Phenomenology of the everyday

The everyday is what is closest and most familiar to everyone, and yet it tends to escape our attempts to seize it. The everyday is daily routine, but it may also open for encounters with the extraordinary. It may be perceived as both authentic and inauthentic being. This intriguing ambiguity has made the everyday one of the most vividly discussed philosophical topics. The book includes a general introduction to the everyday in contemporary philosophy, as well as a number of specialized articles. These articles provide short presentations of important 20th and 21st century thinkers of the everyday. The pertinence of their approaches is visualised in empirical studies of the everyday and its representations in photography, film, theatre, childhood narratives and painting. When we have assembled these articles under the title Phenomenology of the everyday it is both in the stricter sense of the philosophical endeavour launched by Edmund Husserl, that provides us with a guiding line rather than a strict prescript, and in the wider sense of a description of significant features of a phenomenon that concerns us all and that nobody can reject as irrelevant.