Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology

Introduction

The book appeared in 1913 in the first volume of the Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung, the journal Husserl edited with other phenomenologists. It is the first of three planned books; the second and third were published only after his death. Husserl introduces the phenomenological reduction: the natural belief in the existence of the world is “bracketed” (epoché) so that consciousness can be studied as the field in which every object receives its sense. He analyses the correlation between the act of consciousness (noesis) and what is meant in it (noema). Several of his Göttingen students, who had read the Logical Investigations as realist, were disappointed by this turn to transcendental idealism.

Connections

Builds on

• Meditations on First Philosophy1641 · René Descartes
• Logical Investigations1900 · Edmund Husserl

Taken up in

• On the Problem of Empathy1917 · Edith Stein
• The Phenomenology of the Social World1932 · Alfred Schutz
• Being and Nothingness1943 · Jean-Paul Sartre
• Phenomenology of Perception1945 · Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Criticized in

• The Controversy over the Existence of the World1947 · Roman Ingarden

More works by Edmund Husserl

• 1900Logical Investigations
• 1931Cartesian Meditations
• 1936The Crisis of European Sciences