Space, Time and Other: Fred Kersten

This book by the late Fred Kersten—known to many as the translator of Edmund Husserl’s Ideas I—takes up the challenge of Husserl’s phenomenology as the “will to return to the matters themselves,” providing extensive methodological reflections before proceeding to a series of painstaking phenomenological analyses based on a number of evocative examples such as the indeterminate mass of the hillside that looms up before me as I walk toward it in the dark. These analyses are primarily focused on space-constitution, and especially on the passive constitution of “spreadoutness” in tactile, visual, and auditory experience. But the author also considers the deep structure of inner time-constitution and contributes original phenomenological descriptions of the public/private dimensions of experiencing others, leading to concluding meditations on transcendental sociality—and ultimately to questions of the role (and the limits) of phenomenology within the broader realm of philosophy.

A student of Spiegelberg, Cairns, Gurwitsch, and Schutz, Fred Kersten translated Husserl’s Ideen I and also works of Gurwitsch and Schutz and wrote on history and philosophy of the natural and social sciences, music, and literature as well as in Husserlian phenomenogy.