Despite R. G. Collingwood’s relation to British Idealism, a close reading of his subtle descriptions of imagination and expression reveals important points of contact with the phenomenological tradition. In the first section, I bring together Collingwood’s exploration of the role of imagination in art with Merleau-Ponty’s concepts of intentionality and expression. This provides insights into both thinkers’ attempts to describe lived experience and action, highlighting important aspects of their work overlooked by readers. In the second section, I explore how Collingwood and Merleau-Ponty both describe communication as an open and evolving movement of understanding that does not fall back upon a supposedly isolated consciousnesses, thereby eluding the threat of solipsism. In the third section, I outline the connection between Husserl’s identification of a “crisis” in the European sciences and Collingwood’s invocation against what he calls the “corruption of consciousness,” a particularly modern shirking of our responsibilities as expressive and active members of the community.

This chapter explores the connections between ethics, the phenomenological (and hermeneutical) traditions, and education. It focuses on the idea of the subject, showing phenomenology’s contrast with the modernist picture of the autonomous subject. The chapter first briefly traces the idea of the subject in phenomenology through four representative figures – Husserl, Heidegger, Gadamer, and Levinas – and then sketches their approaches to ethics. Then it pivots to four ethical concepts in philosophy of education in this tradition – understanding, risk, subjectification, and responsibility – by connecting them to phenomenological tradition’s broad conception of the subject. The chapter brings into relief the contribution phenomenology makes to envisioning living well together and human flourishing, and education’s role in fostering ethical subjects that would enact such societies.

In Chapter 6, I introduce hermeneutic phenomenology as a philosophical method relating to the description and interpretative analysis of experience. French phenomenology has become a dialogue partner for theology and religion because of its capacity to accommodate what might be given without appearing as such. For Marion, this opens the possibility of recognising phenomena that signify in excess of or counter to experience, including phenomena of r/Revelation. After sketching Marion's typology of saturated phenomena and considering some of the criticism that has emerged in response, I observe his deepening insight that the phenomenality of the event characterises each of the counter-experiences he describes, and so has a particular importance. If what exceeds intentionality is described in terms of the event rather than as a phenomenon of revelation, we avoid the difficulties of the r/Revelation distinction that Marion draws, and decrease the sense that revelation is being smuggled into phenomenology. I also note that the event is a figure used more broadly in contemporary thought and so enables us to connect Marion’s work with that of others in potentially fruitful dialogue.

The aim of this chapter is to understand how the themes of ordinary experience and common sense form a central vein in Husserl’s thinking, albeit in a way that cannot be directly identified with a philosophy of common sense, given its transcendental orientation. After a discussion of the formative influence of Avenarius’s notion of ‘natural conception of the world’ on Husserl’s thinking, this chapter examines Husserl’s contention that ordinary experience exhibits the taken-for-granted structured contours of any possible human experience. Husserl’s detailed descriptions of the various commonsensical ways in which we ordinarily experience the world are meant to showcase the richness of ordinary experience while also delineating in advance intentionality’s manifold structures that are to become the explicit theme of a phenomenological analysis of consciousness. In this manner, it is argued, Husserl ascribes a transcendental significance to ordinary experience in terms of what he dubs an ‘a priori of common sense’. The thrust of Husserl’s phenomenology of ordinary experience in the natural attitude sets up his later and more fully developed conception of the life-world as centred around the ‘presentness’ of the world that remains as elusive as it stands plainly there in all its obviousness.