In this book, I explore the account of experience developed by Edmund Husserl and critically modified and transformed by Martin Heidegger. I develop the nature of the relation between our awareness of the world and the temporal structure of our experience as it is articulated by Husserl in his phenomenology and then transformed by Heidegger in his own existential conception of phenomenology. The connection between our capacity to come to terms with our environment, the directedness of our consciousness and behavior at items in our environment, and the temporal character of our experience is an intimate one. It is the merit of both Husserl and Heidegger to have explored this connection to a degree not easy to find elsewhere in the history of philosophy, and at the same time to have developed fundamentally different accounts of how the connection in question is to be understood.

GENERAL REMARKS

The concept of a private experience (“Erlebnis”) provides the methodological starting-point for Husserl's investigation of the different kinds of objects that populate our shared, public and objective world and the structures that allow us to understand that world. Heidegger rejects the notion of a private experience, indeed the very notion of Erlebnis, that has its heyday at the end of the nineteenth century and in the early twentieth century. However, Heidegger continues to give central importance to the other German term for experience, Erfahrung. This notion of experience lacks the connotation of private, subjective experience that is characteristic of the notion of Erlebnis.