Abstract

The centerpiece of the Analyses is a translation from the German of notes for a series of lectures given by phenomenologist Edmund Husserl in the early twenties, which is to say some eighty years ago. Husserl designated the topic of the lectures 'transcendental logic'. In this context, the term, 'transcendental', is not to be understood in some mystical sense, but rather in a Kantian sense: pertaining to the conditions of possibility of experience. Likewise, the term, 'logic', is not to be taken in the narrow sense of formal logic, but rather in the very general sense it had for Platonic dialectic: a concern with normative guidelines and critical assessment of the possibility of truth. The topic of the lectures is succinctly characterized by Husserl as 'a universal theory of science, and at the same time, a theory of science in principle,' where the latter means 'the science of the a priori of all sciences as such' (p. 1).