Common threads · 6 books
Study intentionality, bodies, other people, and selfhood. Move between foundational texts and later work connecting lived experience with philosophy of mind.
Books, curator notes, and what to read next.
Edmund Husserl
Husserl revisits certainty through intentional experience. Work carefully from the first meditation to the problem of other subjects.
Next: Being and Time
Martin Heidegger
Begin with everyday being-in-the-world before the chapters on death and temporality. Keep a glossary as the vocabulary develops.
Next: Phenomenology of Perception
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Work through the preface and chapters on the body. Notice how perception depends on being situated in a world.
Next: Totality and Infinity
Emmanuel Levinas
Levinas makes the encounter with another person challenge systematic thought. Ask what responsibility means before an exchange of agreements.
Next: The Embodied Mind
Francisco J. Varela and Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch
Compare cognitive science with lived experience and Buddhist reflection. Keep the proposed connections open to criticism.
Next: Subjectivity and Selfhood
Dan Zahavi
Zahavi brings phenomenological arguments into debates about selfhood. Distinguish minimal self-awareness from a narrated personal identity.
Also includes Being and Time
Start with time as lived experience, then test philosophical accounts of persistence, temporal order, and what it means to exist over time.
Also includes Being and Time
Faith, temporality, consciousness, absurdity, and situated freedom. Follow a set of influential encounters without flattening their authors into one school.
Also includes Being and Time
Study the fear of death, the value of a finite life, and our dependence on a future we will never personally see.
