Husserl’s Revision of the Sixth Logical Investigation

Abstract

Husserl was thinking of a revision of the Logical Investigations already in 1905 in connection with the failed plan for an English translation. In 1911 he began working on such a revision but because of his work on the first and second book of the Ideas, the work was delayed until after the publication of the Ideas I in April 1913. In the preface to the second edition of the Prolegomena and of the first five Investigations which appeared in the autumn of 1913 Husserl tells the reader that instead of republishing the Logical Investigations he originally planned to replace them by a series of systematic studies. When he realised, though, that this would take years to accomplish, he decided to write the Ideas first and to republish the Logical Investigations immediately afterwards. The Logical Investigations were to be revised so that they could be read and used as a complement to the Ideas, in that they would introduce the reader to concrete phenomenological work. The reader would first study the Logical Investigations and get acquainted with “attempts at genuinely executed fundamental work on the immediately envisaged and seized things themselves” and “with a group of fundamental questions in explicit investigation”. Then, he would turn to the Ideas for the elucidation of the method from ultimate sources, the delineation of the main structures of pure consciousness and the systematic presentation of the fields of investigation (cf. LI, 44–45 [Hua XVIII, 9f]).