Introduction: On the Discovery of Two Manuscripts by Edmund Husserl

This special Husserl issue of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy celebrates the recent discovery of two manuscripts by Edmund Husserl at Mount Allison University. Included in this volume is an article, written by the world's leading authority on Husserl's logic, Ullrich Melle (director of the Husserl-Archives and of the International Centre for Phenomenological Research at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven), discussing the contributions that the discovery of Husserl's edited manuscript "Entwurf zur Einführung der zweiten Bearbeitung der Logischen Untersuchungen" will add to our understanding of the development of phenomenology; the first publication of Husserl's German manuscript "Einiges über Aufgabe und historische Stellung der 'Logischen Untersuchungen'"; its English translation, "On the Task and Historical Position of the Logical Investigations"; and a discussion of the "On the Task/Einiges über" manuscript by me and Catharina Bonnemann of Hannover/Göttingen.

Husserl's two typewritten manuscripts, with his handwritten additions and corrections (Melle writes that "the changes and additions in the text of the typescript are certainly made by Husserl himself"), are the most recent versions of texts whose earlier known versions, housed at the Husserl-Archives Leuven and upon which earlier publications have been based, do not include the commentary by Husserl found in the Mount Allison texts, additions and deletions that amount collectively to hundreds of words of changes. It is these "final" or most updated versions of Husserl's texts that are featured in this volume of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy.

While the original versions were handwritten by Husserl, the "Entwurf" typescript was edited in various stages by Husserl's assistants Edith Stein, Ludwig Landgrebe, and Eugen Fink, and the "Einiges" typescript was edited by Landgrebe. With the Mount Allison manuscripts, we now may see that Husserl himself also extensively edited the typescript text prepared by his assistants.

In the case of both manuscripts, it appears that this editorial work was conducted in preparation for publication. The publication of these manuscripts, however, occurred only after Husserl's death and in each case was based on the earlier Leuven version, as the Mount Allison manuscripts were not recognized as being the most recent versions of Husserl's texts until spring 2011.

The major significance of the discovery of these texts is the scarcity of Husserl's publications, during his lifetime, from this mature period of his phenomenology, during a time when he made great strides in developing phenomenology from its earlier position as a descriptive methodology into a systematic philosophy. At the time these manuscripts were brought to typescript, circa 1925, as Husserl reported in a letter to Winthrop Bell (in whose papers these manuscripts were found), he believed that his work of the previous years had allowed him to achieve significant progress along these lines. Yet Husserl's works from the post-Ideen (1913) period rarely reached the completion that he felt they needed before they could be published, even as his friends and assistants earnestly petitioned him to the contrary; for Husserl, each new discovery in one part of his research necessitated changes in all related parts.

Thus it has been the Herculean task of researchers, continuing to the present day, to bring Husserl's prolific writings from this period to press. Some of these materials are handwritten manuscripts; others were revised by Husserl's assistants, including Stein, Landgrebe, and Fink from Husserl's original texts; here, in these Mount Allison manuscripts, we have multiple stages brought into rare unity—texts first handwritten by Husserl, then edited by his assistants, and then, finally, with Husserl's handwritten corrections.

These several hundred words of Husserl's alterations between the previously known texts and Mount Allison's manuscripts will not, of course, lead to a cataclysmic shift in our understanding of the meaning of phenomenology. And yet, to cite the words of Melle from our recent conversation: "But still. . . ." Still, that is, these new manuscripts are very interesting in themselves; unknown manuscripts by the founder of the modern European phenomenological movement, who is also known as a perpetually leading light in contemporary Continental philosophy, are not discovered...