Abstract

Professor Herbert Spiegelberg has pointed out that Ricoeur is ‘the best informed French historian of phenomenology’ and French philosophers have had the enormous benefit of his translation of Edmund Husserl’s Ideas I. Ricoeur’s introduction to this translation has been included in this volume of writings and gives an inkling of the advantage French students have had over English. One only regrets that it was not possible to include also the summaries and detailed notes which Ricoeur appended to his translation. The collection includes a study of Husserl contributed to Brehier’s history of German philosophy; three articles from the Revue de Metaphysique et de Morale, two on Husserl’s Ideas II and one on his Crisis of the European Sciences; studies on the Cartesian Meditations from the Revue Philosophique de Louvain and a long study on the important Fifth Cartesian Meditation contributed especially for this volume; a comparison of Kant and Husserl from Kantstudien; an article on existential phenomenology from the Encyclopédie Francaise; and the author’s highly relevant programmatic discussion of the relationship of phenomenology to his own work in progress, the Philosophy of the Will.