Phenomenology emerged at the start of the 20^th century as an invitation: ‘back to the things themselves!’. For Edmund Husserl, widely considered to be the founder of phenomenology, doing this involved painstakingly precise descriptions of experience: attention to what is actually ‘given’ in experience, rather than attempts to categorise reality as a whole. In the hands of Martin Heidegger, Husserl’s pupil, Phenomenology emphasised concern for the fundamental conditions of human being-in-the-world. Phenomenology, as a philosophical methodology, has been applied to a very wide range of objects: logic, sensory perception, moods, intersubjectivity, ethical responsibility, even religious or mystical experience, and has gone through any number of ‘turns’ and ‘returns’.

Participants on this course will be introduced to Phenomenology as a school of thought and as a particular methodological approach to philosophical analysis, starting with Husserl’s ‘bracketing’ process through to contemporary voices in Phenomenology. We will take a tour through some of Phenomenology’s key concerns, namely certain fundamental conditions which shape the lived experience of human subjectivity: embodiment, embeddedness in the world, temporality and intersubjectivity, looking at these themes from different angles. We’ll also attend to the ‘Theological Turn’ in Phenomenology, considering different approaches to locating the transcendent within the immanence of our experience. Beyond Husserl and Heidegger, our philosophical companions will include Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Edith Stein, Emmanuel Levinas and Jean-Luc Marion, among others.