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  • Investigating Husserl's Newly Discovered Manuscript, "On the Task and Historical Position of the Logical Investigations"
  • Jason Bell and Catharina Bonnemann

Of the many interdisciplinary applications of the phenomenological movement, one of the most influential and enduring has been the relation of phenomenology to psychology, among Edmund Husserl's earliest and most devoted concerns. This is the topic of a manuscript of Husserl's recently found among Winthrop Bell's papers at Mount Allison University: "On the Task and Historical Position of the Logical Investigations: From the Introduction to the Lectures on 'Phenomenological Psychology,' Summer Semester 1925"—"Einiges über Aufgabe und historische Stellung der 'Logischen Untersuchungen': Aus der Einleitung zu den Vorlesungen über 'Phänomenologische Psychologie,' S.S. 1925." This volume of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy presents this manuscript in the original and in English translation.

In a November 10, 1925, letter from Husserl to Bell, written several months after the "Lectures on Phenomenological Psychology" were completed, and at approximately the time that a draft of the "On the Task" [End Page 306] manuscript was first completed in typescript, Husserl gives a portrait of the profound shift occurring in his thinking at this time, as he sought to bring phenomenological psychology into dialogue with systematic philosophy:

In the last years I have worked with all my strength—admittedly not without struggle against disturbances, which are spared no one— and, as I now may well say without immodesty, have brought the whole of phenomenology to a higher level. I have pursued above all the principle, most general and systematic connections, but, in my manner, I have also been preoccupied the whole time with accomplishing the sort of special analyses that must give the generalities the required concrete fullness and foundation. The right to speak of a phenomenological philosophy is now justified more than before, the idea of phenomenology has extended into the universal, and the relation of ontology (a priori science in general) to eidetic phenomenology (which is the mother of all sciences that are ultimately justified and which encompasses them all within its natural expanse) has been more deeply clarified, as has, to an exceptional degree, the relation of pure and genuine psychology to the human sciences and of both to phenomenology. The idea of a radical critique of knowledge, that is, of a universal (noetic-noematic) logic as doctrine of science has been neatly realized; the meaning of the phenomenological reduction has been more profoundly elucidated and the decisive justification of transcendental philosophy, a justification that, in my opinion, can no longer be doubted in the least, has been accomplished. I hope finally—finally!—to be able to publish next summer. If heaven grants me a few years' strength yet (to date I have been almost too productive), then a number of works will appear that, as the results of the passionate work of several decades, will not be able to pass by without being of use. I, for myself, believe to have achieved perfect clarity in the main points.1

Husserl's robust publication plans did not come to fruition in his lifetime, and so the work of reconstructing the development of his systematic phenomenological philosophy has been the task of international scholars and historians of the movement for over seven decades. It is in service of advancing this important work that we offer the publication of Husserl's "On the Task and Historical Position of the Logical Investigations." Husserl's [End Page 307] manuscript works to accomplish numerous tasks: to justify and describe a phenomenological psychology and to locate its place within a larger phenomenological philosophy; to discuss the relation of his 1900-1901 Logical Investigations to this task; to locate the new phenomenology as a possibility opened by the new psychology of the 1870s and yet to explicate phenomenology as a significant advance; and to show, in the light of twenty-five years of advances in Husserl's research, both how the psychological and phenomenological work of the Logical Investigations had progressed in time and the significant work that remained perpetually to be completed.

Before further discussing the content of the manuscript, it will be helpful to provide historical and editorial context for its initial...

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