PHIL 409 Phenomenology

Phenomenology asks what experience looks like from the inside before science or common sense gets to label it, and this course traces how that question evolves from Husserl's break with psychologism through the embodied, intersubjective turns taken by Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Scheler, and Stein. You spend the term reading dense primary texts (mostly Husserl's Logical Investigations and Ideas I), presenting in seminar, and writing three essays plus a research paper where the real work is reconstructing arguments rather than summarizing them. It pairs naturally with earlier modern philosophy and Kant courses, and gives you the vocabulary that later continental, philosophy of mind, and aesthetics work assumes you already have.