The Essential Husserl, the first anthology in English of Edmund Husserl's major writings, provides access to the scope of his philosophical studies, including selections from his key works: Logical Investigations, Ideas I and II, Formal and Transcendental Logic, Experience and Judgment, Cartesian Meditations, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, and On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time. The collection is an indispensable resource for anyone interested in twentieth-century philosophy.
An exploration of the terrain of consciousness in the light of its temporality from the father of phenomenology. The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness is a translation of Edmund Husserl’s Vorlesungen zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewußtseins. The first part of the book was originally presented as a lecture course at the University of Göttingen in the winter semester of 1904–1905, while the second part is based on additional supplementary lectures that he gave between 1905 and 1910. The pervading theme of these essays and lectures is the temporal constitution of a pure datum of sensation and the self-constitution of “phenomenological time” which underlies such a constitution. Husserl identifies two categories of temporality—retention and protention—and outlines how temporality provides the form for perception, phantasy, imagination, memory, and recollection. He demonstrates a distinction between cosmic and phenomenological time and explores the relevance of phenomenological time for the constitution of temporal objects. The ideas Husserl developed here are explored further in his Ideas and were pursued until the end of his philosophical career. “As an addition to the small body of Husserl’s writings now available in English (Ideas 1931; Meditations, 1960), this book is essential to even a small collection of source works on contemporary philosophy.” —Choice
Coming from what is arguably the most productive period of Husserl's life, this volume offers the reader a first translation into English of Husserl's renowned lectures on `passive synthesis', given between 1920 and 1926. These lectures are the first extensive application of Husserl's newly developed genetic phenomenology to perceptual experience and to the way in which it is connected to judgments and cognition. They include an historical reflection on the crisis of contemporary thought and human spirit, provide an archaeology of experience by questioning back into sedimented layers of meaning, and sketch the genealogy of judgment in `active synthesis'. Drawing upon everyday events and personal experiences, the Analyses are marked by a patient attention to the subtle emergence of sense in our lives. By advancing a phenomenology of association that treats such phenomena as bodily kinaesthesis, temporal genesis, habit, affection, attention, motivation, and the unconscious, Husserl explores the cognitive dimensions of the body in its affectively significant surroundings. An elaboration of these diverse modes of evidence and their modalizations (transcendental aesthetic), allows Husserl to trace the origin of truth up to judicative achievements (transcendental logic). Joined by several of Husserl's essays on static and genetic method, the Analyses afford a richness of description unequalled by the majority of Husserl's works available to English readers. Students of phenomenology and of Husserl's thought will find this an indispensable work.
Exploring the full range of Husserl's work, these essays reveal just how systematic his philosophy is. An underlying theme is resistance to the idea, current in much intellectual history, of a radical break between "modern" and "postmodern" philosophy, with Husserl as the last of the great Cartesians.
Edmund Husserl, founder of the phenomenological movement, is usually read as an idealist in his metaphysics and an instrumentalist in his philosophy of science. In Nature’s Suit, Lee Hardy argues that both views represent a serious misreading of Husserl’s texts. Drawing upon the full range of Husserl’s major published works together with material from Husserl’s unpublished manuscripts, Hardy develops a consistent interpretation of Husserl’s conception of logic as a theory of science, his phenomenological account of truth and rationality, his ontology of the physical thing and mathematical objectivity, his account of the process of idealization in the physical sciences, and his approach to the phenomenological clarification and critique of scientific knowledge. Offering a jargon-free explanation of the basic principles of Husserl’s phenomenology, Nature’s Suit provides an excellent introduction to the philosophy of Edmund Husserl as well as a focused examination of his potential contributions to the philosophy of science. While the majority of research on Husserl’s philosophy of the sciences focuses on the critique of science in his late work, The Crisis of European Sciences, Lee Hardy covers the entire breadth of Husserl’s reflections on science in a systematic fashion, contextualizing Husserl’s phenomenological critique to demonstrate that it is entirely compatible with the theoretical dimensions of contemporary science.
The Crisis of the European Sciences is Husserl's last and most influential book, written in Nazi Germany where he was discriminated against as a Jew. It incisively identifies the urgent moral and existential crises of the age and defends the relevance of philosophy at a time of both scientific progress and political barbarism. It is also a response to Heidegger, offering Husserl's own approach to the problems of human finitude, history and culture. The Crisis introduces Husserl's influential notion of the 'life-world' – the pre-given, familiar environment that includes both 'nature' and 'culture' – and offers the best introduction to his phenomenology as both method and philosophy. Dermot Moran's rich and accessible introduction to the Crisis explains its intellectual and political context, its philosophical motivations and the themes that characterize it. His book will be invaluable for students and scholars of Husserl's work and of phenomenology in general.
Von Hermann's Hermeneutics and Reflection, translated here from the original German, represents the most fundamental and critical reflection in any language of the concept of phenomenology as it was used by Heidegger and by Husserl.
The purpose of the text is threefold: 1] to contribute to the renaissance of Husserl interpretation around a) the continuing publication of Husserl's manuscripts and b) his unpublished manuscripts; 2] to account for the historical origins and influence of the phenomenological project by articulating Husserl's relationship to authors before and after him; 3] to argue for the viability of the phenomenological project as conceived by Husserl in his later years. In regard to the last purpose, Luft's main argument shows that Husserlian phenomenology is not exhausted in the Cartesian (early) perspective, which is indeed its weakest and most vulnerable perspective. Husserlian phenomenology is a robust and philosophically necessary perspective when taken from its hermeneutic (late) perspective. And the ultimate point Luft makes in the text is that Husserl's hermeneutic phenomenology is distinct from other hermeneutic philosophers, namely, Cassirer, Heidegger and Gadamer. Unlike them, Husserl's focus centers on the work the subject must do in order to uncover the prejudices that guide his/her unreflective relationship to the world. In making his argument, Luft also demonstrates that there is a deep consistency within Husserl's own writings-from early to late-around the guiding themes of: 1] the natural attitude; 2] the need and function of the epoché; and 3] the split between egos, where the transcendental self (distinct from the natural self) is seen as the fundamental ability we all have to inquire into the genesis of our tradition-laden attitudes toward the world.
In Experience and Judgment, Husserl explores the problems of contemporary philosophy of language and the constitution of logical forms. He argues that, even at its most abstract, logic demands an underlying theory of experience. Husserl sketches out a genealogy of logic in three parts: Part I examines prepredicative experience, Part II the structure of predicative thought as such, and Part III the origin of general conceptual thought. This volume provides an articulate restatement of many of the themes of Husserlian phenomenology.
