Introduction to Critical Theory: Phenomenology

Phenomenology is a tradition concerned with how the world gives itself to appearances. It is also an epistemological method, committed to perpetual beginning as a way of apprehending the world and our place in it. This course is an introduction to this philosophy of continual introductions, beginning with several of Edmund Husserl's foundational texts, then moving to a multi-week reading of Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception, alongside recent works of critical phenomenology that engage race, gender, sexuality, and disability.