The Collected Works of Aron Gurwitsch (1901-1973)

The second of a planned six volume of Gurwitsch's writings, this volume is a corrected version of a collection he published in 1966. It was intended to complement the English edition of The Field of Consciousness (1964), which is the third volume of these Works in English. It contains his own introduction addressing his motivation as a phenomenologist and the situation at the time of publication. Included are English translations of his doctoral thesis, Phenomenology of Thematics and the Pure Ego (1929) and the substantial study based on his first Sorbonne lecture course, "Some Aspects and Developments of Gestalt Psychology" (1936), which made his name in Paris when he fled there from Germany after the rise of National Socialism. Other studies draw on the work in psychiatry of Kurt Goldstein and relate phenomenology to René Descartes, William James, Immanuel Kant, and tendencies in modern thought, thus complementing the historical perspectives resorted of in Vol. I. Thematic problematics addressed include the noema, the ego, eideation, and logic.

Auteur

Kersten wrote his dissertation under Gurwitsch as well as Dorion Cairns, translated Husserl's Ideen I, and contributed to phenomenology for decades.

Résumé
The articles collected in the present volume were written during a period of more than 30 years, the ?rst having been published in 1929, the last in 1961. They are arranged here in a systematic, not a chronological, order, starting from a few articles mainly concerned with psychological m- ters and then passing on to phenomenology in the proper sense. Within the latter group, the sequence is from articles dealing with more g- eral questions of principle to those in which rather special questions are discussed. The articles are reprinted or translated unchanged except for phenomenology of Thematics and of the Pure Ego, in which a certain number of pages have been omitted because the author has long since come to consider them erroneous. Almost all of the articles are in the service of Husserlian phenomen- ogy, which they are intended to advance and to develop further rather than merely expound. When the author made his ?rst acquaintance with Husserl's philosophy about 40 years ago, he was overwhelmed by the spirit of uncompromising integrity and radical philosophical respon- bility, by the total devotedness which made the man disappear behind his work. Soon the young beginner came to realize the fruitfulness both of what Husserl had actually accomplished and of what he had initiated, the promise of further fruitful work.

Contenu
Some Aspects and Developments of Gestalt Psychology.- The Place of Psychology in the System of Sciences.- Goldstein's Conception of Biological Science.- The Phenomenological and the Psychological Approach to Consciousness.- Critical Study of Husserl's Nachwort.- The Problem of Existence in Constitutive Phenomenology.- On the Intentionality of Consciousness.- On the Object of Thought.- The Kantian and Husserlian Conceptions of Consciousness.- Phenomenology of Thematics and of the Pure Ego: Studies of the Relation Between Gestalt Theory and Phenomenology.- A Non-Egological Conception of Consciousness.- William James's Theory of the Transitive Parts of the Stream of Consciousness.- Contribution to the Phenomenological Theory of Perception.- Philosophical Presuppositions of Logic.- GelbGoldstein's Concept of Concrete and Categorial Attitude and the Phenomenology of Ideation.- On a Perceptual Root of Abstraction.- On the Conceptual Consciousness.- The Last Work of Edmund Husserl.