Introduction

pp. 3-6

in: Christopher Macann, Presence and coincidence, Berlin, Springer, 1991

Abstract

The idea of a transcendental philosophy which had first been mooted by Kant, at the end of the 18th century, and had then been submerged beneath the manifold currents of German Idealism, re-emerged, in the 20th century, in the form given to it by Edmund Husserl, the acknowledged founder of the phenomenological philosophy of this century. Unlike Kant however, Husserl did not wait until the end of his life to present his phenomenological philosophy in its finished and final form. Rather, his entire life's work can be regarded as a series of attempts to articulate the meaning of a transcendental philosophy. It is for this reason that Husserl thought of himself as a `perpetual beginner,' a thinker ever ready to begin all over again, and along different lines, the task of working out the meaning of a phenomenological philosophy.