Robert Sokolowski

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.

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

This is an intelligent and useful collection of works by Husserl. The editors have assembled twenty-one short works; some appeared first as essays, some are manuscripts, some are letters, some are extracts from larger works. Most important, they cover a wide range of topics and thus make up a rather colorful collection. Five are brief "introductions" to phenomenology: Husserl's inaugural lecture at Freiburg ; his introduction to the English edition of Ideas ; his Encyclopedia Britannica article ; his summary of his London lectures ; and his summary of the Paris lectures. Another group is made up of papers concerning logic and mathematics: an early essay on the concept of number ; the very important essay "Psychological Studies for Elementary Logic" which contains some of the central ideas later found in Logical Investigations; a critique of psychologism entitled "On the Psychological Grounding of Logic" ; and a book review in which Husserl responds to a critic of the Logical Investigations. The issue of phenomenology as a science is developed in two works, the essay "Philosophy as Rigorous Science", in which Husserl criticized Dilthey; and an ensuing exchange of three letters between Dilthey and Husserl. Perhaps the most interesting part of the volume is made up of a series of studies of space and time. Two are manuscript essays ; one is "The Origin of Geometry" ; one is a selection from the lectures on internal time consciousness ; and one is a selection from Experience and Judgment which deals with inner time, perception, imagination, and association. The last section contains three general "humanistic" papers by Husserl, "Phenomenology and Anthropology" ; a paper on cultural and moral renewal ; and one on universal teleology which deals with sexuality. There is also a recollection Husserl wrote of Franz Brentano, letters to Munsterberg and Metzger, and short pieces on Eucken, Reinach, and George Bernard Shaw.

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.

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.

WE OFTEN USE PHRASES like, "knowing the essence of a thing" or "getting to the essence of a thing," but such expressions may be misleading and may provoke unfortunate epistemological problems. They suggest that we somehow extract an essence from the thing and make it, like a new thing, the target of our knowledge. They suggest a kind of vision, acquisition, or possession of the essence itself. If we have such a picture in mind when we speak of knowing an essence, many problems ensue that make us skeptical about ever having such knowledge. We begin to ask how we manage to extract this essence, what sort of intuition or vision is involved, whether the grasp of the essence is sudden or gradual, how the essence exists and how it is related to the things that have it. The problem with the picture is that the essence seems to be taken as a rather substantial object in its own right, a new object toward which we turn, something that we can pull out from other objects, from the individuals that contain the essence. The picture makes us formulate the philosophical problem of essences in the wrong way.

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.

This book explores a dimension in Husserl's thought that is, unfortunately, usually neglected, the analysis of formal structures in thinking. It examines such topics as formal ontology, formal logic, logic and mathematics, set theory, and, most of all, the theme of parts and wholes. Moreover the book does not just comment on Husserl's treatment of these topics; it pursues them as philosophical issues, shows how Husserl's position can be compared with that of other thinkers, and traces some of the influence he has exercised.