Combining Maurice Merleau-Ponty's course notes on Husserl's Origin of Geometry, his "Course Summary", related texts, and critical essays by each of the co-translators, this collection provides a unique and welcome glimpse both into Merleau-Ponty's nuanced reading of Husserl's famed late writings and into his persistent effort to track the very genesis of truth through the incarnate idealization of language.In his notes, Merleau-Ponty focuses primarily on Husserl's well-known "Origin of Geometry" text from the Crisis and on another of his posthumous texts on the phenomenological role of the Earth as Earth-ground. Both of these essays lead to what Merleau-Ponty called in a working note a "transcendental history" -- an analysis of a geographical inscription of history. Likewise, Merleau-Ponty is concerned in these notes with the philosophical and ontological implications of the origin of idealization, the passage from passivity to activity, the interrelation between perception and rationality -- or the intertwining of nature and logos. Because of the central role these themes played in Merleau-Ponty's thought, this volume provides an important supplement to Merleau-Ponty's philosophy and his relation to Husserl for the English-speaking reader. With the translators' essays connecting Merleau-Ponty to Derrida and Levinas as well as to Husserl, the volume should become a valuable sourcebook, an indispensable stopping point on a scholar's journey into the thought of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, and Levinas.

This is a translation of Husserl's 'Thing-lectures' (Dingvorlesung) of 1907, published posthumously in 1973. The lectures deal with the constitution of the thing as a res extensa, an extended spatial structure filled with sensuous qualities and not yet with substantial or causal properties. Key to this phenomenological account is the role of the kinaesthetic systems of the body in the constitution of both three-dimensional space and the thing in its identity, its manifold of possible movements, and its position in relation to the ego. The 'Thing-lectures' form part of the project of a 'phenomenology and critique of reason' announced in a general introduction to the same lectures and published separately as The Idea of Phenomenology. There for the first time the idea of a transcendental phenomenology based on the principle of the phenomenological reduction was laid out. The lectures presented here thus form a striking example of the application of this idea to a concrete and fundamental field of research.

Grundlegend f r Husserls Ph nomenologie sind die beiden Methoden der eidetischen und der ph nomenologischen Reduktion. F r den Band wurden Forschungsmanuskripte zur Lehre vom Wesen ausgew hlt, die Husserl zwischen 1891 und 1935 verfasste. Analog zu den Phasen, in denen er seine Lehre modifizierte, ist der Band in 5 Teile gegliedert. Damit dokumentiert diese erste Ver ffentlichung zu Husserls Eidetik alle Phasen und systematischen Schwerpunkte: von den Anf ngen bis zur Abfassung der Krisis mit Texten aus bislang unver ffentlichten Manuskripten.