Abstract

Drawing upon his almost thirty years of reading and lecturing on phenomenology, Moran provides in this book an introduction to the phenomenological movement—a movement that, as he rightly claims, “in many ways, typifies the course of European philosophy in the twentieth century”. Moran’s book sketches the views of nine philosophers whose works either fall squarely within the parameters of phenomenology or draw a significant inspiration from phenomenology. He begins with an introduction to the thought of Franz Brentano, whose concern for an “exact scientific philosophy, and, specifically, his project for descriptive psychology” provide much intellectual impetus for the founding of phenomenology by Edmund Husserl. Moran then devotes four of the remaining twelve chapters to the views of Husserl, two chapters to those of Martin Heidegger, and one chapter each to the philosophies of Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hannah Arendt, Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Jacques Derrida.