Thing and Space: Lectures of 1907 (Husserliana: Edmund Husserl – Collected Works (7))

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. Content: Front Matter....Pages i-xxxi Introduction....Pages 1-4 Front Matter....Pages 5-5 Fundamental Determinations of Outer Perception....Pages 7-17 The Methodological Possibility of the Analysis of Perception....Pages 19-34 Front Matter....Pages 35-35 The Elements of Perceptual Correlation....Pages 37-50 The Constitution of the Temporal and Spatial Extension of the Appearance....Pages 51-69 Front Matter....Pages 71-71 The Givenness of the Thing at Rest in Continuous Courses of Perception....Pages 73-88 The Possibility and Sense of an Adequate Perception of Spatial Things....Pages 89-115 Recapitulation. The Analyses of Perception in the Framework of the Phenomenological Reduction....Pages 117-128 Front Matter....Pages 129-129 The Phenomenological Concept of Kinaesthesis....Pages 131-138 The Correlation between the Visual Held and the Kinaesthetic Sequences....Pages 139-156 The Thing as Unity in the Kinaesthetically Motivated Manifold of Appearances....Pages 157-170 Front Matter....Pages 171-171 Amplifications of the Oculomotor Field....Pages 173-189 The Typicality of the Modifications of Appearances in the Oculomotor Field....Pages 191-205 The Constitution of Space through the Conversion of the Oculomotor Held into an Expansional and Turning Manifold....Pages 207-217 Supplementary Considerations....Pages 219-224 Front Matter....Pages 225-225 Qualitative Changes of the Perceptual Object....Pages 227-234 The Constitution of Mere Movement....Pages 235-245 Final Consideration....Pages 247-253 Back Matter....Pages 255-349