In the next few months, while I am a guest researcher at Utrecht University, I plan to complete my book on early Husserl. The material and inspiration for the book have quite a long history, starting with my studies here in Utrecht.

During the last year of my philosophy studies in Utrecht, I attended a course on Rudy Rucker’s “Infinity and the Mind” taught by Richard Tieszen, who was in Utrecht as a visiting professor. At the same time I was doing preliminary research for my MA thesis under the guidance of Karl Schuhmann on Husserl’s Philosophy of Arithmetic (PA). For Tieszen’s course I wrote a paper discussing the section on infinity in the PA (“Unendliche Mengen“, last section of Ch. XI), and for Schuhmann a summary and literature review of Husserl’s Über den Begriff der Zahl and the PA. This material then all entered into my thesis, which Schuhmann had convinced me I should write in German. Of course when he later helped me get it published I had to translate it all into English. The result of translating, reworking and expanding my thesis was a big article in two parts in Vol. V and Vol. VI of the New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy: The Beginnings of Husserl’s Philosophy.

During my PhD research I built on this to extend my research, including Husserl’s development up to the Logical Investigations, and again in a stepwise fashion proceeded from there to the philosophy of mathematics and logic in the School of Brentano in my postdoc project. I continually reworked and expanded earlier material, adding sources and details, eliminating digressions, incorporating more recent secondary literature, etc. Now, turning ten years of research on early Husserl into a book, I need to give it a stable and final form: no more eternal work in progress!