Abstract

Luft’s contribution to this emerging wing of Husserl scholarship lies in the way he forces us to consider the possibility that certain fundamental Husserlian principles—most importantly, the “principle of all principles,” that is, the notion that intuitive demonstration is the indispensable bedrock of phenomenological philosophy—must be called into question when one attempts to advance beyond mere phenomenological description and develop a phenomenological system. It is both a basic conviction and a central conclusion of the book that “when one harbors pronounced systematic aspirations, as Husserl does, one cannot dispense with speculative thinking”. Drawing on his intimate knowledge of Husserl’s late manuscripts on the reduction, Luft attempts to demonstrate this conclusion by contrasting Husserl’s approach to the issue of phenomenology’s systematic character with Fink’s outline of a phenomenological system in the Sixth Cartesian Meditation. Fink’s “merit,” Luft argues, is to have shown that phenomenology “cannot do without reflection on its systematic character”. More controversially, however, Fink also claims that such reflection “cannot itself proceed phenomenologically—or at least not only phenomenologically”. Husserl no doubt disagreed, but Luft, following Fink, argues that the systematic character of phenomenology “cannot be analyzed in the ‘straightforward’ manner” of standard phenomenological analysis.