Phantasy, Image Consciousness and Memory (1898-1925). Edmund Husserl Collected Works Volume XI.

by Edmund Husserl, John Barnett Brough (Translator), Rudolf Bernet (Editor)

This is the first English translation of Husserliana XXIII, the volume in the critical edition of Edmund Husserl's works that gathers together a rich array of posthumous texts on representational consciousness. The lectures and sketches comprising Husserliana XXIII come from a period of enormous productivity and pivotal development in Husserl's philosophical life, extending from the years immediately preceding the Logical Investigations (1900-01) almost to the time of his retirement in 1928. They make available the most profound and comprehensive Husserlian account of image consciousness-the awareness we have when we look at a picture or see a play-and of its relation to art and the aesthetic. They explore phantasy in depth, and furnish nuanced accounts of perception and memory. They enrich the Husserlian analysis of time consciousness and offer a fascinating picture of the sometimes tortuous paths Husserl took in his efforts to comprehend how the forms of representation are constituted and how they are related to one another and to perception.

Genres: Philosophy

743 pages, ebook

First published April 28, 1980

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.