Thing and Space: Lectures of 1907

Abstract

HUSSERL, Edmund. Thing and Space: Lectures of 1907. Collected Works, vol. 7. Translated by Richard Rojcewicz. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997. xxix + 349 pp. Cloth, $143.00--With the publication of these lectures, given in the summer semester of 1907 at the University of Gottingen, all of Husserl's course on the Main Parts of the Phenomenology and Critique of Reason is now available. They were preceded by the publication in 1964 of a translation of the first five lectures of the course (on the nature of philosophy, seeing, phenomenology, thinking, and the thing, respectively) under the title The Idea of Phenomenology, which was first published in German in 1950. As wrote in a private notebook, the themes of the course were to be the problems of a phenomenology of perception, of phantasy, of time, of the (p. xx). As worked out in the course, the lectures describe the conditions of possibility of the presentation of a thing in visual (and tactile) perception, the role of kinaesthetic experience in the unification of the series of images of the thing presented, and the temporal background of the presentation. Husserl's marginalia to the lectures are included in an appendix, as are twelve related texts (1907-26) that further develop certain topics raised by the lectures (for example, Visual Space and Objective Space, On the Constitution of Riemannian Things, Active and Passive Locomotion, and Empty Space). In addition, there are two essays from the years 1916-17 which arose from a planned elaboration of the Thing-lectures by Edith Stein, Husserl's graduate assistant at Freiburg University. The second of these essays, on the Systematic Constitution of Space, is Husserl's revision of part of Stein's work. The division of the text into six sections and the headings of the various parts are the work of the German editor, Ulrich Claeges. The so-called Thing-lecture. s, which were first published in 1973, are early, tentative analyses of space and the individually identical thing (p. 98). According to Claeges, Husserl was at this time going through a `severe crisis,' a doubt concerning himself which tormented him so seriously that he put in question his own existence as a philosopher (p. xii). The tone of the lectures reflects this uncertainty. often corrects himself. His tentative formulations never claim to be exhaustive, and they seldom satisfy their author. Claeges also notes that the method of phenomenological reduction had occurred to only in 1905 (p. xviii). Thus, in these lectures, we are witness to among the first examples of Husserl's employment of the method of drawing back or pulling back from (in this case) perception and turning to the act of perceiving that is producing the perception. …

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