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s2smodern

 

I have shared with a number of friends that a couple of years ago I read Husserl.  I have continued to read phenomenology, and am going to try and read some more during this research leave.  There is a longer story I would like to tell, but the short version goes something like  . . . About 20 years ago, when Dianne and I were working with college students in Waco, when I was in school at Baylor, Dallas Willard came to town.  I contacted him in advance, and asked him if he would be willing to visit with the college students we were working with.  It was a fantastic evening, with Dallas fielding various questions from the group, after having already spoken at a more formal event at Baylor.  During that conversation I asked him what one should read if one were interested in affirming/understanding the objectivity of knowledge (yes, I know, my more post-everything friends are already balking at how the question was asked).  Dallas said that if one were serious, one must go back and read Edmund Husserl.  Well, some 18 years ago (two years ago) I took a stab at it--reading Husserl's The Crisis of the European Sciences.  Currently I have just started Logical Investigations.  

The "Translator's Introduction" (by J. N. Findlay) is very helpful.  Here is a snippet, which nicely gives the reader a sense of what Husserl was trying to do, and why it might benefit contemporary readers to understand what Husserl was trying to accomplish.  Here is Findlay:

[Husserl's Logical Investigations is important] "because it uses its investigations of logic to illuminate much more fundamental topics: the nature of meaning, the ontology which meaningful discourse presupposes, and infinitely most important, the nature of those conscious acts in virtue of which alone our words point beyond themselves to things in the world, and in virtue of which alone there is a world for us and any fellows with whom we can communicate." (p 3)