Phenomenology Course

Lesson 1 • Husserl and the New Science

Trace Husserl's founding project from the Logical Investigations onward. Establishes phenomenology as a rigorous science of consciousness.

Lesson 2 • Philosophy Before Phenomenology

Survey the 19th-century intellectual landscape that made phenomenology necessary. Grounds later contrasts between phenomenology and rival traditions.

Lesson 3 • Major Figures and Lineages

Map the key thinkers and schools that shaped phenomenology's development. Provides a reference framework used throughout the course.

Lesson 1 • Intentionality and World-Directedness

Extend intentionality beyond isolated acts to the structured world of experience. Bridges individual act analysis to the broader lifeworld concept introduced later.

Lesson 2 • Types of Intentional Acts

Distinguish perception, imagination, memory, and signification as distinct act types. Deepens understanding of how consciousness varies its mode of directedness.

Lesson 3 • Husserl's Intentional Structure

Analyze the noesis-noema correlation and the act-object distinction. Provides the technical vocabulary for all subsequent phenomenological analysis.

Lesson 1 • The Natural Attitude

Characterize the pre-reflective stance toward the world that phenomenology suspends. Establishes what the reduction brackets and why that bracketing is necessary.

Lesson 2 • Critiques of the Reduction

Evaluate Heidegger's, Merleau-Ponty's, and others' objections to Husserl's reduction. Prepares students to defend or revise the method in their own work.

Lesson 3 • Eidetic Reduction

Apply free imaginative variation to isolate essential structures of experience. Equips students to distinguish contingent features from necessary essences.

Lesson 4 • Transcendental Reduction

Move from the epoché to the disclosure of transcendental subjectivity. Shows how reduction reveals the constitutive dimension of consciousness.

Lesson 1 • The Problem of Time in Philosophy

Contrast objective clock-time with the phenomenological question of experienced time. Motivates the need for a first-person analysis of temporal consciousness.

Lesson 2 • Retention, Primal Impression, Protention

Examine the three-phase structure of the living present in Husserl's lectures. Provides the core model for all phenomenological accounts of temporal experience.

Lesson 3 • Memory, Recollection, and Expectation

Distinguish primary retention from secondary recollection and anticipation. Extends the core model to longer temporal arcs of experience.

Lesson 1 • Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception

Analyze Merleau-Ponty's critique of intellectualism and empiricism through the body-subject. Central to understanding how perception is always already embodied.

Lesson 2 • Perception, Space, and Motility

Examine how bodily motility structures spatial experience and perceptual fields. Connects embodiment to the constitution of the perceived world.

Lesson 3 • Affectivity, Pain, and Illness

Extend embodiment analysis to affective and pathological bodily experience. Demonstrates the range of phenomena the lived-body framework can illuminate.

Lesson 4 • Gender, Race, and the Situated Body

Apply embodiment phenomenology to socially situated bodily experience. Introduces critical extensions of classical phenomenology.

Lesson 1 • Dasein as Being-in-the-World

Introduce Heidegger's fundamental ontology and the unitary structure of Dasein. Replaces the subject-object split with a holistic account of existence.

Lesson 2 • Understanding, Projection, and Discourse

Examine the existential structures of understanding and language as modes of being. Connects Heidegger's ontology to interpretation and meaning-making.

Lesson 3 • Thrownness, Facticity, and Mood

Analyze how Dasein always finds itself already situated in a world it did not choose. Mood is revealed as a primary mode of disclosing existence.

Lesson 4 • Being-toward-Death

Examine death as Dasein's ownmost, non-relational, and certain possibility. Grounds the analysis of authenticity in the finitude of existence.

Lesson 1 • Heidegger on Being-with

Examine Mitsein as an existential structure co-original with being-in-the-world. Contrasts with Husserl's constitutive approach to the other.

Lesson 2 • Husserl's Fifth Cartesian Meditation

Analyze Husserl's account of empathy and analogical apperception. Provides the foundational phenomenological response to the problem of other minds.

Lesson 3 • Feminist and Postcolonial Critiques

Evaluate how power and difference shape intersubjective experience beyond classical accounts. Extends phenomenological intersubjectivity to marginalized perspectives.

Lesson 4 • The Problem of Other Minds

Frame the philosophical challenge of accessing another's subjectivity. Establishes why intersubjectivity is a central problem for phenomenology.

Lesson 1 • Phenomenology and Philosophy of Mind

Apply phenomenological concepts to debates in cognitive science and consciousness studies. Demonstrates phenomenology's relevance to empirical research programs.

Lesson 2 • Social and Political Phenomenology

Extend phenomenological analysis to social institutions, power, and collective experience. Bridges individual experience to structural and political dimensions.

Lesson 3 • Writing Original Phenomenological Analysis

Practice producing a structured phenomenological description of a chosen phenomenon. Integrates all course concepts into a capstone analytical exercise.

Lesson 4 • Phenomenological Research Methods

Introduce qualitative research methods derived from phenomenological philosophy. Equips students to design and evaluate phenomenological empirical studies.