Robert Sokolowski

This book is the edition of a course given by Husserl in the Winter Semester of 1906-07 at Goettingen. The volume contains a long and informative introduction by the editor, the course itself, which extends for 355 pages, two sets of supplementary texts, which extend for almost 100 pages, and textual-critical remarks and tables of contents. The materials are not dramatically new, but they do shed light on Husserl's development and on the meaning of his teachings in Ideas I and in his well-known lectures on thing-perception in the Summer Semester of 1907; the latter were published by Ulrich Claesges as volume XVI of Husserliana, and five introductory lectures to them were published by Walter Biemel as Die Idee der Phaenomenologie, volume II of the series. The lectures in Melle's volume are divided into three sections. The first discusses pure logic as a formal theory of science, the second examines epistemology and phenomenology, the third talks about the lower and higher forms of objectivity.

Albrecht Dihle is professor of classics at Heidelberg. This book is a development of the Sather Classical Lectures given at Berkeley in 1974. It is an important and informative work, rich in detail, clear in argument, and filled with erudition. Dihle begins by contrasting the Hellenistic philosophical understanding of nature with the Jewish religious understanding of the cosmos. The pagan philosophers saw nature and the world as an ordered whole and sought to conform their minds and their lives to this rational pattern. Galen and other writers after him, however, note that the Jewish scriptures consider the world and nature not as something ultimate but as issuing, in their being and structure, from the arbitrary intention of the creator. After Galen, Celsus wrote to refute the Jewish and also the Christian cosmology. The pagans considered reason as ultimate in the cosmos, while the biblical tradition, it is said, considered will or choice as the origin of the cosmos. According to the pagan understanding, man could become conformed to nature through an intellectual activity, while according to the biblical tradition he could be saved by responding to a divine promise and command, by an act of obedience. In both the pagan and the biblical traditions, cosmology, anthropology and ethics were interrelated. The initial form of the concept of the will arose in the biblical tradition.

The first volume of Husserl's Ideen was published in 1913. Until then Husserl was known as the author of Logical Investigations, which had been published in 1900-1901 and which had generated a philosophical movement after its own image: one marked by anti-psychologism, by a detailed analysis of the phenomena of consciousness, by an interest in logic, by a kind of common-sense realism. The developments in Goettingen and Munich were examples of the influence of Husserl's early work. But the appearance of Ideen I in 1913 opened a new dimension in Husserl's thought, one that--as we now know from his posthumous works--had been germinating in the intervening years. To many the new dimension seemed, and still seems, disappointingly idealistic. The new book was an introduction to phenomenology, but it seemed to talk about the world and everything in it as only the achievement of consciousness. Husserl seemed to have become practically a Fichtean idealist. In fact what was at issue in Ideen I was a deeper appreciation of the nature of philosophical reflection and analysis. It was an appreciation that being is essentially intelligible and intendable, and that we give only a partial analysis of an object if we fail to speak, ultimately, about the object's being intelligible and intendable, about its being for consciousness. However in this book Husserl made his case in an apparently obscure way. The terminology, the prose, and the argument are difficult and technical from the start. We do not find the gradual introduction of concepts and problems that can be found in the Investigations. Everything is rigorous from the beginning.

One of the major points in Husserl's philosophy is his insistence that consciousness is structured. He denies that consciousness is simply an undifferentiated awareness and that all the differences occur in the content or object of consciousness. He claims that consciousness itself is articulated; it has parts ordered into different kinds of wholes. The most vivid examples of this articulation are found in "representational" forms of consciousness such as remembering or imaging an experience. Let us say that I remember getting into a taxi last evening. My remembering is dual and involves the memorial reenactment of a prior perceptual activity. I "relive," so to speak, myself getting into the taxi yesterday evening, and I do so now, while sitting in a chair in my office. This dual pattern of consciousness, however, this parallelism between my present remembering and my past experience, is entirely focused on one object, on the taxi as being perceived and entered by me.

This book presents the major philosophical doctrines of phenomenology in a clear, lively style with an abundance of examples. The book examines such phenomena as perception, pictures, imagination, memory, language, and reference, and shows how human thinking arises from experience. It also studies personal identity as established through time and discusses the nature of philosophy. In addition to providing a new interpretation of the correspondence theory of truth, the author also explains how phenomenology differs from both modern and postmodern forms of thinking.

For all these reasons, it is helpful to have a volume such as the one under review, which gives the historical and textual background for Crisis. Ably edited by Reinhold N. Smid, who has been associated with the Husserl Archives at Cologne for many years, the volume contains papers from the period 1934-37, just before Husserl's death in 1938. Crisis itself was published in its present form only posthumously in 1954, but its first two parts appeared in the journal Philosophia, published in Belgrade, in 1936. The idea of composing this work came to Husserl after he gave two lectures in Prague on 14-15 November 1935. The lectures provided the nucleus for Crisis, and the typescript for them is published in thirty-three pages of this volume. It is interesting to note that the title for the typescript is "Psychology in the Crisis of European Science." Although psychology is extensively treated in Crisis, the issue of that science is not one of the themes that commentators usually discuss. It is helpful to see how central psychology was in Husserl's later thought. The point is that he must distinguish the philosophical study of man from the empirical psychological study if he is to avoid taking philosophy as merely a partial science and if he is not to betray the special mode of being of transcendental subjectivity. The study of man must not be carried out according to the "objectivist" methods of modern science.

Distinctions are set in obscurity and imagination. Distinctions are not made anywhere and anytime, nor are they made in no place and at no time; they are made in a situation in which they are called for. Distinctions push against an obscurity that needs the distinction in question. In the story about Jack and the doctor, the obscurity against which the distinction is made is included as part of the story; in the quotation from Chaucer the obscurity that provides the setting for the distinction is not mentioned—although you would find it if you were to read the Wife of Bath’s tale—but it is easy for us to imagine a setting in which the distinction between counseling and commandment ought to be made. When we entertain a distinction, such as "counseling is not commandment," "ignorance is not negligence," or "medical data is not medical care," we always experience or imagine an obscurity against which the distinction arises. When we think philosophically about executing distinctions, we must pay attention to the obscurity that lets the distinction occur.

EVERYONE IS INVOLVED in the question of being in one way or another. When we ask someone how to change the oil in an automobile, or what the diameter of the moon is, or how numbers are different from numerals, we are asking about being. Such interrogations, whether addressed to others or addressed by ourselves to ourselves, are particular questions about beings. But when as metaphysicians we raise the question of being, we do not pursue just one more of these particular investigations. We ask a question that is somehow essentially singular, a question that cannot be made into many. If our question were to become plural, it would be a sign that we have cut off only part of being for our study and that we allow still other questions of being to be raised concerning the parts we have left out. It would be a sign that we have turned being into a genus, into one kind among many. Somehow the question of being has to be complete and comprehensive in itself; it has to be one question; and it must get at issues that enable all the particular questions to arise and to be answered. It is not that the question of being has nothing to do with questions about automobile oil and the diameter of the moon and numbers and numerals; the question of being can be recognized in all these particular questions, but it cannot be reduced to being one like them.

Catherine Pickstock's book is about Catholic liturgy. What does it have to do with political theory and philosophy? Telos has recently been concerned with the problem of modernity — especially its rationalism and the domination of the sovereign state. Both of these problems have come to the fore with the fall of the Soviet Union in the East and the rise of postmodernity in the West. These same problems have their counterparts in theology. Modernity and postmodernity have not left the churches untouched. One of the most important consequences has been the reform of Catholic liturgy in the late 1960s. Up to that point Catholic liturgy had been, in the technical sense of the term, premodern

Philosophers have long agreed that thinking is expressed in the use of language, that we “think in the medium of words.” It is also true, however, that we think in the medium of pictures, and it is likely that these two ways of thinking are interrelated; certainly, we could not think in pictures if we did not have words, and perhaps we could not use words, in principle, unless we were also engaged in some sort of picturing, at least in our imagination. An ideographic language like Chinese would give greater support to the latter possibility than would our phonetically based form of writing.