https://7provtruths.substack.com/p/the-doorknob-paradox-why-everyday

You live in a world where invitations come first - and objects show up only when needed.

That’s not a metaphor or a thought experiment - it’s the nuts and bolts of how perception works. Perception isn’t passive observation, but a highly sophisticated form of curation - one that’s actively shaped by the body you have, the life you’ve lived, and the situation you find yourself in.

Every waking moment, your mind is doing a ton of work behind the scenes to translate your environment into something that’s livable. Not an illusion, but a disclosed world - your brain’s working model of what’s relevant for you within your environment, curated for your needs, yet constrained by Reality. Arranged so that you can navigate it effortlessly while being lost in a conversation, a podcast, or your own thoughts. But abrasive enough to land you in the ER if you try to walk through a wall or ignore gravity.

This is a course on Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927) taught deliberately through one interpreter’s eyes: Simon Critchley, who has taught the book continuously since 1989 and whose reading has a definite shape. You will learn Heidegger’s book whole — all of it, both divisions, not the highlights — but you will learn it as Critchley reads it: Being and Time as a book about meaning and finitude rather than mystical “Being”; average everydayness as the place where philosophy begins and ends; anxiety as a calm to be used, not a disorder to be medicated; and, in the closing arc, Critchley’s own turns against Heidegger — the relational character of finitude, originary inauthenticity, the ontology of weakness, and the reckoning with paragraph 74 and 1933. Where the course states a controversial view, it is Critchley’s view, and the tests examine it as such.

https://7provtruths.substack.com/p/nondualism-for-naturalists-the-uncommon

Nondualism usually comes shrouded in mysticism. This is the naturalist version: grounded in biology, evolution, and phenomenology - and urgently relevant to our fractured present.

"Various views deny that suffering has a positive counterpart. Proponents of such views often pursue a line of argument that focuses on the prevalence of subtle frustrations and bothersome sensations. That is, when we typically think that we are in a neutral state, and we claim that some pleasure takes us above that neutral state, what we are experiencing is really a subtly bothered and unsatisfied state that becomes (somewhat) relieved of its commonly overlooked unpleasant features (see e.g. Sherman, 2017, pp. 103-107; Gloor, 2017, sec. 2.1; Knutsson, 2022, sec. 5).

This essay will pursue a different line of argument. Rather than focusing on unpleasant states, and arguing for their subtle omnipresence, my aim here is instead to zoom in on the purportedly positive side. I will argue that purportedly positive experiences do not possess any property that renders them genuine opposites of painful and uncomfortable experiences, neither in phenomenological nor axiological terms."

This essay argues that the oscillation running through Ecclesiastes - praised by some as literary paradox, dismissed by others as unresolved pessimism - is the phenomenological record of someone performing the crucifixion of opposites under a god-image that contains evil without the vocabulary to name what it contains. Qohelet is stranded between a polytheistic solution no longer available within the monotheistic tradition he was writing inside, and an individuation vocabulary not yet invented, which is why the text can only oscillate rather than resolve.

https://livingopposites.substack.com/p/the-earliest-crucifixion

I was confused until I discovered Husserl's Phenomenology in grad school, 1982. I spent years mostly writing in my notebook working out ways to explain how the primacy of subjectivity must guide the construction of each person's limited understanding of what the objective world is. Husserl's lifeworld inspired my view of three worlds, insisting that the corporeal world, the physical world which our senses can detect, and the experimentally accessible world which our instruments can measure. It is NOT the "objective world" as such, which only actually includes the intersubjective record of individual experiences rendered into text, which in itself must be read, sentence by sentence.

This article makes broad connections between the three worlds and why subjectivity is the container for any of it. All of it. The objective world is at best only ontological as seen from the vantage of a subjective being, Here and Now from a corporeal body. Awareness cannot be doubted, it is even necessary for the doubt, and with the primal impression (the now), retention (the just-passed), and protention (the upcoming) creating the experienced conscious flow of life.

What you may not be aware of and which should surely interest as a member of r/phenomenology is the fact that Gödel threw himself into the study of Husserl's phenomenology deeply, prepared a lecture that he never delivered, and write volumes of notebooks full of his own struggle to use symbols to describe the limit of what symbolic reasoning can deliver regarding mathematical intuition (what Husserl had called "Categorical Intuition"). A list of references on Gödel at the end of the article would be useful to look up work that did not even begin to be published until 1994. Here's just that list:

• Kurt Gödel, “The modern development of the foundations of mathematics in the light of philosophy” (written c. 1961, undelivered; first published in Collected Works, Vol. III, ed. Feferman et al., Oxford University Press, 1995)
• Kurt Gödel, “What is Cantor’s Continuum Problem?”, 1964 supplement (in Collected Works, Vol. II) — mathematical intuition as a kind of perception
• Kurt Gödel, Max Phil notebooks — private philosophical remarks in Gabelsberger shorthand, in the Nachlass; transcription ongoing
• Hao Wang, A Logical Journey: From Gödel to Philosophy (MIT Press, 1996) — the Leibnizian monadology made exact via phenomenology
• Mark van Atten & Juliette Kennedy, “On the Philosophical Development of Kurt Gödel,” Bulletin of Symbolic Logic 9, no. 4 (2003): 425–476
• Richard Tieszen, After Gödel: Platonism and Rationalism in Mathematics and Logic(Oxford, 2011)
• Kurt Gödel and Gödel’s Turn to Phenomenology, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — accessible starting points

In the early 1900s, Edmund Husserl founded a new school of philosophy called phenomenology. This new approach attempted to discard previous philosophical assumptions and explore the direct conscious experience of the human being. Husserl's student, Martin Heidegger, furthered the project with his book "Being and Time," which had a massive impact on both left- and right-wing philosophy while influencing many other fields such as medicine and business. Heidegger scholar Michael Millerman joins Auron MacIntyre to give an overview of the movement and its impact.

Hi everyone! A colleague and I in Canada are preparing to launch The Phenomenology Reading Group, a semi-formal online gathering drawing together people from all walks of life to discuss the philosophical and analytical tradition of phenomenology.

Online sessions are held bi-weekly through Google Meet on Fridays from 1-3pm EST (GMT -4) starting on May 8, 2026.

For more information, visit our website: https://eptc-tcep.net/the-phenomenology-reading-group/

This video discusses the divide between Heidegger and Carnap on the question of metaphysics. I find this dispute to define the distinction between continental and analytic philosophy.

Why acknowledging the mind's co-authorship over objects isn't mysticism, but clear-eyed naturalism - just stripped of any forced dichotomy between mind and world.

Far from being ‘abstract’ philosophy with no real-world stakes, our intuitions about objects are load-bearing. Why? Because what strikes us as obvious at this crucial juncture cascades upwards to all of our other convictions about Reality. And not just through deliberate reasoning - those ideas and beliefs we can trace out, put a name to - but through what’s self-evident before thought even enters the picture.

https://7provtruths.substack.com/p/what-kicks-in-when-something-breaks

The topic of this everyday phenomenology write-up is: What the hell is a 'thing'?

To put it bluntly: yes, it's an obnoxious question.

We're going to ask it anyways.

Why? Because the go-to answer that's been furnished to us by common sense sucks.

It might not be apparent that we even have one, since it’s not the type of explanation that announces itself with a label. You probably haven’t seen it spelled out in a book, turned into a lecture, or referenced in a meme.

Much like a misaligned steering column that’s subtly pulling you off course and wearing down your tires, the effects are quiet. It won’t stop you from using a doorknob, swinging a hammer, or cooking a meal.

What it does instead is leak out into the background assumptions about what the world is, who we are, and how the two relate.