Husserl History

The present volume contains many of the papers presented at a four-day conference held by the Husserl-Archives in Leuven in April 2009 to c- memorate the one hundred and ?ftieth anniversary of Edmund Husserl’s birth. The conference was organized to facilitate the critical evaluation of Husserl’s philosophical project from various perspectives and in light of the current philosophical and scienti?c climate. Still today, the characteristic tension between Husserl’s concrete and detailed descriptions of consciousness, on the one hand, and his radical philosophical claim to ultimate truth and certainty in thinking, feeling, and acting, on the other, calls for a sustained re?ection on the relation between a Husserlian phenomenological philosophy and philosophy in general. What can phenomenological re?ection contribute to the ongoing discussion of certain perennial philosophical questions and which phi- sophical problems are raised by a phenomenological philosophy itself?

This text examines the many transformations in Husserl’s phenomenology that his discoveries of the nature of appearing lead to. It offers a comprehensive look at the Logical Investigations’ delimitation of the phenomenological field, and continues with Husserl’s account of our consciousness of time. This volume examines Husserl’s turn to transcendental idealism and the problems this raises for our recognition of other subjects. It details Husserl’s account of embodiment and takes largely from his manuscripts, both published and unpublished, dealing with his theory of instincts, his considerations of mortality and the teleological character of our existence. This book appeals to students and researchers and presents a genetic account of our selfhood, one that unifies Husserl’s different claims about who and what we are.

Eugen Fink was Edmund Husserl’s research assistant during the last decade of the renowned phenomenologist’s life, a period in which Husserl’s philosophical ideas were radically recast. In this landmark book, Ronald Bruzina shows that Fink was actually a collaborator with Husserl, contributing indispensable elements to their common enterprise.