Animism, Adumbration, Willing and Wisdom

This collection shows the originality of the phenomenology of Dorion Cairns, arguably Edmund Husserl’s closest disciple. The word “studies” (plural) occurs in the subtitle because these studies can each stand alone. They vary somewhat in their approaches, some being more essays and some more editions than others. While published essays by Cairns are drawn on in these studies, his famous and still unpublished New School lectures in the 1960s forms much of the basis of this work. They are quoted extensively.

The studies in this volume show how Cairns creatively continued Husserl’s work. He was deeply impressed by the Abbau-Aufbau method and held that Husserl came to recognize the importance of the primarily passive or automatic infrastratum of mental life too late completely to adjust his concepts. This adjustment of concepts guided Cairns’s effort to bring the thought published by Husserl in his lifetime up to the level of the Cartesianische Meditationen and the Formale und transzendentale Logik. Cairns was also trying to develop better terminology for phenomenology in English.

Lester Embree is Professor of Philosophy at Florida Atlantic University.

· ISBN: 978-606-8266-34-3 (ebook) · Online access on this site · Published May 2012 ·
· ISBN: 978-606-8266-33-6 (paperback) · Print and eBook options available from Zeta Books ·

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