Robert Sokolowski

In 2000 and 2001 many conferences were held to commemorate the centenary of Logical Investigations. In addition to these festive observances, a number of new publications of Husserl’s work related to the Investigations are appearing. The two volumes under review belong to that category. They are the texts of two courses Husserl gave concurrently in the winter semester of 1902–03 at Göttingen, where he had begun to teach in 1901–02. In his first year he gave a course on logic and the theory of knowledge, in which he went through the ideas found in Logical Investigations, which, of course, had been published in 1900–01. In his second year at Göttingen, he split this material into two separate courses, one on logic and one on the general theory of knowledge, but both courses continued to rework the material of the Investigations. These two courses have now been published in the two volumes we are examining. What they offer, therefore, is Husserl’s own paraphrase of and commentary on the Investigations themselves. They are valuable as such, because they are more relaxed and more amplified: they contain more examples, more helpful repetition, some second-person address, and a more conversational tone. These lectures illuminate Husserl’s writings in the way that Heidegger’s published course material sheds light on his works. Furthermore, these books show how the material of the Investigations looked to Husserl when it was still fresh in his mind but when an interval of a few years had given him some critical distance to it. Husserl continued to review and use the material from these courses for other courses he gave at Göttingen in subsequent years.