Introduction

In February 1929 the seventy-year-old Husserl gave two lectures by invitation in the Amphithéâtre Descartes at the Sorbonne; expanded into the Cartesian Meditations, they first appeared in French in 1931. This is his late systematic survey of the whole of phenomenology and the most widely used introduction to it. Following Descartes, he demands that philosophy 'begin radically anew': by the 'phenomenological reduction' we suspend, or 'bracket', our natural belief in the existence of the external world and return to pure consciousness itself, to see how things appear in it. Consciousness, he shows, is always 'consciousness of something': this is 'intentionality'. In the famous Fifth Meditation he takes up a difficult problem: how do I experience the other as a subject like myself? From this he develops his theory of 'intersubjectivity'. The book deeply influenced Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty.