Abstract

In the first of these volumes Schuhmann attempts to collect all available materials dealing with the relationship between Husserl and Pfänder. He dates their first meeting as taking place in May, 1904, and traces further meetings and communications. He examines in detail the notes Husserl made in his copies of Pfänder’s works, and describes manuscripts which Husserl wrote about them. Finally he examines manuscripts which Husserl composed about Pfänder’s work in general, and in this section he describes in detail the famous meeting of Husserl with Pfänder and Daubert, another philosopher from Munich, at Seefeld in August-September, 1905. Under pressure of their criticism, Husserl is said to have come to the conception of the transcendental reduction at this time; he also changed his understanding of sensation, perception, and the transcendent object, and likewise came to see the necessity of admitting an ego in his phenomenology. This meeting then becomes the turning point between the philosophy of his Logical Investigations and that which emerged, after years of reflection, in Ideas I. Schuhmann studies the "Seefeld manuscripts" in this connection. He closes with an extensive bibliography of Pfänder’s works and writings about him. He reports that Husserl’s main criticism of Pfänder and of the Munich school was that they never moved from psychology into transcendental philosophy; however Schuhmann uses this conflict between Husserl and the others as a sign of the necessity that phenomenology has to be straining against a natural, mundane attitude, a necessity of being both mundane and "reduced," psychological and phenomenological. He uses this argument to verify his conception of what philosophy is.