The Phenomenology of Life: Selected Readings

This course explores an interpretation of life as a movement of disclosure (Jonas, Renaud Barbaras). It relates this conception to questions of finitude and transcendence, and to what has been called the paradox of phenomenology. For Arendt and Adolf Portmann, what is disclosed are appearances that are meant to be experienced by sentient life; these living beings are themselves, as appearances, also meant to be perceived. When read together with Merleau-Ponty and Kimura Bin, these thinkers make evident that insofar as life is constitutively oriented towards like-structured life, our existence is conditioned by the need to appear to one another. Satisfies the following distribution requirement(s) for Philosophy.