bob sandmeyer husserl’s constitutive phenomenology. its problem and promise.pdfVIP

Hum Stud (2010) 33:365–370 DOI 10.1007/s10746-010-9160-y BOOK REVIEW Bob Sandmeyer: Husserl’s Constitutive Phenomenology. Its Problem and Promise Routledge, London and New York, 2008, $ 103.00 hbk. 244 pp James Dodd Published online: 28 September 2010 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010 It is always a risk to write a book about a book that an author never managed to write. Borges was a genius at this, with his tales of impossible encyclopedias, or literary traces of lost texts that only exist in references found in other texts that— turn out not to exist. Such tales consistently evoke that fascination, even wonder, that accompanies our speculation on anything that could have been written, but wasn’t; or perhaps that could not have been written, but was anyway. And in fact the question of the very possibility of the unwritten book here in question—Edmund Husserl’s ‘‘System of Phenomenological Philosophy’’—haunts Bob Sandmeyer’s very thorough and helpful reconstruction of the motivations, plans, and ultimate failures of Husserl’s project to bring his life’s work to the pinnacle of a genuinely systematic presentation. The specter of impossibility is conjured relatively early in Sandmeyer’s text: ‘‘One can ask, indeed, one must ask, is Husserl’s philosophy anything other than a collation of individual investigations [Einzeluntersuchungen]?’’1 To be sure, as Sandmeyer appreciates, the conservative (and comfortably selective) approach of dealing with Husserl one investigation at a time has its benefits; Husserl’s reflections are endlessly applicable in detail, and lend themselves to general extrapolation if one’s interest turns more on gathering together principles of philosophical method. Husserl’s corpus, both published and unpublished, is of course rife with more