Everyday Phenomenology

No-one who reads this book will ever see the world the same again. My aim will be to pursue phenomenology, and therefore appearances obliquely, in a number of areas. Predominantly these will be the appearances of; houses, landscapes, places, people and history, but these specific studies will coalesce into a more general theory about appearances, place and time and thereby provide a phenomenology of the everyday. In this pursuit I will bring together works of philosophy, literature, history and art in order to circumvent the apparent paradox of the ubiquity and inaccessibility of the everyday. This will make my work wide ranging and extensive but by the end a delicate coherence and unity will have emerged from allowing the coming together of these different avenues of approach to appearances. Philosophically speaking my guides through all of this will be Martin Heidegger Hans-Georg Gadamer and Gaston Bachelard, with assistance notably from Descartes, Hume, Kant, Hegel and Sartre, although I will endeavour to add some insights of my own as we go along. Other significant contributions will come from the works of W.G. Sebald, Dennis Severs, Rainer Maria Rilke, Irene Nemirovsky the writing of David Hockney, and some Dutch artists