Review: 'Collaborative projects: An interdisciplinary study'

When I was asked to review this book, I was immediately intrigued by the title. As someone influenced by the philosophical legacy of phenomenology and existential humanism through Husserl, Heidegger and Sartre, I have always understood the project as a life-project of which I am the author seeking to overcome the facticity, or the inescapable conditions of my existence, in order to realise myself in the world. Such a project takes courage: in pro - jecting myself into the world I simultaneously find and lose myself, but without this attempt I do not exist at all. In recent years I have come to increasingly question this account of the human project. Could the idea of ‘collaborative projects’ be a more positive way of seeing the social world in which I live, as a world where other people are not simply an obstacle to my self-realisation?