Phenomenology

My phenomenological research asks how the most extreme dimensions of human life — war, evil, suffering — are actually lived, before they are theorised. Working chiefly from Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, and drawing on Alfred Schutz’s account of intersubjectivity, I treat these not as abstract concepts but as phenomena given in first-person, embodied experience.

One strand re-reads Being and Time a century after its publication to ask what it reveals about the being of war, and whether war is best understood as an ethical-ontological condition rather than a political event. A second studies evil as embodied experience: how it is perceived, remembered, and shared between subjects whose knowledge of one another is always partial. Throughout, I take seriously the methodological problem of describing experiences we may not share — the risk that we are, as I have argued, “doomed to misapprehension” — and ask what phenomenology can still offer as a rigorous first-person science of consciousness. This work has been developed with, and presented to, the British Society for Phenomenology and related venues, and it grounds much of my thinking about ethics, memory, and the lived reality of crisis.