PHGA 7153 Husserl’s Later Thought
Professor John Drummond
Spring 2007
Thursday, 2:00–4:00

Between the publication of the first book of Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy in 1913 and the publication of Formal and Transcendental Logic in 1929, Husserl published very little. Nevertheless, his thinking during this period, especially after his move to Freiburg in 1916, was extraordinarily fertile. His research manuscripts from the time include extended reflections on the reduction and questions of transcendental method, on phenomenological psychology, on intersubjectivity, on culture, on feelings, emotions, and moods, on ethics and ethical renewal, and on what he called “transcendental logic.”

It is the last group of writings that are the concern of this course. They have their origin as notes for a lecture course Husserl offered three times at Freiburg under three different titles: “Logic” (Winter Semester 1920/21), “Selected Phenomenological Problems” (Spring Semester 1923), and “Fundamental Problems of Logic” (Winter Semester 1925/26). The folder that collects all these notes was given the title “Transcendental Logic” by Husserl himself. Less concerned with questions regarding the nature of logic and, therefore, less abstract than the sections on transcendental logic contained in Formal and Transcendental Logic, these writings are far more tentative and probing in their exploration of the passive, synthetic processes of consciousness that allow for the presentation of objects and that underlie the active syntheses involved in the exercise of judgment. The bulk of the manuscripts were published in Husserliana with the title Analysen zur passiven Synthesis (1918–1926), and another, much smaller group were published with the title Active Synthesen: Aus der Vorlesung “Transzendentale Logik” 1920/21. Ergänzungsband zu “Analysen zur passiven Synthesis.” (Many of these texts are also collected in Erfahrung und Urteil [Experience and Judgment], edited by Ludwig Landgrebe.) Both Husserliana volumes have been translated (with some reordering of the material) as Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis.

The lectures form, therefore, a discussion of the experiential foundations of judgment and logic, and are in that sense not a narrow treatise on logic but a broad treatment of the workings of intentionality. The aim of the course is to analyze these texts in some detail and thereby to see phenomenology at work in the description of experience (rather than finding yet another account of what phenomenology does). In particular, we shall examine Husserl’s account of perception and its modalizations , of association, of fulfillment or evidence, of memory, of expectation, and of judgment. The aim is to explore the sedimentations of meaning at work in our ordinary experience to garner a conception of, as it were, the genealogy of sense as it builds toward the judgment. This sense includes much that is not simply cognitive, and we shall explore the role of the body and its kinaestheses, of time and history, of affection and feeling. One way to understand the project is to distinguish Husserl from the neo-Kantians of his time. For Husserl, the “transcendental analytic” is grounded in the “transcendental aesthetic,” whereas for the neo-Kantians the opposite is true. Moreover, this study complicates our understanding of Husserl’s relation with Heidegger, for many of these manuscripts originate during the time that Husserl and Heidegger were in much conversation, and it is difficult to discern who was influencing whom.

Students will be expected to discuss the reading materials in class and to prepare a research paper of approximately 25 pages.

The text for the course is: Edmund Husserl, Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis: Lectures on Transcendental Logic, trans. Anthony Steinbock (Dordrecht: Springer, 2001). Don’t panic! Springer has a paperback version available for $34.95. I am asking the bookstore to order them very early so that they’ll arrive in time for class. Between Springer and the bookstore, this could be a challenge!!!