ABSTRACT
The first Husserlian manuscripts dealing with empathy date from 1905 to 1907 and consist of passages excerpted from Theodor Lipps’s article “Further Thoughts Concerning Empathy”. A major development in Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology of intersubjectivity came with the extension of the phenomenological reduction from egological subjectivity to intersubjectivity in the lectures on “Fundamental Problems of Phenomenology” of 1910/11. Husserl stresses that, in order to achieve full phenomenological clarity concerning the consciousness of the hearing or reading person, we must put ourselves, either in fact or by relying on vividly representifying imagination, into the consciousness of the subject who understands. The constitution of mathematical nature is required because of the differences between orthoaesthetic systems of perceptions. This constitution is not achieved by the sensuous intuitiveness of perception, but by thought. That which is sensuously intuitive is subjectively conditioned and subject to the rules of experience. This leads to the problems of empirical psychology concerning perception.
