Preparatory Material for the Summer School

Here you will find a number of resources that we and our keynote lecturers have provided to prepare you for the Summer School. Even if you are familiar with phenomenology in your own studies, the below materials should be helpful to orient you to the specific topics that will be covered during the sessions.

We have also added the discussion questions, submitted by our keynotes, that we will be using for the afternoon discussion groups each day. Find them at the bottom of this page.

We have prepared a video presentation that will introduce you to basic ideas in phenomenology. We especially encourage those of you who are not already familiar with phenomenology to see the video.

Readings Recommended by Our Keynotes

We also encourage you to take a look at the following readings before arriving in Copenhagen. The readings were identified as relevant for understanding the lectures and will be part of the group discussions. We thus strongly recommend that you read them as preparation for attending the Summer School.

Note: You will need an academia.edu account (free of charge) to access some of the readings.

Søren Overgaard

In addition, it is highly recommended that participants read Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, Part II, chapter 3 (‘The Thing and the Natural World’).

Joel Krueger

Mark Wrathall

  • Martin Heidegger, “Temporality and Everydayness,” Being and Time  (chapter 4, division 2).

  • Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Temporality” in The Phenomenology of Perception (chapter 2, part 3).

Sara Heinämaa

  • Von Wright, Georg Henrik 1963: "Chapter I: On norms in general," in Norm and Action, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

  • Heinämaa, Sara and Joona Taipale 2018: “Normality,” in The Oxford Handbook of Phenomenological Psychopathology, eds. Giovanni Stanghellini, Andrea Raballo, Matthew Broome, Anthony Vincent Fernandez, Paolo Fusar-Poli and René Rosford, Oxford: Oxford University Press, DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198803157.013.30.
    https://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198803157.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780198803157-e-30

Dan Zahavi

Discussion Questions

Søren Overgaard (Monday)

  • What is the phenomenon Romdenh-Romluc calls ‘the power of summoning’?
  • What is the phenomenon she calls ‘perceptual faith’?
  • How is the malfunctioning of these two capacities supposed to explain hallucinations? 

Joel Krueger (Tuesday)

  • What are the most significant methodological challenges for integrating E-style externalism with phenomenological approaches to mental illness?
  • How (if at all) might E-style approaches to mental illness indicate the need to reconceptualize diagnostic outcomes and treatment strategies?
  • Does adopting an extended approach to mental illness — as opposed to a more philosophically conservative embodied or embedded approach — affect how we think about the ethics of mental illness and wellbeing?   

Mark Wrathall (Wednesday)

  • Is phenomenology committed to temporal idealism? 
  • Is Heidegger right when he argues that “temporality has different possibilities and ways of temporalizing itself”?  How is this different from observing that our subjective conscious experience of time is not uniform?
  • What does Merleau-Ponty mean when we says that time is “a network of intentionalities”? 

Sara Heinämaa (Thursday)

  • What is von Wright's main argument in the first chapter of his Norm and Action, titled "On norms in general"?
  • How would you explain or explicate the two main senses of normality operative in Husserliana phenomenology?
  • What is the main weakness of phenomenological accounts of normativity?

Dan Zahavi (Friday)

  • How central is the epoché and the reduction?
  • If you want to apply phenomenology, how many of its core philosophical commitments must you then endorse?
  • Is the very attempt at applying phenomenology outside its philosophical home fundamentally misguided?