ABSTRACT
Throughout his working life, Edmund Husserl corresponded with many of the leading scientists of his day. His letter to Lucien Levy-Bruhl, the French philosopher, ethnologist, and anthropologist, is one of his most interesting. Husserl wrote it in March 1935, around the time when he received an invitation from the Vienna Cultural Society to deliver a lecture in Vienna, which he would do some two months later, on May 7–10, 1935. In this letter Husserl is already mulling over many of the themes that become prominent in the Crisis and indeed underlie his thinking about the nature of historical and non-historical cultures in his letter to Levy-Bruhl. Overall, the letter is a reflection on the shift from the mythic to the theoretical outlook and hence on the importance of philosophy for leading a people from a closed to a universal outlook.
