This comprehensive study of Husserl's phenomenology concentrates on Husserl's emphasis on the theory of knowledge. The authors develop a synthetic overview of phenomenology and its relation to logic, mathematics, the natural and human sciences, and philosophy. The result is an example of philology at its best, avoiding technical language and making Husserl's thought accessible to a variety of readers.

Drawing upon both Husserl's published works and posthumous material, Husserl's Phenomenology incorporates the results of the most recent Husserl research. It can consequently serve as a concise and updated introduction to his thinking.

Patocka's celebrated Introduction, here made available in English for the first time, is not an introduction in the ordinary sense of the term. Patocka ranges over the whole of Husserl's output, from The Philosophy of Arithmetic to The Crisis of the European Sciences, and traces the evolution of all the central issues of Husserlian phenomenology--intentionality, categorial intuition, temporality, the subject-body; the concrete a priori, and transcendental subjectivity. But rather than attempting to give a tour of Husserl's workshop, Patocka is himself hard at work on Husserl's problems.

3 same lecture he characterizes the phenomenology of knowledge, more specifically, as the "theory of the essence of the pure phenomenon of knowing" (see below, p. 36). Such a phenomenology would advance the "critique of knowledge," in which the problem of knowledge is clearly formulated and the possibility of knowledge rigorously secured. It is important to realize, however, that in these lectures Husserl will not enact, pursue, or develop a phenomenological critique of knowledge, even though he opens with a trenchant statement of the problem of knowledge that such a critique would solve. Rather, he seeks here only to secure the possibility of a phe nomenological critique of knowledge; that is, he attempts to secure the possibility of the knowledge of the possibility of knowledge, not the possibil ity of knowledge in general (see below, pp. 37-39). Thus the work before us is not phenomenological in the straightforward sense, but pre phenomenological: it sets out to identify and satisfy the epistemic require ments of the phenomenological critique of knowledge, not to carry out that critique itself. To keep these two levels of theoretical inquiry distinct, I will call the level that deals with the problem of the possibility of knowledge the "critical level"; the level that deals with the problem of the possibility of the knowledge of the possibility of knowledge the "meta-criticallevel.

The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, Husserl's last great work, is important both for its content and for the influence it has had on other philosophers. In this book, which remained unfinished at his death, Husserl attempts to forge a union between phenomenology and existentialism. Husserl provides not only a history of philosophy but a philosophy of history. As he says in Part I, "The genuine spiritual struggles of European humanity as such take the form of struggles between the philosophies, that is, between the skeptical philosophies--or nonphilosophies, which retain the word but not the task--and the actual and still vital philosophies. But the vitality of the latter consists in the fact that they are struggling for their true and genuine meaning and thus for the meaning of a genuine humanity."