PHIL 327 - Perception and Human Experience: Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology

FDR: HU
Credits: 3
Planned Offering: Winter 2014 and every third year.

This course is centered on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s landmark work, The Phenomenology of Perception. Bringing together phenomenological philosophy and (neuro)psychology. Merleau-Ponty discusses a wide range of subjects: the bodily nature of consciousness, the expressivity of the body, our relations to others, the experience of time, space, freedom. etc. The course situates this discussion within a contemporary dialogue between phenomenology and the cognitive sciences. 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). Verhage.