A Note on the Readings:
I have posted a lot of reading for our mini-course. (In English, there’s an expression for when you pile too much food on your plate, namely, that your eyes are bigger than your stomach. Something analogous often happens to me when I write a syllabus.) Even though we will be meeting for four hours each day, we will not be able to cover this much material in any detail. Some of it is central to our examination, while other readings have been provided more for future examination than for explicit consideration in the course.
I want to encourage everyone to read as much of the material as they can, but I want to prioritize some readings and also indicate the relevance and relative importance of the secondary material I have posted.
The following readings are absolutely crucial:
1)Excerpts from Husserl’s Ideas II. These excerpts will be the focus of the first day of the course.
2)Excerpts from Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception. This will be the focus of the second day of the course. It’s a bit longer than I would have liked, but the crucial ideas are spread across the first three chapter of Part One. If you are pressed for time – or already familiar with Merleau-Ponty – you may skip the Preface. I included it primarily to indicate the different “feel” of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology.
I have included two further primary readings from Merleau-Ponty – “The Primacy of Perception” and “Cezanne’s Doubt” – that are useful but not essential. Of the two, the first is more important, especially the first couple of pages wherein Merleau-Ponty revisits the adumbrational character of perception. I will very likely talk about those pages in class, so it will be good to have read them. The paper on Cezanne is also interesting and there are a few passages I may cherry-pick for discussion in class, but you may omit it if pressed for time.
I have resisted the temptation to pile on the secondary reading. There’s tons of it out there. I have included two chapters from my introductory book, Understanding Phenomenology. If you have no prior familiarity with phenomenology, I recommend giving them a quick read-through. The chapter on Merleau-Ponty includes a quick discussion of the central deals from Husserl’s account of embodiment, so that chapter especially will familiarize you with the main ideas at issue in the course.
The paper by Hubert Dreyfus I have included is a bit more advanced and technical, but it covers some important ground in terms of tensions in Husserl’s understanding of perception and how those tensions lead toward existential phenomenology. We will not be able to consider it any detail in our two days, but I may allude to it here and there.
The paper by Sean Kelly is an excellent account of Merleau-Ponty’s conception of perceptual experience. One of the nice features of the paper is the care with which Kelly distinguishes Merleau-Ponty’s views from those of Husserl. At the same time, the focus of the paper is perception, rather than embodiment. Try to have a look if you can. I will be drawing from it here and there.
I am very much looking forward to our two days together in Tampere!
All the best,
Dr. Cerbone