Customer Reviews

The Basic Problems of Phenomenology: From the Lectures, Winter Semester, 1910-1911 (Husserliana: Edmund Husserl - Collected Works)

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Phenomenological "Viewing" of "Things-appearing", May 14, 2008
By S. D. Churchill "Doc Churchill" (Dallas) - See all my reviews


This was an exciting book for me to present to my junior psychology majors (and some graduate students) during the first half of my Phenomenological Tradition class. As a first introduction to Husserl it worked well -- better than his very brief "Idea of Phenomenology" (which in recent years was either unavailable or astronomically priced) -- and much less overwhelming for the beginner than his "Ideas" or "Crisis". As these are lecture notes, there are digressions that become tedious, though well demarcated within the text by an excellent system of headings. Most exciting about this book is that it introduces Husserl's ideas on empathy and intersubjectivity long before much of his writing on these topics began to appear in print in the mid-1920s....This shows that Husserl was concerned very early on with these themes; indeed, the appendices indicate that he referred to these lectures in subsequent years as his "lectures on empathy" or his "intersubjectivity lectures". While he does not deliver as much as one might like in these directions, he at least sets the stage for the direction that others have taken with his work (most notably, Merleau-Ponty). His discussion here of a "double reduction" -- and of the givenness of the experience of the other within one's own reduced sphere of consciousness -- contributes greatly to an English-speaking readership's understanding of a thinker who is often associated exclusively with his Cartesian-friendly "egological reduction". This text opens up the possiblity for psychologists who would seek a foundation for a phenomenological method of qualitative research into the experience of others. Coupled with Merleau-Ponty's "The Primacy of Perception" (which takes matters to the next horizon) and field trips to local zoos and museums, I found that students were able to embrace phenomenology as a method of entry into the worlds of others, when guided by the insights presented in this text.