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Phenomenology and existentialism, (Sources in contemporary philosophy)

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This is a great collection of essays to bring you up to speed on the historical and philosophical development of phenomenology. It's got foundational material from Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, as well as newer stuff. It's not a contemporary collection, but a great way to introduce yourself to where it all started.

I use this text as a supplemental text in my Existentialism class. I might wish for a few extra pieces, particularly from Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, in foundation for Existentialism, and most particularly because the editor of this volume, Robert Solomon, has done such admirable work on Nietzsche in other volumes (`What Nietzsche Really Said' is one such text).

On the Phenomenology front, Husserl is well represented. This is supplemented briefer pieces by Frege, Merleau-Ponty, Brentano, Ryle, and Solomon himself. As Solomon's introduction states, Phenomenlogy `takes the Cartesian attention to the primacy of first-person experience and the Katin search for basic "a priori" principles as its modus operandi.' I recall first studying Husserl through his `Crisis of the European Sciences' in which the modern-to-postmodern project of science is seen as needing a stronger philosophical underpinning if it is to answer the fundamental search for meaning rather than mere description. The drive of the scientific enterprise to begin with no presuppositions and to take a kind of radical empiricism in approach.

In the Existentialism section, Solomon includes Ricouer, Merleau-Ponty, Marcel, Heidegger, and Sartre, with a bit in the final section by de Beauvoir and Camus as well. Solomon writes in the introduction to this portion, `The existentialists shift the focus of phenomenological investigation away from Husserl's demand for a "rigorous science" and towards the question, "What is it to be a person?" They place a new emphasis on "lived experience" rather than knowledge.' Of those represented here, Ricouer and Marcel interest me the most, given the way they incorporate the elements that my Existentialism class, as part of the religious studies curriculum, looks at the topic. However, the breadth of the texts means that this collection is good for anyone looking for an introduction to the early work on Existentialism.

The volume of work in the area of Phenomenology and, particularly, Existentialism has grown over the last few decades to make any selection of recent texts a near impossible task, but even this volume of earlier works represents a major work of selection and editing; Solomon's notes along the way provide a good framework for context and interpretation.