a shared world
Follow Husserl and Merleau-Ponty from the appearance of a familiar thing to time, bodily skill, expression and other people. Test what their descriptions establish, where their methods differ and what still needs evidence or an ethical argument.