Date of Thesis

Spring 2025

Description

This paper proposes a phenomenological investigation of addiction, with the goal of describing how it is experienced from within, as an embodied and existential phenomenon. I begin by establishing a conceptual framework—drawn from the works of existential phenomenologists Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty—outlining the key structures of everyday experience such as being-in-the-world, freedom, embodiment, bad faith, and sedimentation. I then turn to a description of the lived experience of addiction by drawing on various first-person addiction memoirs, showing how the aforementioned existential structures are experienced in active addiction and how pathways to sobriety reflect and are experienced as targeting these structures. I argue that addiction is experienced as a deeply sedimented process, one that is both shaped by and reinforced by the existential conditions that structure everyday life.

Keywords

Phenomenology, Addiction, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty

Access Type

Honors Thesis

Degree Type

Bachelor of Arts

Major

Philosophy

First Advisor

Katherine Ward

Second Advisor

Jason Leddington

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