Husserl - Ideas: general introduction to pure phenomenology

One hundred years ago, on 2 April 1913, Edmund Husserl published the First Book of his planned three-volume Ideen zu einer reinen Phnomenologie und phnomenologischen Philosophie . Erstes Buch : Allgemeine Einfhrung in die reine Phnomenologie ( Ideas towards a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology , hereafter Ideas ) in Volume One of his newly founded Jahrbuch fr Philosophie und phnomenologische Forschung ( Yearbook for Philosophy and Phenomenological Research ),

It is important for several reasons to have Boyce Gibsons translation available once more in print in the Routledge Classics series. Boyce Gibsons translation was the first of Husserls works to appear in English and was for many years the only source for English readers. Moreover Gibson had personally studied with Husserl in Freiburg in 1928 and Husserl obviously held him in high regard, even supplying him with a number of unpublished manuscripts which expanded on or revised points discussed in Ideas (primarily on Husserls changing views on the reduction). Husserl saw the translation as an opportunity to elaborate on his new developments and promised to write both a Preface and a Postface to the translation. As Boyce Gibson recorded in his diary:

He [Husserl] will give it a Vorwort and Nachwort , stating here the 2 new directions of advance since the Ideen : 1st Intersubjektivitt ( Einfhlung ) 2nd Ego and Habit.

Husserl clearly wanted Gibson to include amendments and additions in his translation as an alternative to producing a new edition of the work. In the end, only the Authors Preface appeared in the English edition, and again it was an important text for Husserl scholars in the Anglophone world until new translations of Husserl became available from the 1960s onwards.

Boyce Gibsons translation of Husserls Ideas originally appeared in the Muirhead Library of Philosophy, a series founded in 1890 by John Henry Muirhead (18551940) Let us first introduce Edmund Husserl and put the Ideas in context.

The founder of phenomenology Edmund Husserl (18591938)philosophy lectures given by the renowned philosopher and psychologist Wilhelm Wundt (18321920). Encouraged by his friend, another philosophy student, Thomas Masaryk (18501937), Husserl began reading the British empiricists. In 1878 he transferred to Berlin University to study mathematics with the renowned mathematician Karl Weierstrass (18151897). In 1881, he transferred to the University of Vienna, where, in 1882, he received his doctoral degree with a dissertation on differential calculus.

Following a period in Berlin as assistant to Weierstrass, in 1884 Husserl moved back to Vienna to attend the lectures of Franz Brentano (18381917), one of the founders of experimental psychology. Brentano inspired Husserl to devote his life to philosophy. In particular Brentanos conception of intentionality , the idea that every mental experience is directed in its own characteristic way at some object, which may or may not exist, inspired Husserl to develop a new descriptive science of experience: phenomenology. Husserl invoked Brentanos descriptive psychology in his first publication, Philosophy of Arithmetic (1891), The Logical Investigations was the remarkable result of ten intensive years of logical research, during which Husserl came to terms with the then contemporary logicians such as Mill, Boole, Bolzano, Schrder, Lotze and Frege. But the book was anything but a study of pure logic. The first volume Prolegomena to Pure Logic appeared independently in 1900 as a devastating critique of psychologism, the view that logical concepts are reducible to psychological operations. A second volume of six lengthy investigations, subtitled Investigations in Phenomenology and the Theory of Knowledge , was published in two parts in 1901, marking the real beginnings of Husserls phenomenological description. In this second volume, Husserl introduces the idea of phenomenology as a science of essences and defends a kind of intuition (which he calls categorial intuition), akin to sensuous intuition, that, however, grasps non-sensuous or categorial features of objects as well as apprehending states of affairs. As a result of the success of this book, Husserl moved from Halle to Gttingen where he began to attract gifted students who sought to pursue this phenomenology of essential description.