Abstract

The texts collected in this volume deal with a topic that is especially important in phenomenology. The subtitle of the book is, "Towards a Phenomenology of Intuitive Representations." Perhaps the most decisive philosophical move Husserl made was his restoration to philosophical legitimacy of the intuition or the direct presentation of an object; this he did through his treatment of intentionality. Husserl overcame the long tradition of both British Empiricism and continental Cartesianism, the tradition in which the perceiver is said never to deal directly with an object but only with a mental representation of it. But if Husserl restores presentation, then he must give a new account of representation as well. He claims that in many forms of representation we enjoy again the same object we once perceived, but now in ways that must be distinguished from perception. In such forms of awareness we do not have something that only suggests or only resembles the object, we have the object itself, but not immediately perceived. Hence we deal with "intuitive representation," a term that would be contradictory in the philosophical tradition Husserl works against. The texts included in this volume are thus important for the definition of phenomenology, crucial in the criticism Husserl makes of other philosophical traditions, and interesting simply as analyses of the forms in which things are presented and represented to us. The texts are carefully edited and splendidly introduced by Eduard Marbach, whose book, Das Problem des Ich in der Phaenomenologie Husserls develops the themes found in the present volume, and whose current research in developmental psychology shows the impact Husserl's thought can have in related fields.