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Experience and Judgment

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This work was not published in Husserl's lifetime. Maybe that is one reason it is not cited often in the critical literature on Husserl. One is far more likely to see references made to Logical Investigations, or Ideas I or Cartesian Meditations, the Crisis or even to Formal and Transcendental Logic. But I think for students of Husserl, who want to get a sweeping view of how his phenomenology drives to the origins of our most sophisticated and high level rational processes, this is an invaluable volume.
Beginning with the structures of receptivity, the means by which our "objects" of knowledge are given to consciousness, Husserl advances to the ways consciousness also constructs the concepts by means of which all manner of judgement (predication) is made.
This process boldly includes the intersubjective aspects of these constructions, in a way that elides through the issues of solipsism of his earlier writings. Here we are encouraged to take into account how these concepts are "normalized" by intersubjective expectation, anticipation and horizons of shared experiencing and living (although concepts of the "lifeworld" are not developed here).
I find the progression exciting and never pedantic. Something is always at stake here: that beneath our easy assumptions of class, set, group and category, we see the process of constitution.
Hume would approve, I think. Assumptions of habitual perception are placed in the context of horizons of anticipation; truths emerge from a process of fulfilling of these horizons by the givenness of actual (out of possible) occurrences.
Kant would approve. Syntheses of a priori judgements are made by the attentive observations of the play of the risings and fallings away of what intentful acts we bring to experiencing, bringing them to an "open horizon" of experiencing, while generating the differences based on anticipations that pertain to the state of affairs at hand.
And, for Husserl, these developments are still, "remarkable," -- that apriori thought, in pure imagination "gives rise to structures which can be taken as objetive, and that thes aprior structures enter into relations of inclusion with constructions to be newly realized," still amazes him.
I feel that Hegel's phenomenology of recognition, in which the anticipatory concepts are validated by their adoption by another, would have strengthened the "intersubjective" aspects Husserl only peremptorily introduces here. But that's just an Hegelian's perspective. I don't hear Kantians expressing that concern.
And so in this work we see all the elements that advance the work of the phenomenologist into the present day. Here, for Heidegger, it is not the thing, but the Being of the thing that is disclosed; for Derrida, the signified bears with it the stamp of what rises to presence, but givenness still exceeds that presence -- both as a horizon of anticipation and as a givenness that is prescribed by intention; Steinbock's notion of "generative phenomenology," as a gathering and rising of constituted novelties, are indicated; and it opens a gateway to Marion, in that all judgement hinges on this excess of givenness, rising in the form of object, but also in the drive toward the as yet unaccounted, yet absolute, being a force for consciousness, and a force that consciousness exerts on itself.
I would use this volume in the second term of a two-semester graduate-level introduction to Husserl, after Ideas 1 and 2, Cartesian Meditations and Crisis. And then I would jump to Marion's "Reduction and Givenness" as a lead-in to the horizons phenomenology opens up. All students of Husserl will benefit from a study of this work.