Edmund Husserl: Natur und Geist: Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1919, Husserliana Materialien Band IV, ed. Michael Weiler

Abstract

This volume documents Husserl’s thinking as presented in a lecture course (held first in the summer semester of 1919 and then again in the winter semester of 1921/1922) on the realms of nature and spirit and on the proper phenomenological approach to them at a pivotal time in the development of his mature thought. Nonetheless, several years after its appearance, this book has yet to attract widespread attention. There are at least two external reasons for this neglect, namely that it appeared as part of the Materialien instead of as a numbered volume in the main part of the series, and also because it appeared in the same year as Husserliana XXXIV, on the transcendental reduction, and Husserliana XXXV (Einleitung in die Philosophie), as well as several others volumes in the years immediately before and after that. This may well have overwhelmed the ability of readers (and perhaps libraries) to absorb all of these new publications, both in terms of cost and in terms of the time required to work through them. As I will explain below, there may also be some internal reasons as well, related primarily to the content of the volume and the extent to which it does or does not live up to the expectations that its title suggests. Husserl’s phenomenological analyses of nature and natural objects are now fairly familiar and treated in a whole range of other works, but the analyses he embarked upon during the period immediately preceding and during his early Freiburg years into the structure of the ‘‘spiritual world’’ have not been as widely documented, with the notable exception of the Third Part of Ideas II and, most recently since 2008, in the research manuscripts on the life-world published as Husserliana XXXIX. Neither of those works appeared during Husserl’s lifetime, so that these lectures, along with a public lecture by the same title presented to the Kulturwissenschaftliche Gesellschaft in Freiburg just a few months before the beginning of this lecture course, represent the first public presentations of Husserl’s work in this area. Even