10

INTRODUCTION

The Years at Gttingen (19011916) If the years at Halle were marked by the appearance of the Logical Investigations, the years at Gttingen were marked by the appearance in 1913 of the first vo lum e o f H usserls Ide en zu ein e r re in e n P h n o m e n o lo g ie und phnomenologischen Philosophie (Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy) and the more or less simultaneous publication of a second edition of the Logical Investigations that included some revisions of the Prolegomena and the first five investigations, but no revisions in the sixth. The Investigations were not radically revised probably because Husserl recognized that the scope of the revisions would require a new work. Nevertheless, the years from 1901 to 1913 mark for Husserl a profound rethinking of his philosophy. During this period Husserl r a d ic a lly r e th o u g h t b o t h h is lo g ic a l vie w s a n d h is v ie w o f w h a t a n epistemological critique of experience involved. He developed subtle analyses of consciousness, including our awareness of the temporal flow of experience and the discovery of what he called absolute consciousness, 1 4 that is, the consciousness that is aware of the inner or subjective or phenomenal temporality of the flow of experience and its contents. Finally, during these years he formulated the first explicit statements of his new philosophical method. There are three lines along which Husserls development in these years can be traced: the continued analysis of meaning (Bedeutung) and sense (S in n ) ; the notion of ep istem ological critique; and the a nalyses of the consciousness of inner time. If we return first to the question of meaning, we find that by 1908 Husserl had come to think that exploring the objective or ontic dimension of meaning led to a more properly phenomenological account of meaning. 1 5 Indeed, by the time of Ideas I he comes to view this broader notion of objective sense even as underlying the meanings at work in linguistic expressions. 1 6 In the years between the first edition of the Logical Investigations and Ideas I , in short, Husserl turns to the investigation of the correlation between the subjective and ontic dimensions of meaning through the analysis of what he came to call in Ideas I the noetic and noematic dimensions of the intentional correlation between an act and its object. It is, however, difficult to discern what Husserl means by this ontic or noematic dim ension o f m eaning, for in responding to the problem of objectless presentations in the Logical Investigations, Husserl had drawn a distinction between the object that is intended and the object as it is intended or meant. T he act, he had said, that co nfers meaning on a sensible sign emptily intends an object as such-and-such, an intentional object. Intending an object as such-and-such, that is, an experiences having an intentional