To Account for the Appearances: Phenomenology and Existential Change in Aristotle and Plato

Abstract

ABSTRACT I begin by highlighting central texts from Aristotle that demonstrate both an appreciation of the rich coupling of subject and object that has been the subject of much of the most exciting and innovative phenomenological work and a fundamental methodological commitment to answering to the terms of experience. I then turn to Plato’s dramatic portrayals of Socrates’ distinctive practice—the “Socratic method”—first to document the subtlety that Socrates displays in his dialogical embrace of the description of lived experience and then, with him, to see the depths of existential change that are integral to the commitment to this method.