encyclopedia of philosophy: Edmund Husserl (1859-1938)

HusserlAlthough not the first to coin the term, it is uncontroversial
to suggest that the German philosopher, Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), is
the "father" of the philosophical movement known as phenomenology.
Phenomenology can be roughly described as the sustained attempt to
describe experiences (and the "things themselves") without
metaphysical and theoretical speculations. Husserl suggested that only
by suspending or bracketing away the "natural attitude" could
philosophy becomes its own distinctive and rigorous science, and he
insisted that phenomenology is a science of consciousness rather than
of empirical things. Indeed, in Husserl's hands phenomenology began as
a critique of both psychologism and naturalism. Naturalism is the
thesis that everything belongs to the world of nature and can be
studied by the methods appropriate to studying that world (that is,
the methods of the hard sciences). Husserl argued that the study of
consciousness must actually be very different from the study of
nature. For him, phenomenology does not proceed from the collection of
large amounts of data and to a general theory beyond the data itself,
as in the scientific method of induction. Rather, it aims to look at
particular examples without theoretical presuppositions (such as the
phenomena of intentionality, of love, of two hands touching each
other, and so forth), before then discerning what is essential and
necessary to these experiences. Although all of the key, subsequent
phenomenologists (Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Gadamer, Levinas,
Derrida) have contested aspects of Husserl's characterization of
phenomenology, they have nonetheless been heavily indebted to him. As
such, he is arguably one of the most important and influential
philosophers of the twentieth century. The key features of his work,
and his understanding of the phenomenological method, are considered
in what follows.

1. Biography

Edmund Husserl was born April 8, 1859, into a Jewish family in the
town of Prossnitz in Moravia, then a part of the Austrian Empire.
Although there was a Jewish technical school in the town, Edmund's
father, a clothing merchant, had the means and the inclination to send
the boy away to Vienna at the age of 10 to begin his German classical
education in the Realgymnasium of the capital. A year later, in 1870,
Edmund transferred to the Staatsgymnasium in Olmütz, closer to home.
He was remembered there as a mediocre student who nevertheless loved
mathematics and science, "of blond and pale complexion, but of good
appetite." He graduated in 1876 and went to Leipzig for university
studies.

At Leipzig Husserl studied mathematics, physics, and philosophy, and
he was particularly intrigued with astronomy and optics. After two
years he went to Berlin in 1878 for further studies in mathematics. He
completed that work in Vienna, 1881-83, and received the doctorate
with a dissertation on the theory of the calculus of variations. He
was 24. Husserl briefly held an academic post in Berlin, then returned
again to Vienna in 1884 and was able to attend Franz Brentano's
lectures in philosophy.

In 1886 he went to Halle, where he studied psychology and wrote his
Habilitationsschrift on the concept of number. He also was baptized.
The next year he became Privatdozent at Halle and married a woman from
the Prossnitz Jewish community, Malvine Charlotte Steinschneider, who
was baptized before the wedding. The couple had three children. They
remained at Halle until 1901, and Husserl wrote his important early
books there. The Habilitationsschrift was reworked into the first part
of Philosophie der Arithmetik, published in 1891. The two volumes of
Logische Untersuchungen came out in 1900 and 1901.

In 1901 Husserl joined the faculty at Göttingen, where he taught for
16 years and where he worked out the definitive formulations of his
phenomenology that are presented in Ideen zu einer reinen
Ph‰nomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie (Ideas Pertaining to
a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy). The first
volume of Ideen appeared in the first volume of Husserl's Jahrbuch für
Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung in 1913. Then the world
war disrupted the circle of Husserl's younger colleagues, and Wolfgang
Husserl, his son, died at Verdun. Husserl observed a year of mourning
and kept silence professionally during that time.

However Husserl accepted appointment in 1916 to a professorship at
Freiburg im Breisgau, a position from which he would retire in 1928.
At Freiburg Husserl continued to work on manuscripts that would be
published after his death as volumes two and three of the Ideen, as
well as on many other projects. His retirement from teaching in 1928
did not slow the pace of his phenomenological research. But his last
years were saddened by the escalation of National Socialism's racist
policies against Jews. He died of pleurisy in 1938, on Good Friday,
reportedly as a Christian.

Most commentators, therefore, recognize three periods in Husserl's
career: the work at Halle, Göttingen, and Freiburg, respectively. Some
argue that one or another of these periods ought to be taken as
definitive and used as the interpretive key to unlock the others. But
such an approach highlights disjunctions in Husserl's thought while
neglecting the significant continuities. Important strands of
Husserl's philosophy have their beginning long before his academic
career commenced.

The community into which Husserl was born, Prossnitz, was a center of
talmudic learning whose yeshiva had produced or welcomed a number of
famous rabbis during the two centuries before Husserl's birth. This
scholarly activity was supported by the industries of textile and
clothing manufacture, through which Prossnitz's Jews had enhanced the
prosperity of the region. Jews and Germans were minorities in the town
and appear to have comprised its middle class. Their interests were
naturally allied against those of the Slavic majority. (For example,
the census of 1900 counted 1,680 Jews among the town's 24,000
inhabitants, according to The Jewish Encyclopedia.) In the ethnically
diverse town, several dialects were spoken, and the language of the
Husserl home probably was Yiddish.

The Jewish community of Prossnitz had established a technical school
in 1843, and it became a public school for all the town's children in
1869–one year before young Edmund Husserl was sent off to Vienna's
Realgymnasium. 1868 was also a year when civic authorities called for
reform of Jewish education at all levels throughout Moravia. These
developments reflect a movement toward modernization and integration
after centuries of enforced segregation and legal restriction of
Jewish life.

Prossnitz was the second-largest Jewish community in Moravia, with 328
families. Exactly 328 families; it could have no more, because of the
quota established by the Bohemian Familianten Gesetz in 1787. The
Jewish population was controlled through marriage licenses. Civil law
set specific economic, age, and educational requirements; but in
addition, the license could be granted only after a death freed up one
of the allotted 328 slots. In effect, only first sons could hope to
marry. Others had to emigrate if they wanted to have families of their
own. This population-control policy was enforced until 1849, ten years
before Edmund Husserl's birth. The requirement that Jews obtain
special marriage licenses remained in effect until late in 1859, some
months after Edmund's birth.

But Edmund Husserl's childhood was spent during an era of
liberalization for Prossnitz's Jews. He received an elite secular
education and probably made his father quite proud. At that period,
gymnasia provided separate religious instruction for Christian boys
and Jewish boys. Edmund's Jewish education would have continued in
that context and in the language of secular culture, High German. He
could hear and read the Bible in that modern language as well, for in
the nineteenth century a wave of new translations into the language of
German culture was spawned by Moses Mendelssohn's groundbreaking work.
(Mendelssohn's 1783 translation into High German was printed in Hebrew
characters, phonetically, to make it easy to read.) Some of these
editions were lavishly illustrated for display in bourgeois homes like
Edmund's, and most took into account the findings of recent historical
and philological science. But during Edmund's childhood, translating
the Hebrew Bible was still a controversial issue. Some educational
leaders in the Jewish community warned that it would undermine Hebrew
learning among the young. Hebrew learning was evidently not prized by
a father who would send his son to the capital to study Greek and
Latin at the age when boys traditionally were sent down the street to
learn Hebrew and Torah. To complicate the picture, in 1870 when Edmund
was eleven, a new rabbi came to serve the Prossnitz community.

One may surmise, then, that Edmund Husserl came by his knowledge of
the Bible through his classical secular education, not his religious
tradition. It was of a piece with the German cultural heritage for
him. It was a source of literary allusions, and in later life he could
compare himself to Moses and to Sisyphus with equal ease.

Literary allusions, along with fragments of correspondence, are all
that remain to us for the reconstruction of what Husserl may have felt
about himself and his work. There is no autobiography per se. But
there are retrospective texts. One of the most illuminating is the
brief introduction that Husserl prepared for the 1931 publication in
English of the first book of Ideen, originally brought out in 1913.

Now in his seventies, Husserl complains that most readers have
misunderstood his life's work. When he undertakes to reformulate what
phenomenology is and what he has accomplished, however, he writes from
a vantage point that he did not have some two decades earlier. Husserl
becomes, in effect, a critic and interpreter of his own work, which he
describes with a sustained metaphor. He portrays himself as an
explorer who has opened the way into new territory so that others may
conquer, map, and farm it. Of himself, Husserl writes:

"(H)e who for decades did not speculate about a new Atlantis but
instead actually journeyed in the trackless wilderness of a new
continent and undertook the virgin cultivation of some of its areas
will not allow himself to be deterred in any way by the rejection of
geographers who judge his reports according to their habitual ways of
experiencing and thinking and thereby excuse themselves from the pain
of undertaking travels in the new land" (422)

Here is another example of this characterization:

I can see spread out before me the endlessly open plains of true
philosophy, the 'promised land', though its thorough cultivation will
come after me" (429)

By means of this spatial, geographical metaphor of crossing over into
the "new land," Husserl conveys something of the adventure and pioneer
courage that should accompany phenomenological work. This science is
related to "a new field of experience, exclusively its own, the field
of 'transcendental subjectivity'," and it offers "a method of access
to the transcendental-phenomenological sphere" (408). Husserl is the
"first explorer" (419) of this marvelous place.

2. How to Interpret Husserl's Texts

Husserl had already employed the spatial metaphor in the 1913 text,
although without explicit reference to himself as explorer. In chapter
I-1 of Ideen I he had distinguished states of affairs (Sachverhaltnis)
from essences (Wesen) by assigning them to two "spheres": the factual
or material, and the formal or eidetic, respectively. These spheres
are connected only by the mind's ability to pass between them as
easily as moving around within either of them; they do not connect on
their own, as it were. That is, no causality obtains between them.
"Movement between" and "movement within" are of course further
elaborations upon the spatial metaphor, and serve to designate the
ability of consciousness to flow along, concentrate itself, linger,
combine, focus, or disperse as it will. Such acts of consciousness
belong to these spheres. They are worldly. They are "psychological."

Husserl's task is to get from those spheres into another "field" that
is quite unlike them. It will be the sphere of absolute consciousness,
consciousness when it isn't going anywhere. As the title of chapter
II-3 puts it, this will be "The Region of Pure Consciousness." You
can't "go there" with consciousness; instead you have to let the
worldly go away and then inhabit what's left. This is the import of
the infamous fantasy that opens paragraph 33: "(W)as kann als Sein
noch setzbar sein, wenn das Weltall, das All der Realit‰t
eingeklammert bleibt?" (In Kersten's paraphrase: "What can remain, if
the whole world, including ourselves with all our cogitare, is
excluded?" [63])

Now, it's quite curious that Husserl should choose the spatial
metaphor to introduce and induce his phenomenological reduction. This
metaphor invites confusion for anyone familiar with Descartes– who
after all named spatial extension as the substantial attribute of
material being. None of Husserl's "spheres" is literally extended, in
the Cartesian sense; yet all are coextensive (coincident) with
material being–inasmuch as there's literally nowhere else besides the
material universe where they could be. Why then should Husserl choose
such an incongruous and counterproductive metaphor? A different
metaphor (such as "fabric" or "organism," for example) could have
conveyed the notions of coherence, separation, and access that Husserl
intended. What is distinctive about the spatial metaphor, however, is
that it connotes exploration and conquest. If transcendental
consciousness is a promised land, then you need a Moses to lead you
toward it. You need Husserl. When Husserl remarks, in the 1931
Introduction, that he can look down across that land that he has
discovered, but that others will enter, this is a literary allusion to
the figure of Moses, who led his people to Canaan, "the promised
land," but did not lead them into it (Deuteronomy 34).

If these allusions from 1931 can be taken as a thumbnail self-
portrait, still one must remember that it was sketched during
Husserl's retirement. But Husserl's thought grew and changed
throughout his long career. In his maturity, the philosopher joined
his readers in producing commentary upon his youthful work. The three
phases of Husserl's career–Halle, Göttingen, and Freiburg–invite
facile divisions, and decisive turning points have been suggested
within each of those periods. (The survival of nearly 45,000 pages of
stenographic notes from Husserl's teaching and his private researches
has fueled disputes about when he might have had the first glimmer of
a thought that led to a lecture comment that led to a paragraph that
found its way into a book published long after the man's papers and
ashes were shelved in Louvain!)

Husserl himself insisted that the threads of continuity throughout the
evolution of his thought were more significant than any false starts
that later had to be repudiated. It seems well to grant him this
point. Yet on two issues one must take seriously the critical
discussion arising from disjunctions in Husserl's thought: (a) the
question whether to characterize Husserl as realist or idealist, and
(b) the question of which stage of Husserl's evolution–if any–should
be taken as the definitive version through which all other versions
are to be read. Husserl himself, writing as his own critic later in
life, took a position on each of those issues. On (a), he insisted
that he was and always had meant to be a transcendental idealist. On
(b), he claimed competence to correct the insights of 1887, 1900, and
1913 with the insights of the 1920's and 1930's. Thus the mature
Husserl would wish to erase the impression that his early work
resolved the realism-idealism conundrum in favor of realism, and that
it did so in fidelity to an insight already expressed in his earliest
work on number.

Various punctuations of Husserl's career by time, place, and
predominant question have been suggested by commentators (for example,
Kockelmans 1967: 17-23; Ricoeur 1967: 3-12; Biemel 1970; and Bell
1990). Husserl's phenomenology developed gradually, but there were
several relatively sudden turns and several stalls. Two examples
suffice to illustrate. While at Halle shortly after the publication of
Philosophie der Arithmetik, Husserl distanced himself from his recent
efforts to establish mathematical and logical principles upon the
psychological operations of the mind–a project that he later termed
"psychologism." Many commentators have characterized this as an abrupt
turn made in response to Frege's effective criticism of Philosophie
der Arithmetik. However Mohanty (1982: 13), who examines the
Frege-Husserl correspondence along with other documentary evidence,
concludes to the contrary, that:

the seeds of development of Husserl's philosophy from the
Philosophie der Arithmetik to the Prolegomena [i.e., the first volume
of the Logische Untersuchungen, 1900] were immanent to his own
thinking, so that the hypothesis of a traumatic effect of Frege's 1894
review of his book and a consequent reversal of his mode of thinking
is not only uncalled for but also unsubstantiated by the available
evidence.

Mohanty, then, provides ample warrant for a reading of Husserl that
pursues threads of continuity between his early mathematical work and
the breakthrough to phenomenology while at Halle.

In a second example of a supposed disjuncture in Husserl's
development, there has been discussion of whether he changed his
stance from realism to idealism between Göttingen and Freiburg. On the
one hand, Eugen Fink (1933) and many others see a consistent evolution
of transcendental idealism from the work published in Ideen I onward.
They tend either to dismiss the earlier works as if they were merely
youthful failures, or forcibly to harmonize the realist passages with
Husserl's later positions. Husserl himself endorsed such a reading. On
the other hand, those who studied with Husserl at Göttingen insist
that his work at that time had validity and integrity in its own
right. His former student Edith Stein (1932: 44-45) remarks that
Husserl's disciples were surprised at the idealistic passages in
Ideen, and she calls Fink a latecomer to Husserl's phenomenology. One
of Stein's contemporaries among Husserl students, Roman Ingarden
(1962: 159), says that:

the idealistic tendencies apparent in volume I of the Ideen had
been opposed by his disciples when the work was being studied during
the seminars at Göttingen and . . . his disciples pointed out many
passages in the Ideen which seemed to contain direct arguments against
his idealism.

Subsequently Ingarden presented arguments, based on both the text of
Logische Untersuchungen and his conversations with Husserl, in support
of the view that Husserl originally espoused a realist standpoint but
later abandoned it (Ingarden 1975: 4-8). Further discussion of the
issue is to be found in Kockelmans (1967: 418-449) and in Van de Pitte
(1981: 36-42)–who suggests that the discrepancy will vanish if one
reads Husserl's idealism as an epistemological or methodological
approach to a metaphysically real world.

For his own part, Husserl (1931: 418-9) claimed that his
transcendental idealism had advanced altogether beyond ordinary
idealism, beyond realism, and beyond the very distinction between
them. He denied that he ever had held a realist position:

. . . I still consider, as I did before, every form of the usual
philosophical realism nonsensical in principle, no less so than that
idealism which it sets itself up against in its arguments and which it
"refutes." [Phenomenological reduction] is a piece of pure self-
reflection, exhibiting the most original evident facts; moreover, if
it brings into view in them the outlines of idealism . .. it is still
anything but a party to the usual debates bewteen idealism and
realism. . . .

Husserl argued that transcendental-phenomenological idealism did not
deny the actual existence of the real world, but sought instead to
clarify the sense of this world (which everyone accepts) as actually
existing.

Thus Husserl joins the company of those who read his work "backwards,"
from the standpoint of Freiburg, interpreting the earliest work in
light of the transcendental idealism of the latest. This reading
grants no validity to the earlier work in its own right. It sets
Husserl against Kant, and phenomenology's thoroughgoing idealism
against Kantian critical idealism. Fink, in his detailed response to
neo- Kantians' readings of Husserl's phenomenology (1932), scolds them
for even addressing arguments made in Husserl's 1900-1 and 1913
publications–for Fink contends that those positions now must be
assimilated to Husserl's later formulations. The extreme hermeneutical
implications of this stance come clear in Fink's delineation of the
threefold paradox entailed in reading Husserl's phenomenology: (1) It
is inevitably misunderstood if the reader has not first cultivated the
transcendental attitude; yet that attitude arises from the reading.
(2) The words necessarily miss their meaning, and fail to refer
effectively to the pre-worldly realm of transcendental subjectivity,
since all available words are worldly. (3) Phenomenology goes to a
realm beyond logic, individuation, and determination, which ordinarily
structure understanding. In this extreme form, then, the Freiburg
reading of Husserl's work is a locked door for the newcomer who is
trying to get acquainted with Husserl's phenomenology.

Fortunately, there are other hermeneutical options. A second group of
commentators read Husserl "forward" from his intellectual beginnings
at Vienna and Halle. The early work in mathematics and logic continues
to attract the interest of Analytic philosophers. They are among those
who argue that Husserl's concern with numbers and logical reasoning,
stimulated by the Kantian challenge, fructified in the prescription of
eidetic and, eventually, phenomenological reductions.

Besides reading Husserl from Halle "forward" or from Freiburg
"backward," there is yet a third option. One may base one's reading
upon the Göttingen period and upon questions involving the genesis of
the Ideen, as the keystone in the arch of Husserl's development. This
is the stance suggested by Ingarden, who considered Husserl's later
transcendentalism a big mistake, and by Stein, whose own subsequent
works unfold the implications of the realism and personalism embraced
by Husserl at that period. On this view the world, lost by Kant, is
won back for science.

The problems of oneness and unity occupied Husserl throughout all the
phases of his philosophical development: his earliest work on number
and logic, his pre-war realist descriptive phenomenology, and his
idealist transcendental phenomenology. His philosophy in some respects
parallels the emergence of modern psychology, with whose tenets it
should not be confused. The following are his major works.

3. "Übert den Begriff der Zahl" ("On the Concept of Number," 1887)

Husserl's Habilitationsschrift is subtitled "psychological analyses,"
and it addresses the question how we recognize manyness within a
group. Husserl remarks that the common definition of number–that
number is a multiplicity of units–leaves two key questions unanswered:
"What is 'multiplicity'? And what is 'unity'?" It is the former
question, multiplicity, that occupies his attention throughout the
essay. However the latter question, unity, haunts the discussion and
refuses to be ignored.

Husserl locates the origin of multiplicity in the activity of
combining, which he takes to be a psychological process. After much
consideration he identifies this activity as synthesis, or the
gathering of items into a set. He notices then that synthetic unities
are of two kinds. Either the relationship through which the multiple
items belong to the one set is a content of the mental representation
of those items (right in there alongside them as another item that can
be attended to and counted), or it is not there. In the former case,
the unity is physical. Otherwise it is psychical, stemming from the
unifying mental act that sets the contents into the relationship.

Having made that distinction between natural or physical unity, and
arbitrary or imposed unity, Husserl then goes on to contrast these
varieties of synthetic oneness with something else entirely:
unsynthesized unity. His example is a rose, whose so-called parts are
continuous and come apart only for the examining mind.

"In order to note the uniting relations in such a whole, analysis
is necessary. If, for example, we are dealing with the
representational whole which we call 'a rose,' we get at its various
parts successively, by means of analysis: the leaves, the stem…. Each
part is thrown into relief by a distinct act of noticing, and is
steadily held together with those parts already segregated" (114).

Ironically, Husserl has struck gold while mining coal, and doesn't
quite recognize what he's got hold of. His description of
nonsynthesized unity comes almost as a byproduct of his attempt to
differentiate physical or real collective combination from psychic
combination. He writes:

"… these combining relations present themselves as, so to speak, a
certain 'more,' in contrast to the mere totality, which appears merely
to seize upon its parts, but not really to unite them [because they're
already united, independently of the mind!]…. In the totality there is
a lack of any intuitive unification, as that sort of unification so
clearly manifests itself in the metaphysical or continuous whole"
(114).

Husserl has succeeded in distinguishing between natural and
artificially synthesized wholes, on the one hand, and, on the other
hand, those totalities that are known as having been accomplished
neither by natural aggregation nor by mental combination. The unity of
such wholes is known to be real, even though it admits of subsequent
mental analysis or physical dissection.

Again ironically, in his concluding discussion of "number" Husserl
neglects to notice the number one even as he employs it to illustrate
how combination works. Substituting the term "and" for the term
"collective combination," Husserl remarks:

"(T)otality or multiplicity in abstracto is nothing other than
'something or other', and 'something or other', and 'something or
other', etc.; or, more briefly, one thing, and one thing, and one
thing, etc. Thus we see that the concept of the multiplicity contains,
besides the concept of collective combination, only the concept
something. Now this most general of all concepts is, as to its origin
and content, easily analyzed" (116).

Husserl terms the concept something the most general concept. It
stands for any object–real or unreal, physical or psychical–upon which
we reflect. Thus he says that multiplicity as a concept arises out of
the indetermination of the et-cetera that allows the series of "one
and one and one and …" to go however far you like.

Yet an objection must be registered concerning what Husserl has found
but not noticed. Multiplicity is but relatively undetermined;
ultimately, multiplicity is in fact determined, or reined in, by one
itself. This happens at three points. (a) One is the starting point of
the counting series. Every number except the first number is a
multiplicity; therefore the set of natural numbers is greater (by
one!) than the set of multiplicities. (b) One determines the unit of
counting. Only one something at a time gets counted. The and's must be
put in between one's. (c) Although the series can stop anywhere,
nevertheless it has to stop at one single place, not at several
places. Every number is one distinct number.

Husserl, however, tries to produce the concept number by suppressing
what he has taken to be the absolute indetermination of the
something-series. This is how he gets determinate multiplicity, which
he equates with number. In other words, the and's are the main
ingredient for making numbers Husserl-style. This is incorrect, of
course, but it is incorrect in an interesting way. For example, to
make the number five, you would need four and's. To come up with those
four and's, you would have to count them out; but before you could
count to four, you would need three and's with which to make that
four. But… there's a regression back to one. The number five is four
and's, and five one's.

The maddening difficulty of focusing upon combination eventually will
have a happy outcome, which Husserl did not see in 1887. The truly
interesting problem is one, the prime ingredient in numbers and the
determiner whose own determination was to become Husserl's guiding
quest.

4. Logische Untersuchungen (Logical Investigations, 1900-01)

With the turn of the century, Husserl's attention turned from and to
one; that is, away from the mental activity of combining, and toward
that which is reliably there to be combined. He wanted to show that
mental activity is not the source of the latter. Chapter 8 of LU I
exposes and refutes the three premises or "prejudices" of
psychologism. In short, "psychologism" for Husserl is the error of
collapsing the normative or regulative discipline of logic down onto
the merely descriptive discipline of psychology. It would make mental
operations (such as combination) the source of their own regulation.
The "should" of logic, that utter necessity inhering in logical
inference, would become no more than the "is" or facticity of our
customary thinking processes, empirically described.

Husserl's formulation and refutation of the three psychologistic
premises is wickedly clever, but cannot be treated in detail here.
(See # 43-49 of LU I.) One example must suffice. Psychologism, Husserl
charges, would place logical inferences on the same plane with mental
operations (# 44), and this would make even mathematics into a branch
of psychology (# 45). Indeed, math and logic do have structures that
are isomorphic to those of mental operations, such as combination and
distinction. But given that similarity, how then would one distinguish
the regulation of any of these processes from the description of it?
Under psychologism, there's no way. But Husserl makes the distinction
in a way that also shows how regulation (that is, the laws of logic)
comes from elsewhere than the plane of mental activity.

And he does this by virtue of one. In # 46 Husserl agrees with his
opponents that arithmetical operations occur in patterns that refer
back to mental acts for their origin and also for their meaning.
However, there's a difference between them as well. Mental acts
transpire in time: they begin and end, and they can be repeated and
individually counted. Numbers, in contrast, are timeless. While they
can be represented in mental acts, this representation is not a fresh
production of the number but rather an instantiation of its form.
There is only one five. Any time we count five things, it isn't a
production of a new five but merely a deja vu for the same old five,
eternal five. We can't count numbers themselves, for there's only one
of each. (A similar argument is made in #22 of Ideas I.)

The same goes for logic, Husserl says. Concepts comprising the laws of
pure logic can have no empirical range. Their range or sphere is ideal
singulars, not mental generalizations from multiple instantiations.
The operators of logic are other than those mental acts that happen to
share the same names: "and," "not," "is," "or," "implies," "may,"
"must," "should." Psychologically, there can be many factual acts of
combining, negating, etc. Logically, there is only one "and," one
"not," etc. Husserl concedes here, as he did for arithmetic, that the
logical operators take their origin and meaning from the mental acts.
This accounts for the equivocal character of logical terms, which
refer both to ideal singulars, and to mental states and acts. But if
you fail to notice this equivocation, you become ensnared in
psychologism, losing the possibility of pure logic and unified
science.

The danger of equivocation extends over judgments as well. On the one
hand, we can count multiple apperceptive events of affirmation,
occurring psychologically, which proceed in time, begin and end, and
recur as often as we like, in happenings that can be distinguished one
from another. On the other hand, the judgment thus reached remains the
same throughout each act accessing it. It seems to persist and to be
called back for encore appearances; it seems even to have pre-existed
its first appearance to me (# 47). In this latter sense, the judgment
is not the same as the mental act that reaches it. Moreover, the truth
of the judgment is neither equivalent to nor dependent upon the
psychological experience of clear evidence that accompanies the mental
act embracing it. Husserl easily shows this by recalling that in both
logic and arithmetic, there are truths that have never been
entertained in any human consciousness, and indeed could never be
humanly conceived (# 50). (Cases of truth without the possibility of
psychological evidence would include the computation of very large
numbers, and decisions about membership in sets that are uncountably
large. The arithmetical and logical operations connected with such
determinations could never be "done" by a human mind or a computer.
Their truth cannot be "factual.")

The number one, then, has become Husserl's touchstone for
discriminating between psychological processes and logical laws. It is
his reality detector. What is psychological (or empirical) comes on in
discrete individual instances–ones–and you can examine their edges.
What is logical (or ideal) comes on as a seamless oceanic unity
without temporal edges, reliably persisting even when not attended to.
Husserl's sensitivity to the modes of unity, first expressed in the
Habilitationsschrift and developed in LU, provides the launching pad
for transcendental phenomenology.

5. Ideen I (Ideas I, 1913)

What launches transcendental phenomenology is the recognition that
those modes of unity correlate with each other and with a third mode
of unity, in ways that are tantalizingly asymmetrical. These three
onenesses are: the factual unity of things and states of affairs, the
eidetic unity of essences, and the living unity of consciousness as it
flows along in a stream of experiences. Each has, and exhibits, its
own distinctive kind of identity and persistence. Factual and
essential unities give objects to the straightforward regard of
consciousness, entering it as items of experience, each in its
distinctive way; but consciousness can also deflect its regard back
onto these enterings and discover its own unity, which is unlike
either of theirs.

The possibility of this complex correlation is provided by the
"principle of principles": that intuitions come on to us with
distinctive boundary-conditions that we can accept as sources insuring
the correctness of our knowledge of them. Or in Husserl's formulation:

"… that every originary presentive intuition is a legitimizing
source of cognition, that everything originarily (so to speak, in its
"personal" actuality) offered to us in 'intuition' is to be accepted
simply as what it is presented as being, but also only within the
limits in which it is presented there" (44).

The different kinds of unities have different kinds of edges, and
these give away what kind of a unity each of them is going to be. But
it's easy to miss the differences. That happens in the natural
attitude, Husserl says, when all the objects of consciousness are
taken as if they were factual items. Husserl complains that even his
Logische Untersuchungen have been misunderstood as advocating just
this error of "Platonic realism," by those who read into his use of
the term "object" the implication that, through a perverse
hypostatization, every thought turns into a thing (# 22). On the
contrary, he says, the eidetic reduction, operative already in LU,
empowers him to differentiate between how essences appear, and how
cases appear.

Now with Ideen I, this distinction is sketched in beautiful detail.
You can tell when the object occupying your consciousness is a
physical thing, because things don't give themselves to you all at
once. What you get instead is a perspective inviting you to move
around to the other side to perceive some more of the thing. All the
while the thing keeps its unity to itself, as the reference point of
all the angles it gives to you, and out of which you must reproduce or
copy or simulate the unified thing as you conceive it. But in
conceiving, you don't have to put an "and" between two separate
perceptions, the north face of a building and the south face, in order
to yield the perception of the building as if it were a sum. These
different views are given to you as continuous, as views of one thing.

Husserl terms this "shading off" or adumbration. (The notion of
off-shading is reminiscent of a multiple-exposure photograph that
captures successive phases of a movement in a single frame. Such
photos were being seen for the first time at the turn of the century.
Husserl also mentions new media such as the stereoscope and the
cinema.) In contrast, essences give themselves to you all at once.
Their boundaries are not sides, but rather laws entailing the
characteristic necessities and possibilities of kinds of things (more
about which below). The unity of any particular essence coheres within
that determinate outermost boundary which free imaginative variations
of possible cases must not exceed if they are to remain cases of this
particular kind. Essential unity is centripetal, so to speak.

Then are those other unities–the ones presenting themselves as
extended or factual–to be termed centrifugal, inasmuch as each spins
off appearances in all directions from an inaccessible center? No, for
their off-shading appears contextualized, as a foreground; and even as
we focus upon the foreground it pulls its background into readiness
for perception as soon as attention may shift to it. Every one is
surrounded by a halo of and's, and beyond that are other somethings,
seemingly without end. Whatever is extended is inexorably connected to
whatever else is extended. (This last formulation, by the way, is an
instance of an eidetic law. But the shift of attention that brings
this essential rule into view is an eidetic reduction, and it wrenches
us away from our naive attention to instances of things naturally
appearing, under consideration here.) Every perception "motivates"
another, stretching on toward expanding horizons.

The shift to the transcendental attitude–that is, the phenomenological
or transcendental reduction–brings to Husserl's notice a third kind of
unity, which discloses the off-shading of things in a startling new
way. We notice now that what is adumbrated is spatial, but the
adumbration itself is not spatial. It arises in consciousness.
"Abschattung ist Erlebnis" (95), while what is adumbrated, das
Abgeschattete, has to be something spatial. The off-shading of things
is at the same time the streaming of conscious life. Peculiarly, the
giving off of partial perceptibilities (by the thing) coincides with
the taking up of partial perceptions (by streaming consciousness).
Which one is doing the shading? Agency cannot be imputed absolutely to
either side.

But on the "side" of consciousness, as it were, we now recognize that
we are dealing with more than a progression of life-bites strung
together in series with and's. The stream of conscious life is not a
sum or aggregate; nor is it a generalization. That is, it exhibits a
unity unlike either the sachverhaltig unity of a factual case or the
eidetisch unity of an essence. Husserl must account for that unity,
which he calls an ego, Ich.

Moreover, and of paramount significance, with the benefit of the
transcendental reduction it can now be told that these three kinds of
unities themselves are not connected merely in series, with and's
combining them, as if they were three discrete somethings. Their
relationship is vastly more subtle. In order to understand it, through
reduction we try to isolate unity from what accounts for unity. (We
are not looking for something "prior to" unity — such as some "cause"
of unity –, because we can't have priority without having the number
one, and oneness is just what is in question.)

Isolating oneness from the live experience-stream means removing the
individual subject (you or me or Napoleon or whomever) from
consideration. What is left, says Husserl, is transcendental
subjectivity, "the pure act-process with its own essence" ("das reine
Akterlebnis mit seinem eigenen Wesen"). (Paradoxically, we can see,
right here in this formulation, that the reduction has not at all done
away with essence, with states of affairs, or even with identity. We
still have Eigenheit and Wesen, set in relation within a sentence. But
these are now supposedly purified.) Husserl likens this
de-individualized ego to a ray (# 92) or glance (# 101).
Characteristically (or essentially) it has two poles or directions:
the noematic and the noetic (from Greek terms noema and noesis,
indicating what is thought and the act of thinking, respectively).

Husserl's discussion of "noetic-noematic structures" fails in its
attempt to show how the ego reaches and secures both the unity of the
known object, and the unity of the knowing subject. But it fails in a
spectacular starburst of insight. Husserl notices that the mental
stream has its own distinctive kind of adumbrations or continuities,
which are more complex than those discussed above, the relatively
simple off-shaded appearings of spatial objects in perception. Beyond
that simple sort of off-shading, consciousness can also turn back on
itself and reflect upon its own intending acts, or on any component
thereof. The stream meanders among spatial objects, but can also at
whim objectify aspects of its own acts of intending, and consider
them. This yields a thick layering of possible objects (# 97). For
example, here are some noemata that might enter the live experience
stream: pencils … writing … German verbs … the frustration of strong
verbs … Ulrike … memories in general … the unreliability of memory …
components of perceptions … the advisability of analyzing perceptions
into their components … the smell of popcorn wafting into the study …
the effort to resist distractions … and so forth.

Some of these arise directly from things, while others arise as
objectifications of what was inherent a moment ago in the very act of
knowing, the noesis. How can we tell the difference? Husserl answers
that you can tell when the ego-beam has penetrated through to the
bottom of the stack of noemata, so to speak, and has gotten ahold of a
thing itself, because at that point, all the aspects of the thing are
known immanently–really–in the act of perceiving as being contained in
the sense of the thing (# 98). For example, you know popcorn itself
when you are perceiving the taste of butter and salt. (You do not know
popcorn when you read this sentence; instead, you are reflecting on
what it is to know popcorn, and popcorn's qualities are not given
immanently within your object. But then while tasting popcorn,
saltiness was given immanently but not objectified.)

Husserl rightly points out that we are able to slide up and down the
pole of the ego-beam at will, moving now toward the thing, now away
from it to consider the act of knowing and its modalities. For
example, noematically I can consider a certain cat who probably
exists, but then I can turn back noetically to assess the degree of
certitude that characterizes my consideration of that selfsame cat as
existing (# 105). Now if we were to slide down to the point where all
modalities are behind us on the noetic side of the pole, and if there
we were to face the object, we would get the pure sense of the object
in which its unity is given.

In # 102 Husserl claims that this can happen, and that we can indeed
slide far enough toward the object that the unity of the noema will be
known as not having been imposed by the act of knowing. At that point,
all of its qualities supposedly will be given immanently, really,
contained in the perception rather than in the secondary conscious act
that may grasp it a split-second later. Its sense will have been
captured as something known with certainty to comprise its qualities,
without the interference of a synthetic conscious act. (If this
worked, it would effectively ensure the objectivity of knowledge, and
would win the day for realism against idealism.) Husserl writes:

"The noematic objects … are unities transcendent to, but
evidentially intended to in, the mental process. But if that is the
case, then characteristics, which arise in [those unities] for
consciousness and which are seized upon as their properties in
focusing the regard on them, cannot possibly be regarded as really
inherent moments of the mental process" (248-249).

Rather, they inhere in the object's sense, and subsequently are lifted
out for analysis in the mental process.

The ambitiousness of this claim is matched by that of another, which
has to do with the opposite end of the ego-pole. In # 108 Husserl says
that we can also shinny far enough up the ego-pole that we can capture
the affirming noesis in its purity. All the modalities will have been
loaded over onto the side of the noema, and the no_sis will be a
believing affirmation, pure and simple: an unqualified yes. Thus
Husserl insists that there is a crucial difference between (a) being
validly negated and (b) not-being. For example, he would distinguish
(a) denying correctly that my spayed cat has a kitten, from (b)
affirming that the kitten of my spayed cat is a non-entity. With (a),
the negativity inheres in the noesis, which has not yet been purified
of all modality; but with (b), the noesis would be pure affirmation (#
104).

How correct is Husserl's argument? We must grant that whatever makes
this particular kitten impossible inheres elsewhere than in my knowing
about it, for my denying something can't make it go away. Furthermore,
there's nothing to prevent my forcing myself to think positively the
thought of the kitten that my cat never had. Such a noetic posture is
at least conceivable. However, its mere possibility is not enough to
accomplish Husserl's purpose. Husserl needs to show that this pure
affirming belief really is done, somewhere somehow, in the toughest
case, the case of an intrinsically impossible entity such as the
kitten of a spayed cat. (That is, has anyone succeeded in recapturing
that magic moment of purely affirming noesis with regard to an
intrinsically impossible object? And if so, how would one go about
certifying the accomplishment?)

Unfortunately, neither end of the ego-ray connects as Husserl had
hoped. At the noetic pole, the purely affirming ego eludes the grasp
of consciousness; so does the pure sense of the thing itself, at the
noematic pole. These terms may remain as ideal asymptotes toward which
the ego-ray continually points while continually falling short. The
successful recovery of the connection between knowing and reality
awaits another strategy, to be mounted by Husserl in the posthumously
published second volume of Ideen.

6. Ideen II (Ideas II)

The second volume of Husserl's Ideen (publication withheld until 1952)
is the work of many hands. Husserl was dissatisfied with it and did
not publish it. The first draft was written very rapidly in 1912,
immediately after the manuscript of the first volume was completed.
Husserl added material in 1915, and turned it over for editing to his
assistant Edith Stein, who had come with him to Freiburg from
Gottingen. Stein transcribed the work from Husserl's shorthand in
1916. He gave her further material, and in 1918 she produced a
collation arranged and titled as at present: the constitution of
material nature, of animal nature, and of the cultural world. But
Husserl's phenomenology was evolving, and the manuscript did not suit
him. Another assistant, Ludwig Landgrebe, worked on it 1923-25, and
Husserl himself edited it in again 1928. It finally came out
posthumously.

If the pursuit of unity had guided Husserl like a north star from his
earliest writing on through the discovery and first articulation of
phenomenology, then in Ideen II that star becomes obscured by "light
pollution" from numerous more recent and competing insights. Without
access to the manuscripts, it is impossible to know with precision how
that came about. In portions of the text as we have it, the concern
with unity remains a significant factor.

However, other portions seem to go against the grain of key insights
from the first volume and the earlier works. For example, in LU and
Ideen I, the material sphere had comprised states of affairs; that is,
facts or cases such as could be expressed in logical propositions.
There were indeed "things" in there, such as roses, yet the emphasis
was upon the factual scenarios into which these things figured. By
contrast, in Ideen II "material nature" is populated with substantial
items, and the fact they are embedded in circumstances has to be
additionally stipulated, almost as an afterthought (# 15c). By the
same token, in the earlier work the eidetic sphere had comprised the
forms of logical propositions and the rules of inference. While there
were indeed "essences" entailed there, nevertheless the emphasis fell
upon the lawful patterns of thinking about being. By contrast, in
Ideen II "animal nature" is populated by psychic items whose unity is
analogous to that of physical things yet whose active engagement with
the latter can hardly be explained.

This shift matters, because judgments and perceptions reach unity in
quite different ways. To certify that one selfsame proposition (e.g.,
that the cat is on the mat) returns to our consciousness on several
occasions is quite a different task than to certify that one selfsame
substantial entity (e.g., this mat-loving cat) returns to our sight
every afternoon. Husserl's early discoveries about unity had to do
with judgment, and they were based upon the lived difference between
synthetic judgments and analytic judgments. His ambitions then were
not primarily metaphysical or epistemological. Moreover, it is
relatively easy to "feel" the difference among three sorts of
judgment: (a) a synthetic judgment that arbitrarily groups several
items together, (b) a synthetic judgment that groups things in
recognition of some characteristic that all share independently of the
judgment, and (c) a judgment that the unity imputed to a thing is not
owing to judgment at all. The distinction among these judgment-forms
was already established in the Habilitationsschrift. However the task
undertaken in Ideen II is forcibly to transpose that distinction onto
perception, and so to come up with a general test for certifying when
knowledge is genuinely in touch with reality.

This project is set in motion in # 9, where new terminology is
introduced for the threefold distinction first made in "Begriff der
Zahl." (However, now that the transcendental reduction is presupposed,
the arrow of causality should be removed. There can be only
correlation or its absence.) BZ's "psychic relation" now becomes
"categorial synthesis," in which perception serendipitously collects
disparate items into one group, for no special reason intrinsic to the
items. BZ's "content relation" (or "physical relation") becomes
"aesthetic synthesis" (or "sensuous synthesis"), in which perception
recognizes some intrinsic reason for grouping these items and finds
itself constrained to do so by something other than mere whim. And
BZ's uncomposed unity (e.g., "that rose there") becomes the "pure
sense-object."

In BZ, "synthesis" meant a combining judgment: a judgment that erected
a set of things with many members. A set with one member–that is, a
unified thing–obviously needed no synthesizing judgment to set it up.
In Ideen II, however, "synthesis" means a perception that, while
receiving multiple impressions (the off-shadings or Abschattungen),
composes an object out of them. But this object is a unity, not a
group; in fact, it is what Husserl would earlier have called an
uncomposed unity. In other words aesthetic synthesis–operating now
over partial views, not discrete items–finds that it has a reason for
referring those multiple impressions to one object, even though the
unity of the thing never gives itself directly to consciousness. What
is that reason? This question is enticing, because Husserl is
tantalizingly close here to describing a way in which the real unity
of things is available for knowledge.

Husserl works on this question in # 15b, where "the spatial body is a
synthetic unity of a manifold of strata of 'sensuous appearances' of
different senses" (42-43). The spatially extended thing is a unity
drawing together all the experiences we have had of it, and summoning
us toward further experiences of it through sight and touch and our
other senses. It achieves its unity as a spatial location, which seems
not to depend upon whether or not it is actually perceived.

However, Husserl cautions, this unity alone is insufficient to
validate itself. He writes:

"(W)e have first taken the body as independent of all causal
conditioning, i.e., merely as a unity which presents itself visually
or tactually, through multiplicities of sensations, as endowed with an
inner content of characteristic features…. But in what we have said,
it is also implied that under the presupposition referred to (namely,
that we take the thing outside of the nexuses in which it is a thing)
we do not find, as we carry out experiences, any possibility for
deciding, in a way that exhibits, whether the experienced material
thing is actual or whether we are subject to mere illusion and are
experiencing a mere phantom" (43).

Thus, reality is not guaranteed for an isolated item, even when it
seems to be giving us a reason to take it as the unified core
attracting its manifold appearings to one hub of reference. The
central location of the thing is dependent upon its real
circumstances, as Husserl goes on to say in # 15c. The reality of
"one" depends on "others"; i.e., on thing-connection. The thing is
what it is in relation to its surroundings. This becomes apparent when
things move and change, for their changes must correlate coherently
with reciprocal changes in the things next to them.

Such co-variance is what certifies reality–or materiality, which
Husserl seems to equate with it. In # 15c, reality means substantial
causality. Within the webwork of material things, everything affects
everything else. The real is the causal. Co-variance across the
material realm, then, is what certifies the oneness and reality of
that realm (# 15e).

Animated bodies also connect in the webwork of material things (# 13).
Each of them is a center of appearings, a one, just as every other
thing is. However, unlike soulless bodies, each animal is also a zero.
It lives at a point of origination. The animal body bears the
zero-point of orientation for the pure ego (61), as its absolute
"here" (135, 166). Arithmetically, this is a stunning contrast. Every
"something" whatsoever is either a one or a one-and-one-and-etc. But
the animated body, in addition to being just one of those somethings,
is also the one who is zero: the one from whom the counting starts,
the one who chooses whether and where it is appropriate to insert the
and's.

But any series that is initiated by/at/in the living body is counted
off nonarbitrarily. Such series go in order; they are "motivated."
This is owing to the movement of the body itself within the material
web. The body's own kinesthetic sense will coordinate with the
corresponding changes in sensory perceptions as it navigates among
things. Thus, the zero shifts position in relation to the other
unified centers to which perceptions accrue; but as it does so, the
series of their appearings change in a regular way (63).

What about counting zero's? Are they multiple; are there many human
bodies? Husserl declines to pursue this avenue of approach into the
problem of other minds and human community. Intersubjectivity will
treated instead as an implication of the reality of the material
world, not a precondition for it. The multiplicity of bodies is taken
up only on page 83, where it is admitted that the foregoing analysis
has been framed on the assumption that there would be only one,
"solipsistic," point-zero in reality. Belatedly, other bodies now are
brought into the picture–but not because they are necessary for its
unity, or because they have been apprehended among the realities
presenting to consciousness. The others are brought in because they
are required for the full unification of the thing in reality, whether
that thing is one of the physical bodies or my very own live body. To
be is to be describable (87). Reality for the thing entails a
possibility of appearing to anyone at all. Being counted from one
zero-point is not enough for the real thing. To count, it needs the
possibility of being counted from multiple directions.

The thing is a rule of appearances. That means that the thing is a
reality as a unity of a manifold of appearances connected according to
rules. Moreover, this unity is an intersubjective one…. The
physicalistic thing is intersubjectively common in that it has
validity for all individuals who stand in possible communion with us
(91-92).

To be real, the thing must count as a place or location, a center,
independently of any particular point of origin. Yet what grants
reality to the thing is not some consensus reached by observers.
Indeed, the thing may look entirely different to different observers;
however, its reality constrains all to agree that, at least, "it is
there." Oddly, then, the real thing is another kind of zero, for its
barest reality consists in its being an empty place-holder (91-93).

Finally, Husserl makes unity a synonym for the philosophical term
"substance" as traditionally meant. For example, he says that both the
soul and the body are unities, so that an analogy obtains between
psychic unity and material unity (129, 131). Oneness becomes the
ontological form that determines substantial reality (133). The pure
ego is one with respect to an individual stream of consciousness, that
is, before the transcendental reduction has de-individuated the latter
(117); however the pure ego is insubstantial and not one whenever the
reduction is in effect (128).

And so Husserl's quest for unity splinters and spends itself out by
diverting into many contradictory projects pursued by the many
unharmonized voices of Ideen II. Although the manuscript remained
unpublished, it was made available for consultation by a number of
Husserl's younger colleagues. Among the last publication of Husserl's
lifetime was the Cartesian Meditations of 1931, in which he addressed
the apparent solipsism of his transcendental phenomenology. That work
itself was undergoing a comprehensive reworking in partnership with
Husserl's assistant Eugen Fink during the years before Husserl's death
in 1938.

7. Husserl's Published Works

Husserl's publications and his extensive Nachlass are being brought
out in a multi-volume critical edition entitled Husserliana – Edmund
Husserl, Gesammelte Werke, from Nijhoff in The Hague. The major works
published during Husserl's lifetime are the following:

Über den Begriff der Zahl. Psychologische Analysen, 1887.

Philosophie der Arithmetik. Psychologische und logische
Untersuchungen, 1891.

Logische Untersuchungen. Erste Teil: Prolegomena zur reinen Logik,
1900; reprinted 1913.

Logische Untersuchungen. Zweite Teil: Untersuchungen zur
Phänomenologie und Theorie der Erkenntnis, 1901; second edition 1913
(for part one); second edition 1921 (for part two).

"Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft," Logos 1 (1911) 289-341.

Ideen zu einer reinen Ph‰nomenologie und phänomenologischen
Philosophie. Erstes Buch: Allgemeine Einführung in die reine
Phänomenologie, 1913.

"Vorlesungen zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins,"
Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung 9 (1928),
367-498.

"Formale und transzendentale Logik. Versuch einer Kritik der
logischen Vernunft," Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische
Forschung 10 (1929) 1-298.

Mèditations cartèsiennes, 1931.

"Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzentale
Phänomenologie: Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie,"
Philosophia 1 (1936) 77-176.

Works translated into English by Husserl (In chronological order.
Publication dates of the German
originals are in brackets.)

"Philosophy as Rigorous Science," trans. in Q. Lauer (ed.),
Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy, New York: Harper [1910],
1965.

Formal and Transcendental Logic, trans. D. Cairns. The Hague:
Nijhoff [1929], 1969.

The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Philosophy,
trans. D. Carr. Evanston: Northwestern University Press
[1936/54], 1970.

Logical Investigations, trans. J. N. Findlay, London: Routledge
[1900/01; 2nd, revised edition 1913], 1973.

Experience and Judgement, trans. J. S. Churchill and K. Ameriks,
London: Routledge [1939], 1973.

Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological
Philosophy – Third Book: Phenomenology and the Foundations of the
Sciences, trans. T. E. Klein and W. E. Pohl, Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1980.

Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological
Philosophy — First Book: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology,
trans. F. Kersten. The Hague: Nijhoff (= Ideas) [1913], 1982.

Cartesian Meditations, trans. D. Cairns, Dordrecht: Kluwer [1931], 1988.

Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological
Philosophy – Second Book: Studies in the Phenomenology of
Constitution, trans. R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer, Dordrecht: Kluwer,
1989.

On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time
(1893-1917), trans. J. B. Brough, Dordrecht: Kluwer [1928], 1990.

Early Writings in the Philosophy of Logic and Mathematics, trans.
D. Willard, Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1994.

The Essential Husserl, ed. D. Welton, Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1999.

encyclopedia of philosophy

Thursday, September 3, 2009

Edmund Husserl (1859-1938)

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