PHIL 395 - Advanced Seminar

FDR: HU
Credits: 3
Planned Offering: Fall, Winter

Prerequisites: Varies with topic. Three credits in philosophy and instructor consent. An intensive and critical study of selected issues or major figures in philosophy. May be repeated for degree credit with permission and if the topics are different.

Topic for Winter 2012:

PHIL 395-01: Advanced Seminar: Phenomenology of Perception (3). Prerequisites: One NON-LOGIC course in philosophy and instructor consent. Perception is the primary relation that we have to the world; it reveals to us a world of meaningful objects; it reveals a world to which we belong as embodied subjects. A careful philosophical study of perception not only makes us understand the world better but also gives us more insight into our own embodied existence: “By thus remaking contact with the body and with the world, we shall also rediscover ourself” (PhP, 206). This course is centered around Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s landmark work The Phenomenology of Perception (1945). Boldly bringing together phenomenological philosophy and (neuro)psychology, he discusses a wide range of subjects: the bodily nature of consciousness, the expressivity of the body (language), the habitual body, our relations to others, the experience of time, space, freedom, etc. The course will situate this discussion within a dynamic contemporary dialogue between phenomenology and the cognitive (neuro-) sciences. (HU) Verhage.