Phenomenology: The Philosophy of Edmund Husserl and Its Interpretation

In 1900 Edmund Husseri introduced to the world the idea of a new philosophy, "phenomenology," which, with its offspring "existentialism," has gradually become the dominant continental European philosophy. Husseri demanded of philosophy both a new rigor and a new humanism. He first showed how the philosopher can recover, by a kind of mental leap that Husseri calls the transcendental reduction, the ability to describe with scientific exactness the life of consciousness in its primordial encounter with the world about it. In addition he accused science of inundating Western European culture with abstractions that parade as final truth; he wished to ubderpin the accumulations of "facts" with more trustworthy descriptions of "essences" as they are presented to consciousness in a primordial intuition prepared by a reduction from the world of science to the life-world. With readings drawn from Husseri and his commentators, the editor presents an illuminating portrait of phenomenolgy as Husseri developed it between 1900 and 1938.