Abstract

This dissertation examines how and why Edmund Husserl's investigations of the consciousness of time compelled him to revise his early analysis of consciousness and conception of phenomenology. Husserl analyzes consciousness initially as part of a project of clarifying the conditions of a priori knowledge in his Logical Investigations of 1900, allegedly in abstraction from temporal considerations. The dissertation demonstrates, however, that Husserl's construal of intuition as the paradigm of modes of consciousness---or, in other words, as the fulfillment of stages of intentionality---effectively privileges a form of temporal presence. In this way the dissertation advances the thesis that time-consciousness plays a tacit and fundamental but unreflected role in Husserl's initial account of consciousness. Husserl begins to appreciate that role and the fundamentally temporal character of consciousness in his lectures on time-consciousness of 1905 as he criticizes Franz Brentano's psychological theory of time. By means of this criticism of his former mentor, Husserl discovers that the key to explaining how time can become an object of consciousness is to account for the presence of the past as a passing consciousness, not in an imaginative representation, but within the very consciousness of the present. The dissertation demonstrates how, with this discovery, Husserl comes to recognize that investigations of the origins of time-consciousness and consciousness itself coincide, and, consequently, that he must thoroughly rethink his earlier effort to analyze consciousness in abstraction from time. As evidenced by investigations of time-consciousness, repeatedly undertaken by Husserl from 1904--1911, he redresses his earlier position by showing the significance of "absences" for the constitution of temporal presence and, equivalently, for the presence of consciousness itself. Perhaps most importantly, Husserl uncovers how consciousness transcends itself precisely in retaining its past and, hence, must be defined, no longer simply in terms of self-presence, but also in terms of its self-transcending temporality. These considerations lead Husserl to usher in a new sort of investigation of consciousness, what he would eventually call a "genetic phenomenology" of subjective life, thereby confirming the central thesis of the dissertation that the investigation of time-consciousness holds the promise of phenomenology itself