Thing and Space: Lectures of 1907

by Edmund Husserl, R. Rojcewicz (Translator)

This is a translation of Edmund HusserI's lecture course from the Summer semester 1907 at the University of Gottingen. The German original was pub­ lished posthumously in 1973 as Volume XVI of Husserliana, Husserl's opera omnia. The translation is complete, including both the main text and the supplementary texts (as Husserliana volumes are usually organized), except for the critical apparatus which provides variant readings. The announced title of the lecture course was "Main parts of the phenome­ nology and critique of reason." The course began with five, relatively inde­ pendent, introductory lectures. These were published on their own in 1947, bearing the title The idea ojphenomenology.l The "Five Lectures" comprise a general orientation by proposing the method to be employed in the subsequent working out of the actual problems (viz., the method of "phenomenological reduction") and by clarifying, at least provisionally, some technical terms that will be used in the labor the subsequent lectures will carry out. The present volume, then, presents that labor, i.e., the method in action and the results attained. As such, this text dispels the abstract impression which could not help but cling to the first five lectures taken in isolation. Accord­ ingly, we are here given genuine "introductory lectures," i.e., an introduction to phenomenology in the genuine phenomenological sense of engaging in the work of phenomenology, going to the "matters at issue themselves," rather than remaining aloof from them in abstract considerations of standpoint and approach.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction

382 pages, Hardcover

First published October 31, 1997

About the author

Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl (Dr. phil. hab., University of Halle-Wittenberg, 1887; Ph.D., Mathematics, University of Vienna, 1883) was a philosopher who is deemed the founder of phenomenology. He broke with the positivist orientation of the science and philosophy of his day, believing that experience is the source of all knowledge, while at the same time he elaborated critiques of psychologism and historicism.

Born into a Moravian Jewish family, he was baptized as a Lutheran in 1887. Husserl studied mathematics under Karl Weierstrass, completing a Ph.D. under Leo Königsberger, and studied philosophy under Franz Brentano and Carl Stumpf. Husserl taught philosophy, as a Privatdozent at Halle from 1887, then as professor, first at Göttingen from 1901, then at Freiburg im Breisgau from 1916 until his 1928 retirement.

Reviews

[Kira · Rating 4 out of 5]

My first review of this book was a little juvenile. I finally managed to buy a copy in hardcover for myself at a reasonable price, so maybe that's motivated me to go back and read it more carefully.
You won't find the familiar "new and improved, more convincing-than-ever introduction to phenomenological philosophy" with which Husserl was inclined to begin his books, and even his lectures. This is one extended noetic analysis of the ways in which the spatial schemata of objects, abstracting from their other levels of constitution (their "phantoms" as he later confusingly called them) come to givenness through cross-motivations between the kinaesthetic systems and the visual system.
This is one blessed case in which Husserl is concerned with the same topic through an entire book (well, published lecture), without the usual "that is extremely important but we can't dwell on it now" type of writing characteristic of some of his books.
The translator is the same fellow who translated Ideas II, and one of Heidegger's lecture courses.
The only difficulty with this book is trying to see how the noetic analysis here, done within brackets, relates to the noesis/noema 'correlation' he would soon discover in Ideas I and II, with the use of the reductions as well as the basic bracketing he follows here. It's not obvious, however, that he saw the lack of noematic analysis as a problem in 1907, since he didn't yet have the noesis/noema distinction. So unfortunately, we can't simply read off the significance of the noema from this book, by noting what is conspicuously missing. It wasn't intended to be there in the first place. Whatever happens with the opening of transcendental phenomenology (I will bet it is essentially based on the problem of sedimentation and horizonality) it hasn't happened yet even as late as these lectures, despite their reference to both bracketing and a "pure ego."
BTW: Edith Stein's summary of the lectures, published in this volume at the end of the book, is excellent and may be good to read first, before diving in to Husserl's descriptions, because it gives you a map of where he's going, saving you from getting to lost in details -- of which there are many.