What is Experience?

(4 Credits)

This course provides a historical reconstruction and comparative analysis of philosophies of experience. The course asks: what are the strengths and limits of individualized lived experience and what might it mean to experience our reality in social contiguity? What are the virtues and pitfalls of empathy? In the modern period, the idea that moods can be felt ‘in the air’ among human beings has been at times pathologized. On the other hand, experiences of projection, emotional ‘dumping’, group suffering, and social control of expression are often experienced by racialized, gendered, and colonized others. How might one manage the flux of lived experience to protect the self, even if the self might be, in Hume’s words, but a “heap or collection of different perceptions united together”? We trace a line connecting a range of disciplines and philosophical traditions, including skepticism and empiricism, phenomenology (decolonial, feminist, queer), affect theory, psychoanalysis, anthropology, and more. Theorists read might include René Descartes, David Hume, Edmund Husserl, Frantz Fanon, Gloria Anzaldúa, bell hooks, Teresa Brennan, and others.