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Iulian Apostolescu and I are very pleased to announce the publication of our edited volume Husserl and Awakened Reason: Critical Essays on Mathematics, Science and Phenomenology as part of the Contributions to Phenomenology series at Springer.

The theme of “Awakened Reason” has not yet received the attention it deserves in our opinion. The expression itself comes from the final paragraph of the Krisis and might appear, at first blush, as a mere throwaway remark or as a metaphor without any deeper meaning or implications. However, given the context and the previous usage of the term “waking life” (“Wachleben”), on closer inspection it is revealed as a much more central concept in Husserl’s thinking. This centrality concerns both the relationship of philosophy, phenomenology, and science on the one hand, the respective horizontal positioning of these disciplines; as well as the
relationship between pure reason and practical life, on a vertical axis from abstract to concrete; but finally also on the third depth axis of the historicity of reason and philosophy.

The passage of the Krisis in which the expression “Awakened Reason” occurs is part of §73 and is presented by the editor Walter Biemel as the concluding section of the work. This role of §73 has been called into doubt by the English translator of the Krisis, David Carr, who believes the text was not meant as such by Husserl and that the Krisis remains essentially unfinished. Hence, Carr
demoted the paragraph to the status of a supplementary text in his translation. No doubt this interpretation and decision contributed to this paragraph being largely overlooked in the subsequent debates about the Krisis among scholars relying exclusively on the English translation. In the Introduction to the volume, Iulian and I present an argument why we think that the concept of awakened reason nonetheless did in fact occupy a central position in Husserl’s phenomenology. We hope that the present collection of contributions will bring more attention to the somewhat neglected underlying theme of awakened reason. We’d like to thank the contributors to the volume for their contributions (and their patience). It is with deep sadness that we received the news of Claire Ortiz Hill’s passing. We are honored and grateful to have been able to include her contribution in the present volume.

In the coming weeks, I will try to summarize some of the main points of my own contribution to the volume “Husserl on Mechanical Calculation: Outsourcing Symbolic Intentionality”. This is a theme that I have had the occasion to present at numerous workshops and conferences already and I am very happy to finally see it in print in this volume: