Introduction

Although not the first to use the term, Edmund Husserl is generally regarded as the founding figure of the philosophical movement of phenomenology, by which he understands a descriptive science of the essential structures of experiences and of their objects precisely as these are experienced. Phenomenology has had a decisive influence on philosophy in the 20th century, especially in Europe. The movement known as continental philosophy, whether practiced in Europe or elsewhere, has its roots in phenomenology and in the post-Hegelian philosophies of Sren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Karl Marx. But those who enter into contemporary continental philosophy through the post-H egelians use a pheno m eno logical filter, nam ely, the phenomenological readings of the post-Hegelians made possible by Husserl and found most prominently in Martin Heidegger. Even where philosophy has become post-phenomenological, it takes its bearings to a great extent from the philosophy of Husserl. Husserl rejects what he takes to be the skepticism of empirical philosophy as well as the constructivism of neo-Kantian philosophy. Against both, he insists that philosophical reflection return in the words of his well-known slogan zu den Sachen selbst, that is, to the things themselves exactly as they are given to us in exp erience. T he co nstant them e thro ugho ut his phenomenological descriptions is the issue of how objective knowledge arises in and for an experiencing subject. These descriptions are in the service of an account of reason, which is understood by Husserl as a striving for evidence, for experiences in which our judgings are confirmed or disconfirmed by insight into the directly, clearly, and distinctly presented things themselves. These evidential experiences take different forms in knowing and the theoretical sciences, in valuing and the axiological sciences, and in willing and the practical sciences. B ut in all three domains, the aim of experiential life is to live the life of reason. During his lifetime Husserl published relatively few of the studies in which he developed this phenomenological project. W hat he did publish was for the most part a series of so-called introductions to phenomenology that focused largely on methodological matters and sought to distinguish his phenomenology from other philosophical approaches. These programmatic works were, however, far from the total of Husserls output. At his death he left over 45,000 pages of unedited manuscripts written in a form of shorthand