ABSTRACT
The introduction begins with a personal experience, the Story of the Stargazer. The story reports a change in the structure of experience, that is, in the way we get in touch with reality. The significance of this experience initially went unnoticed. It emerged only when I systematically explored my memories in search of philosophically motivating experiences. This anamnetic method looks for key experiences that stimulated the curiosity in our youth. A curiosity that can be metaphysical, artistic, erotic, or whatever. From this search developed the key issue of the History of Experience: the study of experience and its historical dynamics. It turned out that “experience,” though ubiquitous in scientific discourse and everyday language, has remained one of the most obscure concepts we have. A major reason for this is that the debate about “experience” focused on its content, while the structure of experience escaped attention. The results of this research eventually lead to the project of developing a theory of experience. Reflecting on the aforementioned key narrative also made clear that the structure of experience is variable, changing over the course of our lives and throughout human history as well. The conceptual inquiry therefore expands into a study of the historical dynamics of experience. The History of Experience evolves in a total of nine transformations beginning in the Paleolithic and continuing to the present day.
