In this chapter we outline the development of Husserl's philosophy over the course of his life. Writing for half a century, addressing richly varied themes, Husserl published just five books during his lifetime. Yet he left volumes of lecture texts and some 40,000 pages of shorthand notes, showing the philosopher at work on detailed analyses of consciousness, space, time, intersubjectivity, number, and so on, elaborating in finer detail the ideas unfolded in the texts he released for publication during his long career. From this “Nachlass” many further volumes of Husserl's writing have been produced, with many more to come. The historical development of Husserl's thought, in relation to the wider history of philosophy in his day and to the long philosophical tradition from Plato onward, will indicate the range of Husserl's thought and the wider context of his work.
Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), Czecho-Austro-German mathematician turned philosopher, founded the discipline of phenomenology, a new approach to the study of consciousness and its role in constituting or giving meaning to the world. In the Europe of his day, mathematicians were laying new foundations for mathematics (in set theory and non-Euclidean geometries) and physicists were developing new foundations for physics (in relativity theory and quantum mechanics), while psychologists were setting psychology on a scientific foundation (from Franz Brentano to Wilhelm Wundt and, in a different direction, Sigmund Freud). Husserl shared this passion for new foundations, and he sought to put philosophy itself on a radical new path, with a new vision and new methods.
Husserl proposed that all philosophy, and indeed all science and all knowledge, be grounded in what he came to call transcendental phenomenology, seeking the ideal meaning of various types of experience, from perception and imagination to judgment and knowledge formation. The rationalists – Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, et al. – had held that knowledge is founded ultimately on reason; the empiricists – Locke, Berkeley, Hume, et al. – countered that knowledge is founded ultimately on sense perception; and then Kant's critique of pure reason (and of pure sensation) laid out a synthesis of rationalist and empiricist doctrines, mapping the mind's contribution to the structure of space, time, and things as we know them. Into this grand sweep of European philosophy entered Husserl. Deeper than the structure of either reason or sensation, or Kantian categories of the understanding, Husserl held, is the structure of consciousness itself: what he called intentionality, that is, the way that consciousness is “directed” toward or represents objects of various kinds in the world. Phenomenology studies just this structure, and thereby provides the proper foundation for knowledge.
In practice, however, Husserl's idea of philosophical foundation was different from that of prior thinkers such as Descartes and Kant. Husserl developed a systematic philosophy in which phenomenology, ontology, epistemology, and logic are interdependent parts, each founded upon elements in the other parts. For Descartes, all philosophy is founded on epistemology (the theory of knowledge) and all knowledge is founded in the “pure light” of reason. For Kant, all philosophy, from theory of knowledge to moral theory, is founded in reason, pure and practical, which operates in conjunction with sensibility. For Husserl, by contrast, all philosophy is founded on the phenomenological theory of intentionality, but phenomenology, logic, ontology, and epistemology are in certain ways mutually founding. Thus, Husserl's philosophy developed with a kind of structured holism, even as phenomenology became the avowed centerpiece and the proclaimed foundation for the whole system.
As Husserl's philosophy developed, and as his conception of phenomenology was extended and modified by later thinkers (especially Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty), the concerns of phenomenology spread from the foundations of logic, science, and knowledge to the meaning of human experience and its significance for social reality. Existentialism and later movements (structuralism and poststructuralism) carried phenomenology from mathematics and science to social analysis. (See Moran 2000 for a detailed appraisal of the varieties of phenomenology that evolved through the 20th century.)
Husserl was a philosophers' philosopher, engaging the large issues raised by Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Hume, and Kant, along with the issues of logico-mathematical theory emerging in his day in Cantor, Frege, Hilbert, Carnap, Whitehead and Russell. Accordingly, Husserl's philosophy addressed in a systematic way the classical issues of universal and particular, mind and body, individual and society, fact and value, and especially the emerging issues of how mind and language represent the world. Today's techniques of computer science would have been at home in Husserl's model of mental representation, yet Husserl insisted that the techniques of formal modeling be grounded in bona fide activities of consciousness, as our minds present and engage things in our environment. And from this formal mathematical matrix of ideas emerged Husserl's con-ception of phenomenology, focused on concrete human experience and the importance of the world of everyday life.
A mathematician turned philosopher, Husserl's writing was complex and abstract, yet strangely engaging. The more you read, the more you see of his large vision. His complex prose is holographic: the more you read, the more you see in each part the larger scheme. In his early works you can see the same concerns that emerge in his later works, such as his humanistic concern for the life-world, which plays smoothly into the concerns of existential philosophy in later decades. And in his later works you can see the same concerns that launched his earliest work, such as his concern for logical theory as a scheme for representing the world.
There is a brief film clip of Husserl in a home movie (reproduced in a videocassette in Embree 1991). The film shows a rather small man, with full beard, round wire-rimmed glasses, and the three-piece suit of his day. He seems almost to be looking toward the Platonic heavens with an idealistic bearing as he walks in the garden behind his apartment in Freiburg, Germany. Husserl often received visitors, both students and famous philosophers, in his family apartment, sometimes talking with them in his garden, to which he refers in his writing. It is reported that his wife Malvine would sometimes escort a visitor to meet Professor Husserl in his study, where a long discussion would ensue, and then Frau Husserl would escort the visitor to the door, where she would quietly ask, “Is he as great as Plato?”
Husserl's writing shows his penchant for abstraction, for drawing the very large picture meant to be filled in by concrete details of experience. His lectures were said to be complex and demanding, and students found that Husserl was not gifted at understanding others, either in discussion or in reading other philosophers. These qualities do not sound like those of the leader of a great philosophical movement. Yet his passion for philosophy, for truth and objectivity, and for the new science of phenomenology, were clearly contagious. His writing and teaching drew many students, and the phenomenological movement was launched. This movement was the dominant force in 20th-century European philosophy, even as later phenomenologists diverged from Husserl's own strict path. Moreover, scholars today are discovering Husserl's role in the development of analytic philosophy, the other great movement launched in the 20th century. Furthermore, while Husserl was not a philological scholar of the classical philosophers, from Plato through Kant, his philosophy absorbed and reconfigured the concerns of these classical thinkers. The world has not often seen such a broad philosophical mind executing abstract theories with attention to exacting description of concrete detail. These are the traits of a mathematician put to work in the philosophy of a visionary, and they inform Husserl's conception of phenomenology, seeking ideal meanings in concrete everyday experiences. History will place him among the small number of greatest philosophers, though his full legacy will not be understood for another hundred years.
Edmund Husserl was born on 8 April 1859 in Prossnitz, Moravia, which was then part of the Habsburg or Austro-Hungarian Empire and is now Prostejov, near Brno in the Czech Republic. He died on 27 April 1938 in Freiburg, Germany, near the French border, in the town where he taught and practiced philosophy at the zenith of his career.
Husserl was born into an assimilated Jewish family in the German-speaking community in the Czech region Moravia (part of what Germans called the Sudetenland, an area that would be the focus of German aggression in the 1930s). The family was not religious, and Edmund himself became a Lutheran as a young adult. The second of four children, Edmund was an uninterested schoolboy who nonetheless showed some ability in mathematics. At the age of nine he was sent to school in Vienna, then finished his Gymnasium (high school) studies at Olmütz, now Olomouc, in 1876. He entered the University of Leipzig, studying astronomy, mathematics, and physics. There he befriended Thomas Masaryk, a philosophy student (and later President of Czechoslovokia), who interested Husserl in the philosophy of Franz Brentano and in the empiricists. In 1878 he moved to Berlin, where he studied mathematics and philosophy. There he attended the lectures of two great mathematicians, Karl Weierstrass and Leopold Kronecker. In 1881 Husserl transferred to the University of Vienna and in 1882 earned his doctorate in pure mathematics with a dissertation on the calculus of variations. His dissertation was directed by a disciple of Weierstrass, and in 1883 Husserl returned to Berlin as Weierstrass' assistant. But Husserl's interests were turning toward philosophy. After a period of military service, he returned to Vienna, where his friend Masaryk was then teaching philosophy as a Privatdozent (unsalaried lecturer).
From 1884 to 1886 Husserl attended the lectures given in Vienna by Franz Brentano, a charismatic teacher of great renown. In these years Husserl turned firmly to philosophy, and Brentano's concep-tion of descriptive psychology would be the formative influence on Husserl's later development of phenomenology. Through Brentano Husserl became interested in the empiricist philosophy of David Hume, whom Husserl always admired as a genuine forerunner of phenomenology, as Hume mapped the different kinds of mental activities. Brentano also introduced Husserl to the work of Bernard Bolzano, whose conception of logic proved a crucial inspiration in Husserl's development of phenomenology. Moreover, it was from Brentano that Husserl learned of the Medieval theory of intention, the mind's aiming at objects in thought or perception. After a decade of incubation, Husserl's conception of intentionality would be the heart of his theory of knowledge and ultimately phenomenology.
Husserl was ready to begin work on his Habilitation (a kind of second doctorate in the German university system, the prerequisite for university positions). However, Brentano's conflicts with the Church forced him to resign his professorship in Vienna. So Brentano then sent Husserl to study with Brentano's former student Carl Stumpf at the University of Halle. In 1886 Husserl moved to Halle, and in 1887, under Stumpf's supervision, Husserl completed his Habilitation thesis, On the Concept of Number, Psychological Analyses. Sitting on Husserl's examination committee was the mathematician Georg Cantor, known today for his pioneering work in set theory and the foundations of mathematics. Husserl and Cantor became friends during Husserl's years at Halle, where Husserl continued in the post of Privatdozent. In the Habilitation thesis Husserl proposed to clarify the concept of number by tracing its formation in psychic acts of distinguishing multiplicities, or “manifolds” (a notion to which Husserl often returned, and a term that remains in contemporary geometry). In this early work Husserl had begun his intellectual migration from pure mathematics into philosophy and ultimately into pure phenomenology. That journey would take Husserl another 14 years.
Husserl remained at Halle until 1901, all the while teaching at the rank of Privatdozent. He was never happy in this position in Halle, living with little prestige and limited income (students paid for lectures). But his family life was begun in the Halle years and seemed quite happy. In 1887 he married Malvine Steinschneider. They had three children: Elli, born in 1892; Gerhart, born in 1893; and Wolfgang, born in 1895. Malvine, also from a Jewish family, had become a Christian shortly before they married. Though Husserl considered his philosophy “a-theological,” he seems to have had some strong religious feelings. Perhaps that intensity of feeling was related to his pursuit of the purity of consciousness and the ego in his later phenomenology.
Husserl published his first book in 1891 while at Halle, The Philosophy of Arithmetic: Psychological and Logical Investigations, Book I, which he dedicated to Brentano. This book was an extension of his Habilitation thesis, and it marked Husserl's transition from mathematics into philosophy of mathematics, turning his eye to logical theory and an inchoate form of analysis of psychic activity – the kernel of his later vision of phenomenology. In the same era mathematicians, including his friend Cantor, were working toward new foundations for mathematics in the emerging theory of sets (then variously called Inbegriffe, Mannigfaltigkeiten, or Mengen: as it were, conceptual graspings or groupings, manifolds or multiplicities, and groups). Over the following decades, mathematicians and logicians would seek to ground all of mathematics in a combination of logic and set theory. Husserl's position in The Philosophy of Arithmetic has been widely taken as a form of “psychologism,” reducing mathematics to patterns of psychic activity like mentally grouping things and counting or measuring the size or cardinality of the group. The subtitle of the book is illuminating, for we see Husserl beginning to wrestle with the relation between the psychological and the logical. (Recall that from Brentano Husserl had acquired an admiration not only for descriptive psychology, but also for logical theory, in Brentano's own exact philosophy and in Bolzano's prior logic.)
Husserl had corresponded in writing with Gottlob Frege, Professor of mathematics at Jena, whom we now know as one of the greatest logicians in history. When Husserl's book appeared, Frege wrote a critical review charging Husserl's philosophy of arithmetic with psychologism, or reducing logic and mathematics to psychology. Frege joined Hermann Lotze in attacking 19th-century psychologism and defending instead a Platonistic philosophy of mathematics, which would hold that numbers and other mathematical entities exist in their own right and are not created by psychological activities. Husserl readily accepted Frege's anti-psychologism, seeming to turn sharply in his tracks and to move in a different direction. In fact, Husserl's account of the origin of the concept of number was not a reduction of numbers to psychic acts; nonetheless, he did not yet have the tools to sort out the relevant issues concerning how thoughts or concepts of numbers are related to numbers themselves. Book II of The Philosophy of Arithmetic never appeared. Instead, over the next decade Husserl wrote his monumental Logical Investigations, published in 1900–1. That work opened with a book-length attack on psychologism and then moved through detailed studies in ontology, phenomenology, and epistemology.
Husserl's Logical Investigations, the result of a decade of hard thinking about a rich complex of themes, earned Husserl at last a regular, salaried position in the German academy. In 1901 he was appointed Professor Extraordinarius (somewhat like Associate Professor in today's American academy) at the University of Göttingen. In 1906, despite faculty opposition, he was advanced to Professor Ordinarius (the rank of full Professor, which, in the German academy, is granted to only a couple of scholars in each field at each university). Husserl stayed at Göttingen until 1916, and during this period his philosophy evolved considerably.
During the Göttingen years, Husserl was actively involved with a group of scientists and mathematicians including the mathematician David Hilbert, who framed the problem of completeness for axiomatic systems in mathematics. Husserl's conception of logic as the theory of theories, mapped out early in the Logical Investigations, had already indicated the philosophical importance of logical completeness for a theory conceived as a system of propositions closed under logical deduction. (In the 1930s Kurt Gödel would prove theorems about completeness and incompleteness in certain axiomatic systems. Late in life Gödel would study Husserl's phenomenological theory of knowledge, finding himself in sympathy with Husserl's phenomenology.)
Throughout the 1890s, Husserl's conception of logic had developed in tandem with his emerging conception of phenomenology, as he wrote out some 1,000 pages of the Logical Investigations. On the heels of its publication, as he took up his new position in Göttingen, Husserl's phenomenology developed a strong following throughout continental Europe. In Munich in 1903 an informal “school” of phenomenology took shape following Husserl's work, organized in good measure by a farmer named Johannes Daubert (who died in the First World War) and including Adolf Reinach, who developed a phenomenological ontology for legal theory (he also died in the First World War).The Munich school promoted a realist ontology for phenomenology, in line with Husserl's ontology of parts/wholes and states of affairs. In 1907 the Göttingen Philosophical Society formed to advance phenomenology. This group included Roman Ingarden and Edith Stein. Ingarden, who contributed to the growth of philosophy in Poland, would later criticize Husserl's turn to transcendental idealism, and he would develop a phenomenologically informed ontology of art works, which remains influential today. Stein would go on to write a doctoral dissertation under Husserl, published as On the Problem of Empathy, a seminal work on the phenomenology of understanding others, after which she turned to religious writing. Though Jewish, Edith Stein converted to Catholicism, but died in the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz; in 1998 she was canonized by Pope John Paul II, becoming Saint Benedicta, in recognition of her ordeal and as testament to her faith.
In 1891 William James, Professor at Harvard University, published his monumental Principles of Psychology, which surveyed the mind in a proto-phenomenological way, distinguishing basic types of mental activity, while stressing the role of habit and bodily states, especially emotions, taken as extending into the body. Husserl read and admired James' work, but James did not have a proper theory of intentionality, of how consciousness is directed toward things in the world. James took a pragmatist approach to psychology, tying our consciousness to our bodily habits, and to our social practices, whereas Husserl, in his Logical Investigations, took a logical approach to the study of consciousness, featuring the role of ideal meanings in representing things we experience. Still, the godfather of American pragmatism, Charles Sanders Peirce, was a logician, and interacted with European logicians as contemporary logic was developing. (Peirce and Frege independently proposed theories of the quantifier words “all” and “some,” thereby advancing logic beyond Aristotle's syllogism.) Unfortunately for the history of 20th-century philosophy, James recommended against an English translation of Husserl's Logical Investigations, mistakenly thinking it just another long text of logic.
During the 1890s, in a different research program than James' psychology, Sigmund Freud, in Vienna, was developing the foundations of psychoanalysis, launched in his Interpretation of Dreams, which appeared in 1900. Freud and Husserl had both attended Brentano's lectures on psychology, and both published groundbreaking studies of the mind in 1900. Freud's studies of dreams launched psychoanalysis, featuring the theory of unconscious psychic states and their causal influence on conscious emotions and actions. Husserl's studies of logic, by contrast, led into his phenomenology, featuring the theory of consciousness and intentionality. It does not appear that Freud read Husserl or vice versa. Yet, in a fortuitous division of labor, they championed, respectively, the unconscious and the conscious parts of the mind.
During the years 1905 to 1910 Husserl carried out some of his most important phenomenological analyses. He appraised the structure of our experience of time and of space, in works that were published much later, posthumously. In that context he studied the structure of sensation, of sensory experience as it unfolds in time, and the role of sensation in our experience of objects in space and time. In an important series of lectures on the theory of meaning in 1908, he modified his earlier conception of meaning from the Logical Investigations. These 1908 lectures launched his mature theory of ideal meaning, for which he later introduced the famous terminology of “noema” (a Greek term for what is known). At the same time Husserl studied Kant's philosophy and by 1913 presented his own version of “transcendental idealism,” adapting the Kantian idiom to his conception of phenomenology, now called “transcendental” phenomenology. In 1912 and 1913 Husserl tied together these results, at a high level of abstraction, in his third book: Ideas, Book One. The complete title was: Ideas toward a Pure Phenomenology and a Phenomenological Philosophy, Book One: General Introduction to Phenomenology. This work is known as Ideas I. In the same months in 1912 he drafted Books One, Two, and Three of Ideas, though he published only Book One. Book Two : Phenomenological Studies of Constitution, known as Ideas II, was drafted at the same time, but Husserl never released it for publication, a great misfortune since it contains some of Husserl's most important concrete phenomenological analyses: analyses of embodiment (the I or ego is not a disembodied spirit), kinesthetic awareness (of one's bodily movement) in action, empathy (how I experience another “I”), the world of everyday life (later called the “life-world”), and the social structure of our experience (much elaborated by later phenomenologists, including Martin Heidegger and Alfred Schutz, and by the French poststructuralists, including Michel Foucault). Book Three: Phenomenology and the Foundations of the Sciences, Ideas III, elaborates on the relations between phenomenology, ontology, psychology, and the social sciences.
In Ideas I (1913) Husserl's phenomenology took a “transcendental turn.” In the Logical Investigations Husserl's phenomenology was developed in conjunction with a realist ontology, whereby consciousness occurs in a world that exists independently of our perceiving or thinking of it. In Ideas I, however, Husserl's phenomenology was presented in conjunction with a neo-Kantian doctrine of transcendental idealism, whereby the world is “constituted” in a multiplicity of actual and possible acts of consciousness. What does it mean to say an object (a tree, another human being, or whatever) is “constituted” in consciousness? As we shall see, this is one of the thorniest issues in understanding Husserl. On one reading of Husserl's transcendental idealism, every object in the world consists in a system of ideal meanings, or “noemata,” which present it from an infinite variety of perspectives. Noemata take the place of Kant's “phenomena,” or things-as-they-appear. Beyond that system of noemata, there is no “thing in itself,” no object beyond the reach of all possible consciousness. The character of Husserl's idealism remains in dispute today. Some scholars find an idealism not unlike Berkeley's (the world reduces to ideas, though ideas are ideal noemata). Others find a transcendental idealism quite like Kant's (there is a world beyond our ideas, but we cannot know it as it is “in itself”). And some interpreters (including the present author) find a realist ontology joined with a methodological perspectivism (mundane objects exist independently of our consciousness of them, but we know them only through some particular conception or meaning). In any event, Husserl's position of “transcendental idealism” does not squeeze into any of the familiar pigeonholes. What is genuinely new in Husserl, and what makes his philosophy “transcendental,” is his theory of intentionality, of how consciousness is directed via meaning toward objects that are (in most cases) independent of our consciousness of them. Husserl's conception of intentionality turns his phenomenology away from classical concerns of epistemology and ontology (what can we know and does it exist independently of our knowing it?), and toward 20th-century logical or semantic theory (how do meanings present or refer consciousness to objects in the world?). Thus, what makes Husserl's phenomenology transcendental, in his new conception of the transcendental, is the role of ideal meaning in the “constitution” of the world, as we interpret or understand things in the world only through the complex structures of meaning that characterize our myriad forms of consciousness of objects in the world.
In 1916 Husserl was appointed Professor Ordinarius at the University of Freiburg. He would live out the rest of his life in Freiburg, teaching, receiving famous philosophers from abroad, lecturing throughout Germany and in London, Paris, and Italy. Husserl was then the leading thinker in the German-speaking philosophy world, and phenomenology would remain the center of continental philosophy for the rest of the century, even as later philosophers modified or rejected aspects of Husserl's philosophy, especially its rationalism and its transcendentalism. (See Moran 2000 for a detailed study that ties many key European thinkers into phenomenology over the course of the past century.)
During the 1920s and 1930s the movement called “analytic philosophy” emerged, seeking to ground philosophy in logical and linguistic analysis, aligning philosophy with logic, mathematics, and natural science. The foundations of the new logic had been laid by Gottlob Frege in the late 19th century and were furthered by Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell in their monumental Principia Mathematica (1910–13). Husserl knew these works, but tied logical theory into phenomenology. Analytic philosophy took shape in the vigorous activity of the Vienna Circle during the 1920s, as the logical positivists sought to put philosophy on a firm empirical basis along with the physical sciences. Both Moritz Schlick and Rudolf Carnap, central figures in the Circle, addressed Husserl's work directly, and Ludwig Wittgenstein's famous Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) offers a somewise Husserlian analysis of how propositional meanings represent states of affairs in the world (it is not evident whether Wittgenstein knew of the similar picture of representation in the details of Husserl's Logical Investigations). Schlick resisted Husserl's Platonistic notion of ideal essences knowable by a special kind of intuition. However, Gödel, who studied in Vienna in the 1920s, would later argue for the role of abstract or ideal entities and for mathematical intuition, going against the 1920s positivism of Schlick et al. Carnap attended Husserl's lectures in 1924–5 while Carnap was writing The Logical Construction of the World (Der Logische Aufbau der Welt, 1928). This seminal work in analytic philosophy of science was clearly influenced by Husserl's doctrine of constitution (Carnap called his system “constitution theory,” Konstitutionstheorie), but Carnap developed a formal logical language and its interpretation to model the way we conceptualize or “constitute” the world. Gilbert Ryle, one of the founding fathers of Oxford ordinary language philosophy with his The Concept of Mind (1949), visited Husserl at Freiburg in 1929. Ryle later reflected that The Concept of Mind could be viewed as a study in phenomenology, though the technique Ryle practiced was to analyze the ways we use mental verbs such as “think,” “imagine,” “see,” “will,” and so on. As the 20th century wore on, analytic philosophy took root in England and then America, reflecting in part the remarkable growth in science and technology. The traditions of continental phenomenology and Anglo-American analytic philosophy gradually diverged, leaving a famous cultural gap between philosophers in these traditions. Nonetheless, in the early 20th century the core concerns of the traditions overlapped, and key practitioners were engaged in fruitful interactions, which scholars are investigating today. And as philosophy of mind developed in the later decades of the 20th century, analytic philosophers returned to issues of intentionality and consciousness, which Husserl had explored earlier in his phenomenology.
During the 1920s a different sensibility was at work elsewhere in Europe, in the rise of existential philosophy, concerned with everyday human existence, including our social being and the role of choice and value in our world. Students in Freiburg joined Husserl in this emphasis. In Ideas II Husserl had analyzed the social or cultural (geistlich, “spiritual”) aspect of the self or I, emphasizing the role of empathy in grounding social life and the personal and moral aspects of human life. In 1916 Edith Stein, as Husserl's assistant in Freiburg, edited the manuscript of Ideas II, but Husserl was not ready to release it for publication. From 1919 to 1923 Martin Heidegger, destined to become the leading German philosopher after Husserl, worked as Husserl's assistant, emphasizing our relation to the surrounding human world and its practices. In 1928–9 Emmanuel Levinas attended Husserl's (and Heidegger's) lectures in Freiburg, and took phenomenology back to Paris when he returned; Levinas would go on to develop a phenomenology of ethics, emphasizing the meaning of the “face” of the other. These themes would loom large in the existentialism cum phenomenology of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, writing in 1940s Paris.
In 1928 Husserl retired. He was succeeded in the Chair of Philosophy by Martin Heidegger. Husserl continued to write and to lecture. In 1929 he published Formal and Transcendental Logic, returning to themes of the Logical Investigations but extending (or re-emphasizing) the foundation of logic in intentionality. In 1931, after his Paris lectures, he published a French translation of the Cartesian Meditations, casting his phenomenology in a revisionist Cartesian perspective and extending his epistemology with refined distinctions of types of evidence. Husserl was still pressing his conception of phenomenology, placing it in different contexts and introducing it differently in each of his principal books.
In 1933 the Nazis came to power in Germany and issued new regulations prohibiting Jews and other non-Aryans from holding positions in government or in the universities. Husserl was thereby effectively locked out of the University. The Rektor of the University of Freiburg in the spring of 1933, the official who enforced the Nazi decree, was none other than Martin Heidegger, Husserl's former assistant and now his successor. Although Heidegger remained as Rektor for only a few months, Husserl was shocked by the actions of both his former friend and his adopted country. Ethnically Jewish (though a Protestant), Husserl was loyal to Germany, noting that his son Wolfgang was killed and his son Gerhart wounded while fighting for Germany in the First World War. Heidegger's magnum opus Being and Time was dedicated to Edmund Husserl “in admiration and friendship” when published in 1927; subsequent editions dropped the dedication. Heidegger's actions and political ambitions in Nazi Germany remain a subject of scrutiny, but his acquired enmity for his forerunner was expressed in no uncertain terms in letters years later.
Husserl was prohibited from lecturing or publishing in Germany and his German citizenship was revoked, but in 1935 he delivered a lecture in Vienna that was incorporated into the posthumous book The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (known as Crisis, 1935–8).This book incorporates Husserl's thought during his final three years. The larger thesis is that natural science, since Galileo's “mathematization of nature,” has lost touch with the level of understanding that we have in the Lebenswelt or life-world. This “crisis” in European culture, Husserl intimated, lay behind the rising irrationalism of the Nazi era. The Husserl children Elli and Gerhart had emigrated to the United States in 1933–4, but when Husserl died in 1938 he still had no plans to leave Germany. His widow was hidden in a convent in Belgium during the Second World War, and in 1946 she joined her children in the United States.
Husserl left a huge body of unpublished writing, or Nachlass, when he died. To protect this work from destruction by the Nazis, his supporters smuggled the whole Nachlass out of Germany through the Belgian consulate. These texts remain today in the Husserl Archives in Louvain (or Leuven), Belgium. Hermann Van Breda, a Belgian priest, arranged for the preservation of Husserl's manuscripts, and it was Van Breda who arranged for Frau Husserl to reach safety in Belgium.
Husserl published relatively little for a major thinker with an academic career spanning half a century, from 1887 (when he com-pleted his Habilitation, following rather quickly on his dissertation of 1883) until his death in 1938. Following the European tradition, most of his publication took the form of books, five books in 51 years. Yet Husserl wrote constantly, leaving a Nachlass of 40,000 pages of shorthand notes (in the Gabelsberg system commonly used in 19th-century German universities). Many of his lecture courses are preserved as texts. Moreover, he was constantly experimenting with philosophical ideas, “thinking through writing,” often working out concrete analyses whose results are presented only abstractly in his published books. To some extent these are the habits of a pure mathematician, transferred to philosophy. Much of this massive output has yet to be transcribed from shorthand into German, much less translated into English. Decade by decade, though, a series of posthumous texts have appeared, forming further books in which Husserl is seen filling out the details of his overall philosophy.
Husserl's first book, published in 1891, was his Philosophy of Arithmetic: Psychological and Logical Investigations. The “logical” side of this work would remain in place throughout Husserl's career, but the “psychological” side would evolve into his subsequent conception of phenomenology. Husserl would soon consider this an immature work that bordered on psychologism by explicating the concept of number in relation to the psychology of grouping and counting. As noted earlier, Husserl was not wholly guilty as charged in Frege's critical review of the book, yet he took Frege's critique to heart.
Over the next decade Husserl composed what many regard as his magnum opus, the Logical Investigations, covering some 1,000 pages in the original German edition. (Note the title, and previous book's subtitle.) This work appeared in two parts:
The Prolegomena is a book unto itself, a long critique of psychologism in logic and mathematics, including a critique of relativism in the theory of knowledge, and culminating in Husserl's positive account of logic as the “theory of theories.” The Second Part comprises what today would appear as a series of six books or monographs, which he called “investigations.” Investigation I is a philosophy of language, including a theory of sense and reference (compare Frege's famous doctrines on these topics) and a theory of speech acts (compare J. L.Austin's and John Searle's work in the 1950s tradition of Oxford philosophy). Investigation II is a theory of species or universals (in effect putting Platonic and Aristotelian views together). Investigation III is an ontology of parts and wholes, together with the important notion of ontological dependence (one thing cannot exist unless another does). Investigation IV is a theory of “grammar,” applying part–whole theory to ideal meanings or propositions. Investigation V is a detailed theory of intentionality, featuring carefully argued distinctions among an act of consciousness, its ideal shareable content (ideal meaning, in principle expressible in language), and the object toward which the act is directed by way of its content. Here lies the foundation of Husserl's phenomenology – buried in the middle of the Second Part of the Investigations. Finally, Investigation VI is a book-length study in the theory of knowledge, extending Husserl's phenomenological theory of intentionality (how consciousness represents) to a phenomenological theory of knowledge (how consciousness forms genuine knowledge through “intuition” or “evident” presentation of objects and states of affairs).
Looking back, Husserl's Logical Investigations was a study in logic widely construed, a philosophy of logic, mathematics, and scientific theory that would be at home in the tradition of analytic philosophy – these were the concerns of Husserl's early career, moving from pure mathematics through “pure” logic into ontology, phenomenology, and epistemology. Looking forward, the Logical Investigations launched Husserl's full conception of phenomenology, for the theory of intentionality, the heart of phenomenology, was laid out carefully and for the first time in Investigation V. Husserl would later set phenomenology in a context of transcendental philosophy (as distinct from naturalistic philosophy, based in natural science). In 1913 Husserl published a revised edition of all but the last Investigation, and in 1920 the revised edition of Investigation VI appeared. The revised edition incorporated remarks from Husserl's transcendental perspective. That edition is what we have today (Routledge 2000 in English translation).
In 1913 Husserl published his third book, Ideas I, focused solely on phenomenology. Its long title reads: Ideas toward a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy, Book One: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology.
This work was Husserl's mature manifesto of transcendental phenomenology. Ironically, the abbreviated title that we use informally, Ideas, would have been just right, since what the empiricists called “ideas” are the proper subject matter of phenomenology, though Husserl drew crucial distinctions and developed a detailed theory not evident in his predecessors. (Recall that Husserl admired Hume, as did Brentano.)
In Ideas I Husserl presents his method of phenomenological “reduction”: we are to study pure consciousness by “bracketing” the general thesis of the “natural standpoint,” the thesis that there is a natural world of objects beyond our consciousness. By this method of bracketing, we turn our attention from the objects of consciousness (things in the surrounding world of nature) to our con-sciousness of these objects, regardless of whether they exist. At one point (§49), Husserl says that the world does not exist “absolutely” but only “relatively,” in intentional relation to our consciousness. That at any rate is the doctrine of transcendental idealism often attributed to Husserl following his neo-Kantian transcendental turn. A more subtle interpretation holds instead that, for Husserl in Ideas I, any object in the world around us exists independently of our consciousness, but it exists “for us” – we know and experience it – only in acts of consciousness through specific meanings or “noemata,” through which we understand it in a particular way. Then the point of bracketing is to turn our attention from the objects that normally concern us to our consciousness of these objects, and to the meanings through which we experience them.
Ideas I was written in a matter of months, and Books Two and Three, Ideas II and III, were drafted at the same time but never released for publication in Husserl's lifetime. These volumes, now published, not only provide detailed phenomenological analyses whose significance is touted in Ideas I. They also belie the tendency toward classical idealism that may be suggested by certain sections of Ideas I, (§§49ff.). Here Husserl details the structure of our experience of embodiment, of other persons, and of social practices and institutions. Here too lie the basics of the “existential” phenomenology developed later by Martin Heidegger and, in very different ways, Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
In 1929, shortly after his retirement, Husserl published his fourth book, Formal and Transcendental Logic, written in a few months. Despite many years of work on phenomenology as opposed to logical theory, Husserl here returned to the nature of logic. Most of his phenomenological work is in evidence, as if presented here through the lens of logical theory, thus echoing the Logical Investigations. Husserl distinguishes formal logic, of the sort now familiar in symbolic or mathematical logic, from transcendental logic, by which Husserl means a philosophical account of formal logic. Basically, Husserl proposes that intentionality is the structure of thought or judgment in processes of reasoning. Where formal logic abstracts from these mental processes, to produce a logical calculus, transcendental logic analyzes the underlying intentional acts whose meanings are expressed by the symbolisms of formal logic. While mathematical logic was coming into full bloom, with Alfred Tarski's logical or semantic theory of truth and Gödel's incompleteness theorems still a few years off in the 1930s, Husserl was providing a philosophy of logic that tied logic into phenomenology.
In 1931 Husserl published his fifth book, Cartesian Meditations, in a French translation of the text of lectures he gave in Paris (the German edition would be published posthumously in 1952). Reflecting Descartes' epoch-making Meditations on First Philosophy (1641), Husserl here presents phenomenology with a focus on epistemology. Husserl says Descartes was close to discovering phenomenology but mistakenly held on to “a little tag-end” of the world, in the ego or I who thinks. Descartes sought to ground all knowledge in the certainty we each have of our own consciousness and our own self (“I think, therefore I am”). But Husserl develops a series of distinctions among types of evidence or certainty. The result is an approach to our own conscious experience, not unlike Descartes', but with a careful analysis of different kinds of evident knowledge: of my own experience, of myself as subject, of my body, of other objects in my surrounding world, and of other persons. In his Meditations, Husserl wrestled with the problem of solipsism as a challenge to phenomenology. Solipsism (meaning “one self”) is the doctrine that there exists only what appears within my own mind – all else is illusion. Now, bracketing the world seems to leave one isolated within one's own consciousness, so that phenomenology may seem to lead to solipsism. Husserl tried to show how my experience of an “other I” undercuts the threat of solipsism, even within the bounds of phenomenology. Apparently unsatisfied with the force of this argument, however, Husserl continued to address the problem of intersubjectivity, or how things in the world are “there for everyone,” reverting to a recurrent theme in Ideas I and Ideas II.Accordingly, Husserl produced a more compelling response to this problem in his last phase of work, gathered posthumously in the Crisis. In any event, Husserl's method of bracketing should have forestalled any threat of solipsism (as the method is explicated in Chapter 6).
In 1935 Husserl gave a lecture in Vienna titled “Philosophy in the Crisis of European Humanity.” He extended the theme of that lecture in texts written between 1935 and his death in 1938. These texts were gathered in a posthumous volume published in 1954 under the title The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy. This text is in effect Husserl's sixth and final book – still trying to introduce phenomenology to the world. On the face of it, Husserl broke new ground in the Crisis, configuring his conception of the life-world, modifying his prior “Cartesian” method of phenomenological reduction, and critiquing the “mathematization” of nature in physical science. In Husserl's analysis, (European) humanity was losing touch with its humanity as the scientific worldview was displacing our sense of the world in everyday life. In fact, the details of this analysis were already worked out in Ideas II, written in 1912. What was new in the Crisis was its direction: more humanistic, more existential, in some ways anti-scientistic, with a nearly religious sensibility about the life-world. Some scholars see the Crisis as Husserl's response to Heidegger, who was actively seeking to replace Husserl as the great German thinker and the proper architect of phenomenology as fundamental ontology – and who had betrayed Husserl in enforcing the Nazi regulations that banned Husserl from the university. No one can miss Husserl's anguish over the crises of that time. In any event, beyond its 1930s political overtones, the Crisis was a prescient work. For by the end of the 20th century the most active philosophical concern was arguably the new mind–body problem: how to understand mind and especially consciousness given the great advances in cognitive neuroscience, where psychic activity is to be explained in terms of computational processes executed in the neural network of the brain. How can we understand our own conscious experience and our everyday human activities in the life-world if everything reduces to physical and computational processes in fields of matter-energy mathematically defined by quantum mechanics and relativity physics?
Other manuscripts from Husserl's Nachlass have been edited to form further books of Husserl's work, filling out the picture we now have of Husserl's overall philosophy. These manuscripts show Husserl actively engaging basic issues throughout the rather long silences between his published books. Among these posthumous texts now available in English are the following, each of which has created a stir in the interpretation of Husserl's philosophy:
Other volumes have been published in German but not yet translated into English, including:
The thing to note in this list is the combination of concrete phenomenological analyses with abstract logical and ontological theory. Throughout Husserl's career he combined these two types of philosophizing. On the one hand, we see analyses of time-consciousness, perception of things in space, the genesis of meaning (of such things) through active and passive synthesis (in intentional activity). On the other hand, we see Husserl framing these phenomenological analyses within a picture of logic that grounds reason in intentional acts of consciousness, in acts that carry ideal meanings through which we understand and experience things in the world around us – along with our selves and our experiences of these things.
According to a prominent traditional interpretation, Husserl's philosophy evolved through some four periods separated by revolutionary turns of mind. (This traditional view is captured in some detail in Moran 2000; the view is perceptively summarized, then criticized, in Mohanty 1995.The secondary literature debates smaller twists and turns in Husserl's thought, but our concern is a broad evolution through four phases.)
The phases delineated by this view can be drawn from our account of Husserl's work. The first phase, in Husserl's early years at Halle, involved his foray into a seemingly psychologistic account of number, expressed in his Philosophy of Arithmetic (1891).Then Husserl reversed course, prompted in part by Frege's sharp criticism of that book. In his second phase, during his later years at Halle, Husserl carried out a detailed critique of psychologism in logic (and mathematics and axiomatic theories in general), developed in the Prolegomena to the Logical Investigations (1900–1).As we know, Husserl did not stop with logic: the Investigations continued with related studies in linguistic theory, ontology, phenomenology, and epistemology. In this quasi-Platonistic phase, emphasizing ideal species or essences, Husserl laid the foundations for his conception of phenomenology, articulated in the later parts of the Investigations. Therein, so the story goes, Husserl was beginning to change course again, returning to a descriptive psychology – the early phenomenology – as the foundation of knowledge. In the third phase, during his Göttingen years, Husserl is seen as taking a sharp transcendental turn, reconceiving and radicalizing phenomenology on a neo-Kantian transcendental foundation, seeking the conditions of the possibility of knowledge in pure consciousness alone. In Ideas I (1913) transcendental phenomenology led into a transcendental idealism that seemingly grounded all reality (not just knowledge, but being itself) in pure consciousness. Husserl's transcendental phase lasted into his Freiburg years and beyond his retirement, as the Cartesian Meditations (1931) grounded all the activities of consciousness in the pure or transcendental ego. By the end of the Meditations, however, Husserl was struggling with the problem of “transcendental solipsism,” where the whole world seems to collapse into the solitary unit of being, “my” ego. In his fourth and final phase, then, Husserl changed course again, turning now to the social reality of the life-world. As we see in the Crisis (1935–8), the ego is born into the everyday life-world, where “I” live with others, and together we constitute the world as we know it. Scientific theories are themselves formed by scientists working in the everyday world, their results “sedimented” into concepts inherited by others. And as “I,” the practicing phenomenologist, turn to the transcendental acts of my own consciousness, I live still in the life-world, where my actions and commitments carry existential and social significance that undercuts any move toward classical idealism and solipsism. Here Husserl's philosophy comes to rest.
In this way, according to the traditional interpretation, Husserl rewrote the fundamentals of his philosophy at least three times, shifting from a psychologism of number to a Platonistic logical realism joined with a realist phenomenology, then to a transcendental phenomenology yielding a strong form of idealism, and finally to an existential (yet somehow transcendental) phenomenology grounded in the life-world.
There is excitement in the idea of the Master, the founder of phenomenology, radically and repeatedly changing course as his reflections move him onward. Moreover, a certain metaphilosophy is at work in the traditional interpretation of Husserl, a philosophy of radical change in the history of ideas, a perspective often invoked in continental philosophy (by Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida). It is said that each great thinker must “kill off the father” (like Oedipus) in order to move on. Husserl is seen, accordingly, as killing off his former self at each of three great turning points in his philosophical evolution. Indeed, the traditional reading of Husserl begins in part with his successor, Heidegger. Nonetheless, if we look for the unity in Husserl's evolving philosophy, a very different picture emerges, and we come to see the continuity in the development of Husserl's thought. (See Mohanty 1995; Smith and Smith 1995.)
According to this alternative interpretation (followed in the present book), Husserl was constantly expanding his overall system of philosophy. The shifts observed in Husserl's writings were not radical (nearly schizoid) turns of mind, but rather recurrent efforts to get the large scheme right. In diverse explorations, Husserl moved back and forth across different levels and domains of theory in addressing different parts of the world of consciousness, nature, and culture. (See D.W. Smith 1995 on the relation between ontology and phenomenology in Husserl's system.)
Husserl's system begins to come into view as we sketch how Husserl's corpus of work hangs together.
When Husserl moved from mathematics into philosophy of mathematics, in the Philosophy of Arithmetic (1891), his aim was not to reduce numbers themselves to patterns of mental activity like grouping and counting. Rather, he wanted to explain how our arithmetical concepts emerged, how they originated in and so rest upon such activities. Husserl would not be able to straighten out the relevant issues, however, until after he had developed his view of phenomenology and its relation to logic and ontology, in the complex story line of the Logical Investigations (1900–1). Much later, he would take up the genesis of mathematical concepts again, in a 1936 essay “The Origin of Geometry,” included as an appendix in the Crisis. (That Husserl was not really or wholly guilty of psychologism as charged by Frege is evident in his early writings from the 1890s, well before he had completed his attack on psychologism in the Prolegomena of the Investigations. See Dallas Willard's introduction to his 2003 translation of Husserl's Philosophy of Arithmetic: Psychological and Logical Investigations with Supplementary Texts from 1887–1901; and see Husserl's texts gathered by Willard in the 1994 collection Early Writings in the Philosophy of Logic and Mathematics.)
Husserl's philosophy of logic, laid out in the Prolegomena of the Logical Investigations, was a deepening of his concern with the foundations of mathematics. In line with developments of his day (involving his friends in mathematics, Cantor and Hilbert), Husserl understood each mathematical theory as an ideally axiomatizable system of proposi-tions that spell out a formal structure, a structure that can be applied to some domain of entities, such as the positive integers, or the points in Euclidean space, or the particles in physical space–time. The same form pertains to any type of theory, from physics to biology to empirical psychology. The task of “pure” logic, for Husserl, is to develop an account – a metatheory – about any such theory. Thus, for Husserl following Bolzano, logic is the theory of theories.
What Husserl calls logic, however, is a broader discipline than what we think of today. For Husserl, logic is a philosophical scheme that incorporates language systems, intentionality, and ontology – and, adding evidence, epistemology. This is the vision detailed in the Logical Investigations and amplified in later works. Husserl's philosophy develops, if you will, an onto-phenomenologic: a system that details and correlates structures of language, mind or experience, and world. The systematic correlation among these levels is basically the story of intentionality and its foundation in the world.
In Ideas I (1913) Husserl focuses more fully on the structure of intentionality, including the ideal meanings or noemata that embody the full structure of an act of consciousness and implicitly lead into intentionally related systems of noemata. In Formal and Transcendental Logic (1929) Husserl revisits his wide conception of logic, stressing the foundation of formal logic in intentionality and the structures of meaning that language expresses. In Cartesian Meditations (1931) he amplifies his account of evidence, of how intentional judgments bearing different types of intuitive evidence yield different kinds of knowledge – of consciousness, self, others, and the surrounding world.
In the Crisis (1935–8), Husserl focuses on the interplay between our everyday knowledge and our inherited scientific knowledge. The intentionality of the practicing scientist is founded on the intentionality of his/her everyday life (as Einstein works on relativity theory and its experimental support, he writes with a pencil and he breaks for lunch). Yet our everyday perceptions, judgments, and actions themselves carry meanings that are inherited as “sedimented” concepts that were developed by others long ago (we see trees and bees, we use hammers to strike nails, we think about the South Pole, we value human rights). Some of our inherited concepts are drawn from ancient cultural practices (like hammering); some are drawn from scientific theory (my computer runs on energy in a stream of electrons).
In Husserl's shifting emphases over the years and in different works, we should see an ever-expanding system of philosophy, seeking greater breadth and depth in ways indicated by the expansive range of Ideas indicated above. In Husserl's varying claims about the world and its relation to consciousness, we should see not simply a vacillation between forms of realism and forms of idealism, but rather a struggle to specify relationships between act and object in the basic structure of intentionality. And in Husserl's concerns with social reality and the life-world, we should see not a latter-day rejection of the importance of consciousness and its intentionality, but rather a balancing (in line with his early work) of the subjective realm, the intersubjective or social realm, and the objective realm, especially the world of nature.
As the chapters proceed, we shall see in Husserl one of the great systematists in Western philosophy. His overall philosophy has a conceptual unity rarely matched over so wide a range of philosophical concerns. Our task shall be to explore the different parts of his philosophical system – logic, ontology, phenomenology, epistemology, and so on – while mapping out the ways in which all the parts hang together to form a coherent whole. Interestingly, this hanging-together (zusammenhängen – it sounds better in German) is itself an instance of the part-whole structure studied (almost buried) in the middle of the Logical Investigations. Husserl himself never explicitly recounted how his philosophy hangs together in light of his own theory of hanging-together, but that theorem of his philosophy remains a result to be drawn out by his readers. We, in this book, are those readers.
Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) wrote voluminously over some 50 years. He studied mathematics initially, writing a doctoral dissertation on the calculus of variations, followed by a Habilitation (similar to a second dissertation in the German academic system) on philosophical aspects of number theory. The latter evolved into his first book, after which he moved with vigor into the development of a systematic philosophy that framed, and introduced, his new science of phenomenology.
Over the course of his career, Husserl published five books:
Husserl regarded Philosophy of Arithmetic as an immature work, in which he had veered too close to “psychologizing” sets and numbers. A decade of intensive theorizing then produced the Logical Investigations, which many consider Husserl's magnum opus. In this 1,000-page work, Husserl presented his carefully wrought theory of intentionality (how an experience is directed via its content toward an appropriate object in the world). Here was the foundation of Husserl's conception of phenomenology, the science of the essence of consciousness. However, the Investigations also developed Husserl's conception of “pure” logic (where various forms of meaning represent appropriate forms of objects), his detailed categorial ontology (distinguishing “formal” and “material” essences), and his epistemology (featuring “intuition” as self-evident experience). Thus, the Investigations crafts Husserl's overall system of philosophy, in which phenomenology takes its place. Ideas then detailed Husserl's mature “transcendental” conception of phenomenology, employing his method of “bracketing” and his refined theory of intentionality. Husserl's fourth book reminds us of his continuing interest in logical and mathematical theory, even in his “transcendental” period. The Cartesian Meditations present Husserl's philosophy, centered on phenomenology, with a Cartesian twist. But Husserl worried, in the work itself, that this approach led into a “transcendental solipsism,” whereby consciousness is enclosed unto itself rather than existing in significant relations to the world around one.
Although many years separated the appearance of his key books, Husserl wrote constantly. Posthumous volumes of his writing address the structure of time and space as we experience them, the relation between experience of oneself and empathic experience of others, and much more. Notably, his final phase of writing has been gathered as: The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (1935–8).
In his work Husserl addresses the sweep of thought from Galileo's inauguration of the modern sciences to the “crisis” of rationality Husserl saw in 1930s Germany. There Husserl developed the theme of the “life-world,” in contrast with the “world of nature” as “mathematized” in modern physics.
In the course of his philosophical life, then, Husserl moved from an initial focus on the objectivity of knowledge (in mathematics, logic, and science) to a prominent focus on the subjectivity of our own consciousness (in pure or transcendental phenomenology), and on to a focus on the intersubjectivity of our collective experience of things (in the philosophy of the life-world). Husserl's oeuvre bears a remarkable unity even as he is constantly on the move.
Husserl's system of philosophy, framed in the Logical Investigations and refined in later works, shall be the focus of our presentation of Husserl in the present book.
The following books include discussions of Husserl's life, works, and career. However, the more detailed discussions of philosophical issues in these books pertain to later chapters in this book. The videocassette shows Husserl in the flesh.
Bernet, Rudolf, Iso Kern, and Eduard Marbach. 1999. An Introduction to Husserlian Phenomenology. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press. A detailed overview of Husserl's phenomenology, its methods, its results, its development, and a detailed chronology of Husserl's life, work, and teaching.
Embree, Lester, ed. 1991. A Representation of Edmund Husserl. Videocassette. Boca Raton, Florida: Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology, Florida Atlantic University, circa 1991. A videocassette representing Husserl, his life, and an account of his work, including a short film clip of Husserl from a home movie.
Mohanty, J. N. 1995. “The Development of Husserl's Thought.” In Barry Smith and David Woodruff Smith, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Husserl. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. An appraisal of the development of Husserl's philosophy over the full course of his career, stressing the continuity of Husserl's development.
Moran, Dermot. 2000. Introduction to Phenomenology. London and New York: Routledge. An overview of classic work in phenomenology, including a chapter on background in Brentano, four chapters on Husserl's work and life, and several chapters on later phenomenologists (Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty) and broadly phenomenological continental philosophers (Gadamer, Arendt, Levinas, Derrida), all presented in historical context and chronological development.
—— 2005. Edmund Husserl: Founder of Phenomenology. Cambridge and Malden, Massachussetts: Polity Press. A presentation of Husserl's phenomenology and its development in Husserl's different stages, including the early phase, the later “transcendental” phase, and the final phase emphasizing other persons in the life-world.
Smith, Barry, and David Woodruff Smith, eds. 1995. The Cambridge Companion to Husserl. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Essays on basic areas in Husserl's philosophy.
—— 1995. “Introduction.” In Barry Smith and David Woodruff Smith, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Husserl. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. An overview of Husserl's philosophy and its development.
Zahavi, Dan. 2003. Husserl's Phenomenology. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. A short book giving an overview of Husserl's thought in the early logical period, the middle transcendental period, and the later life-world period, indicating Husserl's influence on subsequent figures in the continental tradition of Germany, France, and other locales.