ABSTRACT
This book introduces the beginner to Husserl's phenomenological research by situating its salient discoveries in relation to traditional philosophy. It discusses the relevance of philosophy to the problems that gave rise to the ancient Greek beginning of the Western philosophical tradition and to this tradition's development in the European beginning of philosophy's modern transformation into universal science. The book addresses a potential pitfall that the attention to phenomenology's development brings: losing sight of the unity of Husserl's philosophical enterprise from beginning to end. Husserl's commitment to knowledge's integrity involves something greater than the theory of knowledge that is today defined under the heading of "epistemology". The conclusion that Husserl has belatedly, in the last phase of his phenomenology, come to recognize the socially and historically conditioned character of consciousness and knowledge, and that this recognition, creates a tension with his earlier programme for a pure phenomenology, has therefore understandably been drawn by many students of his phenomenology.
