Customer Reviews

Edmund Husserl's Phenomenology (Purdue University Series in the History of Philosophy)

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This book is an outstanding presentation of Husserl's philosophy. The book draws upon important texts that are not readily available to English-speaking readers (e.g., the Husserls' lectures in Amsterdam and Paris), and it provides a careful analysis of how Husserl's ideas evolved over time. It provides a lucid account of the relation between phenomenological psychology and transcendental phenomenology. Chapter Seven ("The Transcendental Problem: Its Origin and Its Quasi-Solution by Psychologism") describes the origins of the concept of the transcendental and presents an account of how that concept evolved in the thought of Kant and Husserl. That chapter also discusses the evolution of Descarte's concept of the cogito. Dr. Kockelmans' understanding of Husserl's thought and of Husserl's importance to the history of philosophy is impeccable. He is currently Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Penn State. I had the good fortune of attending quite a few of his classes and seminars in the 1970s. He is a man of deep and abiding compassion. He was a superb teacher who invariably presented his subject with elegance, grace, critical exactitude, transparent clarity, and sublime intellectual humility. This book is a fine book, and I highly recommended it to anyone with an interest Husserl, phenomenology, and transcendental idealism.

Prof. Kockelmans navigates the reader (even the uninitiated, as was I) through the prinicpal features of Husserl's thought. His writing is extremely well-structured, such that the reader's comprehension proceeds in equal rhythm with the author's careful explanations. After studying some medieval philosophy with Prof. Kockelmans I can confidently say that his understanding of the history of thought, art, and science are inspiring; all of this adds to the finish of the book. His style is never cumbersome--though he retains all of the slippery terminology of the discipline--and his summary is without superfluity. This is a highly important and recommendable work. Jason Stell

I have returned to this work of Kockelman's several times since its initial publication and always feel some increase, however small, in my weak understanding of what Husserl was saying in his torturous article. For my part I doubt the last reviewer was able to discern the format of the book he wrote about but the result was so hilarious that it's just as well. In his article for the Encyclopaedia Britannica Husserl tried to say too much but he often did that and the article was surprisingly important to him or he wouldn't have struggled on alone after Heidegger bailed out. Husserl was a genius with few peers and tradition insists on calling him an unnecessarily difficult if not a poor writer. Well, maybe, but the difficulty in reading him is also a function of the complex ideas he was trying to throw light on for the very first time. Not all great ideas grasped for the first time by certain men and women are extraordinarily complex, but they are always like Eliot's words and tend to slip, slide, perish, and will not stay in place. Otherwise, we would not have to wait for genius to point at them for us. Kockelman's book and Husserl's article still help me see some things I enjoy thinking about but could never have come up with on my own.

Unfortunately Kockelman's book turned out to be a encyclopedic summary of Husserlian phenomenology, and as such much poorer and less illuminative than the Brittanica article of Husserl's which was similar in aim, and which is the movement point for this book. Students of some intelligence need books that are really engaging and developing, and not just encyclopedic knowledge. Of course by reading this sort of a book we may learn definitions of concepts like noema and noemata, but I believe we would better have no idea of a subject than having a junk of poor and lifeless concepts. I would recommend the reader, especially the more sophisticated and good-willed one, to turn to Husserl's own numerous introductions like Cartesian Meditations or the Crisis even if he does not know much phenomenology, and put some sweat into them. Still this book might be helpful with some undergraduate exams- to'fill in' papers.