Author Description

The literature on the work of Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) abounds in specialized studies of various aspects of his philosophy - that is, transcendental phenomenology. Yet there have been few attempts to present Husserl's philosophy as a whole. No wonder, for Husserl's mammoth literary output over some forty years and the highly diverse nature of his investigations have made it extremely difficult to make a broad survey of his work. In addition, Husserl's philosophy is not a fixed system that can be neatly derived from a few general principles, but is rather a method of inquiry that regularly modified itself in the light of its own results. Now one of the world's leading Husserl scholars presents a unified and critical interpretation of Husserl's philosophical work from the only point of view from which its continuity can be grasped: method. The culmination of several decades of intense scholarly engagement with Husserl's phenomenology, her work reveals as no other the dynamic interplay between the development of Husserl's method and the thematic progression of his research. Taking as her point of orientation Husserl's self-professed goal of realizing the ideal of First Philosophy in his transcendental phenomenology, the author reveals the inner logic of Husserl's winding path through such diverse fields of inquiry as logic, truth, evidence, science, essence, intentionality, constitution, internal time, horizon, intersubjectivity, history, and the lifeworld. In the course of her masterly exposition, she develops compelling positions on a number of contested points in Husserl scholarship and deflects many of the common objections to Husserl's project, while pointing out its conceptual limitations and oversights.